HR 7174 Reported in House – Cyber Forensics

Last week, the House Homeland Security Committee published their report on HR 7174, the National Computer Forensics Institute Reauthorization Act of 2022. The Committee considered the bill on May 19^th, 2022. Some relatively minor amendments were adopted, and the Committee ordered the amended bill reported favorably. The bill will be considered by the Full House tomorrow under the suspension of the rules process.

The Report provides a look at how multiple committees can work together when there is overlapping jurisdictions. In this case, the House Judiciary Committee has limited jurisdiction over some parts of the operation of the NCFI and were thus assigned to consider this bill. The Judiciary Committee held no hearings about the bill and the Chairs of the two committees were able to work together to allow the bill to move forward to consideration by the Full House. The Report contains letters between Rep Nadler (D,NY) and Rep Thompson (D,MS), the respective Chairs of the Judiciary and Homeland Security Committees.

There is no telling how much back and forth between the two chairs (and their staffs, of course) occurred to allow this cooperative action. I suspect that Thompson’s amendment to the bill may have been part of the process for moving that agreement forward.