Review - S 2131 Introduced – FY 2024 ARD Spending

This week Sen Heinrich (D,NM) introduced S 2131, the Agriculture, Rural Development, Food and Drug Administration, and Related Agencies [ARD] Appropriations Act, 2024. The Senate Appropriations Committee also published their Report to accompany the bill. As expected, the only mention of cybersecurity in the bill deals with the cybersecurity spending by the USDA Chief Information Officer on pages 5 and 6 of the legislation. There are no chemical safety mentions in the bill. There are minor mentions of both in the Committee Report. On Thursday, the Committee ordered the bill to be reported favorably by a unanimous vote (pg 140 of the Report).

Moving Forward

Since the Constitution mandates that spending bills originate in the House, the Senate does not usually take action on spending bills until the House version is passed. Typically, once the House passes their bill, the Senate will take up that bill and Heinrich will offer this Senate version as alternate language for the bill. The Senate will make their amendments to this language and then pass the bill (well they have not actually passed individual spending bills in quite some time). A conference committee will be appointed to negotiate a version of the bill that (hopefully) could be passed in both chambers.

The House Appropriations Committee marked-up their version of the bill on June 14^th, 2023, and voted to report the resulting bill favorably in a party-line vote. That bill has not yet been published. This, considering recent leadership disputes in the Republican majority, would seem to indicate that there are still problems that have to be worked out, probably dealing with spending levels. The Republican 11 almost certainly want to see even lower spending levels than were adopted in Committee.

 

For more details about the provisions in the bill and directions in the Report, including a longer discussion about spending bill politics in the 118^th Congress, see my article at CFSN Detailed Analysis - https://patrickcoyle.substack.com/p/s-2131-introduced - subscription required.