HR 2659 Passed in House – Cyber Resilience

Yesterday the House began consideration of HR 2659, the Strengthening Cyber Resilience Against State-Sponsored Threats Act, under the suspension of the rules process. After about 13 minutes of debate a recorded vote was requested. Later in the evening the House passed the bill by a strongly bipartisan vote of 402 to 8. The eight nay votes were contrarian Republicans that have opposed much of the legislation in the 119^th Congress.

The bill would require DHS to establish a joint agency task force to detect, analyze, and respond to the cybersecurity threat posed by State-sponsored cyber actors, including Volt Typhoon, of the People’s Republic of China. The Chair of the Task Force would come from CISA and the Vice Chair from the FBI. No new funding is authorized by this legislation.

As is typical for bills being considered under the suspension of rules, the debate was shorter than the allocated 40 minutes. It was also one-sided, with no one speaking against the bill.

The bill now goes to the Senate for possible consideration. The bill is unlikely to come to the floor under regular order; it is just not politically important enough to consume the amount of Senate floor time needed to undergo that process. The opposition to the bill in the House, would seem to indicate that, if this bill were offered under the unanimous consent process, one of the contrarian Republicans in the Senate would rise to object to that consideration, effectively killing the bill. I suspect that the only way that this bill makes its way to the President’s desk would be by adding it to some other must pass bill.