Draft Report for FY 2024 DHS Spending bill

Today, the House Appropriations Committee provided committee mark versions of both its FY 2024 DHS spending bill and the report to accompany that bill. As I mentioned earlier these two draft documents will be marked up by the full Committee tomorrow, along with similar documents for the Legislative Branch spending bill. I will wait for the final version for a complete review, but I do want to look at a few items from the Report for the CISA appropriations.

First off, CISA would be getting a small ($19 million) net increase over FY 2023 spending but a decrease ($130 million) from what was requested by the Administration.

There are a bunch of cybersecurity instructions for CISA in the report. I will cover those in detail in a later post.

There is no mention of chemical security or the Chemical Facility Anti-Terrorism Standards (CFATS) program in the report. This is not terribly unusual, the CFATS program is too small to receive detailed mention unless there are problems with the program that have come to the attention of the Appropriations Committee. Having said that, with the CFATS sunset date (July 27^th, 2023) quickly approaching, I was hoping to see some mention of either the CFATS program or the ammonium nitrate regulations in the Report as kind of a morale boost for the Office of Chemical Security or the regulated community. May still see something added tomorrow (but probably not).