Review - HR 2447 Introduced - Cybersecurity Education Support

Back in March, Rep Lieu (D,CA) introduced HR 2447, 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 very similar to HR 3429, which was introduced by Lieu in May 2023. No action was taken on that bill in the 118^th Congress. For the most part the differences between the two bills are formatting issues, for example changing the complex subsection describing the amendments to the Internal Revenue Code described in §3(b) in the earlier bill is changed to multiple paragraphs within §3(b) in HR 2447. There are also some changes in the numbering of the subsections being added to the IRC.

Moving Forward

Neither Lieu, nor his two cosponsors, are members of the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee to which this bill was assigned for primary consideration (or any of the three other committees assigned secondary consideration). This means that there is little chance that there will be sufficient influence to see the bill considered in any of the four committees.

While no spending is authorized by the bill, the loan forgiveness provisions will 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. This establishment of ‘congressional intent’ is one of the most common reasons for adding ‘congressional findings’ to a piece of legislation.

 

For more detailed information on the provisions of this bill, see my article at CFSN Detailed Analysis - https://patrickcoyle.substack.com/p/hr-2447-introduced-cybersecurity - subscription required.