Review - H 4664 Introduced – FY 2024 FinServ Spending

Back in July, Rep Womack (R,AR) introduced HR 4664, the Financial Services and General Government Appropriations Act, 2024. The House Appropriations Committee also published their Report on the bill. There are actually three cybersecurity spending mentions included in the bill. There are multiple discussions about cybersecurity (mostly information technology related) issues in the Committee Report.

Moving Forward

To understand how politically polarized this spending bill is, one only has to look to the ‘Dissenting Views’ portion of the Committee Report on pages 289 thru 291. It is unlikely that there will be any Democratic votes for this bill if/when it comes to the House floor, but it is unclear whether the spending cuts have been sufficient to see the radical wing of the Republican Party vote for the bill.

Commentary

See my ‘Coming FY 2024 Spending Bill Logjams’ for my discussion about the problems passing spending bills this session. Those problems have been further compounded by the removal of Speaker McCarthy over the passage of the continuing resolution with Democratic support and the ongoing problem with electing a new speaker. Even if a new Speaker is elected in time enough to take actions on the pending spending bills, it is now very unlikely that there is enough time before November 17^th to get those bills through a conference Committee.

And a reminder, anything that comes out of conference in a form that could pass in the Senate will require Democratic votes to pass in the House. There is a very real possibility that that the passage of the first such bill would again trigger the removal of whomever is Speaker and initiate Speaker Chaos 3. Perhaps the new Speaker should just go for an omnibus spending bill out of the gate and lose their job over that. Then at least, the executive branch could continue to function.

 

For more details about the cybersecurity mentions in the bill and Report, see my article at CFSN Detailed Analysis - https://open.substack.com/pub/patrickcoyle/p/h-4664-introduced - subscription required.