Committee Hearings – Week of 7-9-23

With the House and Senate returning from two weeks raising money in their districts, we have a moderately full slate of hearings scheduled, including four markup hearings of interest here and a Rules Committee hearing for the NDAA.

NDAA Hearing

The House Rules Committee is scheduled to meet tomorrow on HR 2670, the FY 2024 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). The Committee will formulate the rule for the consideration of that bill later this week (see below). There are currently 1502 amendments that have been proposed for consideration on that bill. The big news coming out of tomorrow’s hearing will be which amendments have been okayed for floor votes. I will have more on those amendments later.

CFATS Extension

On Wednesday, the House Homeland Security Committee will hold a markup hearing looking at three bills which includes HR 4470, a Chemical Facility Anti-Terrorism Standards (CFATS) program extension bill. I discussed this hearing last week.

Cybersecurity Markups

On Wednesday, the House Oversight and Accountability Committee will hold a markup hearing looking at ten legislative bills and a number of postal facility naming bills. One unintroduced cybersecurity bill on the list may be of interest there: the Modernizing the Acquisition of Cybersecurity Experts Act. No text of this bill is currently available.

On Wednesday, the Senate Small Business and Entrepreneurship Committee will hold a markup hearing looking at 25 bills. One bill of interest here is S 1458 – the SECURE Small Business Act. This bill would require SBA to establish a short-lived program to assist small business concerns with purchasing cybersecurity products and services.

Spending Bill Markups

The Senate Appropriations Committee will hold a markup hearing on Thursday which will consider the following spending bills:

• Legislative Branch Appropriations Act, 2024,

• Commerce, Justice, Science, and Related Agencies Appropriations Act, 2024, and

• Financial Services and General Government Appropriations Act, 2024.

On the Floor

The House is scheduled to take up HR 2670, the National Defense Authorization Act for FY 2024, under a rule starting on Wednesday. It looks like the leadership expects the consideration of this bill to continue through Friday.

Interestingly, the House is only scheduled to take up three bills under the suspension of the rules process. Part of this is because these bills can only be considered on Monday and Tuesday. This week, Tuesday is the first day that the House will meet in legislative session. But a major part of this is that the House leadership has shown little interest in legislating on matters that actually have a chance to get to the President’s desk. I think that this is part of their campaign strategy for 2024, show how ineffective a divided government is.