House Accepts Senate Version of HR 240

Earlier today the House accepted the Senate version of HR 240 in an unusual bipartisan vote of 257-167; only 75 Republicans voted for the bill as did every voting Democrat. Before today’s debate on the bill could start the conservative Republicans lost a procedural move to stop the consideration of the bill by a vote of 140-278.

The bill will go to the President who has indicated that he will sign the bill, so the Homeland Security funding issue has been resolved for this fiscal year. It will be interesting to see if the FY 2016 budget and spending bill suffer the same sort of problems.

There will almost certainly be repercussions within the Republican caucus for the leadership’s failure to get cohesive action on a major bill of this sort. It is probably too early to see any changes in the leadership, but unless something happens to change things the likelihood of those changes happening is going to increase.

Senate Passes Amended HR 240 – House Disagrees

Earlier today the Senate adopted a clean version of HR 240 by a vote of 68 to 31; all 31 nay votes were from conservative Republicans. Just now the House voted (228 to 191) to disagree with the Senate amendment to HR 240 and to request a conference. It is unlikely that there will be a resolution to the disagreement on HR 240 today.

Meanwhile, the House debated HJ Res 35 and is now waiting for the leadership to call for a vote on that measure that would extend the current DHS funding until March 19^th. The Senate is currently in recess subject to the call of the Chair waiting to take up either HR 240 or HJ Res 35.

Bills Introduced – 2-11-15

Yesterday there were 76 bills introduced in the House and Senate. Three of those may be of specific interest to readers of this blog:

HR 861 - Making appropriations for the Department of Homeland Security for the fiscal year ending September 30, 2015, and for other purposes. Rep. Cummings, Elijah E. [D-MD-7]

HR 878 - To provide for the authorization of border, maritime, and transportation security responsibilities and functions in the Department of Homeland Security and the establishment of United States Customs...Rep. Miller, Candice S. [R-MI-10]

S 456 - A bill to codify mechanisms for enabling cybersecurity threat indicator sharing between private and government entities, as well as among private entities, to better protect information systems. Sen. Carper, Thomas R. [D-DE]

HR 861 is almost certainly a ‘clean’ FY 2015 appropriations bill for DHS. Since Rep. Cummings is a Democrat and not on either the Appropriations Committee nor the Homeland Security Committee this bill has almost no chance of being considered.

I think that recent press reports about the President’s cybersecurity bill being introduced in the Senate refer to this bill (almost no one else reports bill numbers), but according to Sen. Carper’s press release this bill is a blend of the Administration’s bill and “insights and advice from our Committee’s hearing on the topic earlier this month”. According to the release the bill will:

● Authorizes sharing and provides liability protections;

● Sharing within the government and protection of information;

● Government to industry sharing and improved coordination; and

● Builds in strong privacy protections.

The same could be said for a number of information sharing bills, but the devil is in the details. We’ll have to see what the bill actually says.

Rules Committee Announces Hearing on DHS Funding Bill

This evening the House Rules Committee announced that it would hold a hearing on Monday, January 12^th to formulate the rule for the consideration of HR 240, Department of Homeland Security Appropriations Act, 2015. As expected it looks like there will be floor amendments that will be offered to counter the President’s immigration initiatives, but the bill as introduced looks quite a bit like HR 4903 from the last session.

There have been some increases in proposed funding, but in general the bill seems to be very similar to what was introduced previously. I have scanned quickly through the portions of the bill that I typically watch. The table below shows how some of the programs that might be expected to be of specific interest to readers of this blog will fare under this bill.

	HR 4903 – 113th	HR 240 – 114th
Surface Trans Security	$121,303,000	$123,749,000
Infrastructure Protection	$1,139,499,000	$1,188,679,000
BioWatch	$86,891,000	$86,891,000
Port Security Grants	$100,000,000	$100,000,000

From my point of view, of course, what is important about this bill is what is missing. For the first time in a number of years there is not a provision in the bill that will extend the current CFATS program until the end of this funding period. This is, of course, because Congress finally took the CFATS program out of this annual budget dance by passing HR 4007 last month.