Review – DHS Congressional Oversight

As I noted yesterday, the House Homeland Security Committee are holding a hearing this afternoon looking their oversight plan for the Department of Homeland Security. DHS covers a wide range of activities, but thee of are particular interest here, chemical security, cybersecurity, and surface transportation security. All are covered in the Oversight Plan draft published by the Committee.

The chemical security portion of the Plan includes (pg 9):

“An act to extend the Chemical Facility Anti-Terrorism Standards Program of the Department of Homeland Security, and for other purposes, (Pub. L. 116-150), conveys CFATS statutory authority until July 27, 2023, at which point the Committee will rely on these oversight activities and findings to consider improvements or modifications to the CFATS program which can be achieved through reauthorization.”

The wide-ranging cybersecurity discussion includes an interesting congressional initiative (pg 8):

“The Committee will lead quarterly meetings of relevant House Committees to conduct oversight, coordinate, and recommend changes to facilitate a whole of government approach to cybersecurity.”

The surface transportation provisions include (pg 15):

“The Committee will also review the extent to which TSA effectively coordinates with its federal, state, local, and private sector partners to secure the Nation’s transportation systems and to help prevent conflicting or unnecessarily redundant regulations. Finally, the Committee will assess the effectiveness of TSA’s efforts to secure the Nation’s pipeline systems through TSA’s oversight and inspection activities.”

Commentary

With just under five-months left until the current CFATS authorization runs out, there is not much time for oversight hearings, formulating reauthorization legislation and passing it through the legislative process before July 27^th. Compounding the problem is that the Committee shares oversight of the CFATS program with the Energy and Commerce Committee. Thus, legislation needs to be coordinated before it can come to the floor of the House. The Republican leadership of the ECC is concentrating on energy matters and will have little time for CFATS oversight, this will complicate the reauthorization process.

I suspect that these problems will require Congress to kick the problem down the road by authorizing a short-term (one to two years) extension of the program. CISA would probably push to see that such an extension would include specific authorization for the ChemLock program to avoid funding problems.

 

For more details about the Oversight Plan, see my article at CFSN Detailed Analysis - https://patrickcoyle.substack.com/p/dhs-congressional-oversight - subscription required.