Senate Agrees to Conference on HR 4521 – America COMPETES Act

On Thursday, the Senate considered the House message to go to conference on resolving their differences on HR 4521, the America COMPETES Act of 2022. By a final vote of 67 to 27, the Senate insisted on their amendments to the bill, agreed to a conference committee, and authorized the Chair to appoint the Senate representatives to that conference.

HR 4521 started off in the House last summer as the Bioeconomy Research and Development Act of 2021. The bill quickly morphed into a massive spending and authorization bill. When it finally passed in the House in February, it contained 19 Divisions that included everything from cybersecurity, to temporary duty suspensions and even a child care resource guide requirement.

When the bill arrived in the Senate, it looked for sure that the party-line vote in the House would prevent the bill from moving forward in the Senate. But the Leadership had a different idea, instead of considering the House version of the bill they quickly substituted language from S 1260, an equally bloated, but more bipartisan, spending and authorization bill that had passed in the Senate with a moderately bipartisan vote of 68 to 32 last June. With a few minor tweaks and amendments the substitute language was adopted in HR 4521 in a similar vote of 68 to 28 just a month ago.

With many similarities between the two bills, but even more differences, this will be an interesting backroom challenge to craft compromise language between the two massive versions. Fortunately, the one area that will see the most agreement will be in the area of cybersecurity, with most of the provisions in both bills probably making it into the final version.