Committee Hearings – Week of 3-27-22

This week with both the House and Senate in session, there is a nearly normal hearing schedule. The FY 2023 spending process starts with the presentation of the President’s budget. There will be one markup hearing that includes cybersecurity legislation. There will also be two hearings of interest here, one on critical infrastructure cybersecurity and one on DHS counter-drone operations.

FY 2023 Budget Hearings

• Tuesday – House Budget Committee

• Wednesday – Senate Budget Committee

Cybersecurity Markup

On Wednesday, the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee will hold a business meeting. In addition to eight nominations to consider, the Committee will take up eleven postal naming bills and eleven ‘normal’ pieces of legislation. One of the later is S 3511, the Satellite Cybersecurity Act. Do not expect much discussion, whatever issues exist in this Committee are normally dealt with behind closed doors, but amendments are possible.

Cyber Threat Hearing

On Wednesday, The House Homeland Security Committee will hold a hearing on “Mobilizing Our Cyber Defenses: Securing Critical Infrastructure Against Russian Cyber Threats”. The witness list includes:

• Adam Meyers, Crowdstrike,

• Mr. Steve Silberstein, CEO, Financial Services-ISAC 

• Kevin Morley, American Water Works Association

It will be interesting to here the private sector point of view on this topic after all of the warnings from various Federal agencies over the last couple of weeks.

Counter-Drone Operations

On Thursday, there will be a joint hearing of two Subcommittees of the House Homeland Security Committee looking at “Assessing the Department of Homeland Security's Efforts to Counter Unmanned Aircraft Systems”. The witness list includes:

• Samantha Vinograd, Office of Strategy, Policy, and Plans,

• Rear Admiral Scott W. Clendenin, USCG,

• Austin Gould, TSA,

• Dennis J. Michelini, U.S. Customs and Border Protection

The last witness was added by the Republicans. They will be using Michelini’s testimony to attack the President’s ‘lack of action on the Southern Border’. Just a reminder, DHS has very limited authority to conduct counter-drone operations.

On the Floor

The major bill in the House this week will be HR 3617, the Marijuana Opportunity Reinvestment and Expungement (MORE) Act. It will come to the floor later in the week, so the House will have time to consider a total of 17 bills under their suspension of the rules process. Those bills include:

S 2629 – the Better Cybercrime Metrics Act, and

HR 6865 – the Don Young Coast Guard Authorization Act of 2022,

The Senate is scheduled to finish up action on HR 4521 this evening. While many things could happen to delay the final vote, I suspect that the Senate will adopt the substitute language this evening. Then the conference process will begin to iron out the major differences in the two bills. The final bill will be larger than either of the two alternatives and will almost certainly contain both sets of cybersecurity provisions.