HR 5658 Passed in House – Cybersecurity Roles

Yesterday, the House took up introduced HR 5658, the DHS Roles and Responsibilities in Cyber Space Act. The bill was considered under the House suspension of the rules process. After minimal debate, with no dissenting voices heard, a recorded vote on the bill was requested. Later in the day, the House voted 313 to 105 to pass the bill. The bill is unlikely to be considered in the Senate.

The bill would require DHS to prepare “a report on the roles and responsibilities of the Department and its components relating to cyber incident response.” It would also specifically add CISA cross-sector responsibilities for enhancing control system cybersecurity.

Since there was no opposition voiced to the bill in yesterday’s debate, it is hard to see what caused the substantial bipartisan (32 Democrats and 73 Republicans voted Nay) opposition to this bill.

Once again, this is a relatively unimportant bill. It would be hard to justify the legislative time necessary to take up this bill in the Senate under regular order. The significant opposition to the bill seen in the House would mean that there would be little chance of this bill being passed under the unanimous consent process. Thus, the only way this bill could make it to the President’s desk would be for the language to be added to some other bill that was headed to the White House.

For more details about the provisions of this bill, see my article at CFSN Detailed Analysis - https://patrickcoyle.substack.com/p/hr-5658-introduced - subscription required.