Committee Hearings – Week of 6-19-22

This week, with both the House and Senate in session and the Summer Recess deadline approaching, there is a moderately heavy hearing schedule. The House Armed Services Committee will markup their FY 2023 NDAA. The House is pushing ahead with spending bill markups while there are still budget hearings being held (including a bunch of closed intel agency hearings). There will also be a hearing looking at the cybersecurity of new technologies. Finally, there are a couple of cybersecurity bills scheduled for consideration in the House.

FY 2023 Spending Bill Markups

Tuesday – House – IER – Subcommittee,

Tuesday – House – EWD – Subcommittee,

Wednesday – House – State – Subcommittee,

Wednesday – House – CJS – Subcommittee,

Thursday – House – ARD – Subcommittee,

Thursday – House – THUD – Subcommittee,

Thursday – House – LHH – Subcommittee, and

Friday – House – DHS & Legislative – Full Committee

Cybersecurity Hearing

On Wednesday, the Cybersecurity, Infrastructure Protection, & Innovation Subcommittee of the House Homeland Security Committee will hold a hearing on “Securing the Future: Harnessing the Potential of Emerging Technologies While Mitigating Security Risks”. The witness list includes:

• Andrew Lohn, Georgetown University,

• Charles Robinson, IBM,

• Ron Green, Mastercard, and

• Rob Strayer, Information Technology Industry Council (ITI)

This looks like it will be concentrating on quantum technology, so I do not expect to hear much about control system security.

On the Floor

The House is scheduled to take up eleven bills today under the suspension of the rules process. They include two cybersecurity bills that I briefly discussed yesterday:

• HR 7777 – Industrial Control Systems Cybersecurity Training Act, as amended, and

• HR 7174 – National Computer Forensics Institute Reauthorization Act of 2022, as amended

Both bills are likely to pass with substantial bipartisan support, but Republican bomb-throwers are likely to demand recorded votes in their continuing campaign to slow the legislative process.

To be clear there are ‘bomb-throwers’ on both sides of the aisle. This is not a dig against Republicans in general. After all, I was a Goldwater Republican in ’64 and a member of the California Republican Assembly in 1972.