Review - HR 3429 Introduced – Cybersecurity Education Support

Last month, Rep Lieu (D,CA) introduced HR 3429, the New Collar Jobs Act of 2023. The bill would provide employer incentives to provide cybersecurity training to employees and would provide federal loan forgiveness to certain individuals student loans. No new spending is authorized by this bill. The bill is virtually identical to HR 4389 which was introduced last session by Lieu. No action was taken on that bill.

Moving Forward

Lieu is a member of the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee to which this bill was assigned for primary consideration. This means that there may be sufficient influence to see the bill considered in Committee. While no spending is authorized by the bill, the loan forgiveness provisions may draw the ire of the Republican budgetary-hawks, so there may be some organized opposition for that reason. I suspect that there would be some bipartisan support for the bill, but not enough to see the bill considered under the suspension of the rules process if it were to make it to the floor of the House. That means that the bill would not likely be considered by the House because of the influence of the conservative minority on the Rules Committee.

Commentary

While there are no specific mentions of control system cybersecurity in the legislative requirements, two of three congressional findings in §2 of the bill address manufacturing control system security issues. Thus the ‘congressional intent’ clearly applies (not exclusively, to be sure) the education support provisions to control-system-security educational programs.

 

For more details about the provision of this bill, see my article at CFSN Detailed Analysis - https://patrickcoyle.substack.com/p/hr-3429-introduced - subscription required.