Congressional Hearings – Week of 3-23-14

Both the House and Senate will be back in Washington this week. The budget continues to be a big topic for hearings; the table below provides a summary of the budget hearings. No other House hearings of specific interest, but there will be three hearings on the Senate side of the Capital that might be of specific interest to readers of this blog. They include topics of perennial interest; emergency response, cybersecurity and transportation safety.

Agency	House Appropriations	House Oversight	Senate Appropriations	Senate Oversight
DHS	3-11-14	3-13-14	3-11-14	3-13-14
DOT	3-12-14	3-12-14	3-13-14
Defense	3-13-14	3-6-14
CG	3-12-14	3-26-14
FEMA	3-26-14	3-25-14		3-13-14
TSA	3-25-14

Budget Hearing Summary

Emergency Response

The Emergency Management, Intergovernmental Relations and District of Columbia Subcommittee of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee will be holding a hearing on Tuesday looking at “Preparing our First Responders for Emerging Threats and Hazards”.

The focus of the hearing will be on transportation related incidents and crude oil trains will be widely discussed. Witnesses include:

• Mike King, FEMA;

• Tim McLean, Casselton, ND Fire Department; and

• Lisa Stabler, Transportation Technology Center, Inc.

Cybersecurity

The Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee will hold a hearing on Wednesday looking at “Strengthening Public-Private Partnerships to Reduce Cyber Risks to Our Nation’s Critical Infrastructure”.

The witness list is pretty wide ranging so there may be some discussion about control systems in this hearing, but probably not much. The witnesses include:

• Phyllis A. Schneck, NPPD-DHS;

• Donna Dodson, NIST;

• Stephen L. Caldwell, GAO;

• Elayne Starkey, Delaware Department of Technology and Information,

• David M. Velazquez, Pepco Holdings, Inc.;

• Doug Johnson, Financial Services Sector Coordinating Council; and

• Steven R. Chabinsky, CrowdStrike, Inc.

Transportation Safety

On Thursday the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee will be holding a hearing looking at “MAP-21 Reauthorization: State and Local Perspectives on Transportation Priorities and Funding”. No witness list is available yet, but the title indicates that they will probably be State and local officials. Transportation safety will be one of the topics discussed.

On the Floor

There will probably be nothing of specific interest to readers of this blog brought up on the floor of either body this week. We are getting deeper into the political cycle so we are seeing more political posturing and looking good for the home audience. Tuesday will see a number of bills on the floor of the House renaming Federal buildings after local heroes; most of the renaming ceremonies will take place before the first Tuesday in November and will feature the local Congressional delegation.

FY 2015 Budget Request

Yesterday the President submitted his FY 2015 Budget Request to Congress. In recent years this has been more of a wish list rather than an actual budget proposal because Congress has pretty much ignored the request and crafted their own budget. This year this is a particularly futile exercise because the Senate Budget Committee has already declared that it has no intention of producing a budget this year, leaving the Republicans in the House the sole (if somewhat limited) authority to enact a budget. As always, it will come down to what is in the actual spending bills that will eventually get passed by Congress.

None the less, the Budget Request is a pretty good outline of how the Administration would like to run the government if it had its way. The table below shows the budget numbers for those portions of DHS that I normally keep track of here in this blog. The dollar amounts (in millions of dollars) are for the overall account and the ‘FTE’ is full time equivalent employees (NOTE: the Coast Guard numbers are for military personnel only).

	FY 2014 ($M)	FY 2015 ($M)	% Change	FY 2014 FTE	FY 2015 FTE
TSA Surface	108.6	127.6	17.5	720	926
TSA I&V	176.5	232.5	31.6	490	799
Coast Guard	7,009	6,572	(6.2)	41,051	40,730
NPPD	56.5	65.9	1.7	305	358
IP/IS	1,187	1,197	0.8	1,373	1,544

FY 2015 Budget Request for Homeland Security

NOTE: The TSA I&V reflects the new Administration name (Intelligence and Vetting) for the old ‘Transportation Threat Assessment and Credentialing”.

NOTE: IP/IS is Infrastructure Protection and Information Security. This includes such programs as CFATS, US-CERT, and ICS-CERT among a number of others. These individual programs are not broken out in the current budget documents.

With the exception of the Coast Guard (and it looks like this is part of the general military cutback in the budget), DHS looks to do pretty well under the President’s proposal. We will get more details when the Secretaries make their trips to Capitol Hill in the coming weeks.

Then we just have to wait and see what Congress does with this.

Congressional Hearings – Week of 3-2-14

With Monday’s submission of the President’s FY 2015 budget to Congress (one month late, again) this week officially starts the annual spending scramble. The hearing schedule in the House reflects this, but the Senate is officially sitting out the budget process this year so we have a couple of weeks yet before they join this particular game. So the Senate hearings this week will include a DHS appointment hearing, a look at crude trains and an oversight hearing about EO 13650.

Budget Hearings

The annual spending scramble officially starts on Wednesday with the House Budget Committee holding their initial hearing on the President’s FY 2015 budget. Only one witness is scheduled, Ms. Burwell the OMB Director. There will only be broad overviews of the budget discussed here.

The only other budget hearing this week of specific interest to readers of this blog will be the House Armed Services Committee’s initial hearing on the President’s FY 2015 National Defense Authorization Budget. This will be a contentious hearing about the President’s propose Defense Department cuts, but cybersecurity will almost certainly be mentioned. The interesting stuff will come out in the subcommittee hearings in the coming weeks.

DHS Nominations

The Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee will be holding a nomination hearing on Wednesday looking at Mr. Brothers for S&T Under Secretary and Mr. Taylor for Intelligence and Analysis Under Secretary. Cybersecurity will certainly be a topic here.

Rail Safety

The Surface Transportation and Merchant Marine Infrastructure, Safety and Security Subcommittee of the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee will hold a hearing on Thursday looking at Enhancing our Rail Safety: Current Challenges for Passenger and Freight Rail. The witness list right now is organizational rather than by name. Witnesses will be representing the:

• Federal Railroad Administration

• Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration

• National Transportation Safety Board

• Federal Communications Commission

• American Petroleum Institute

• Association of American Railroads

The PHMSA and API witnesses indicate that crude oil trains will be discussed, no surprise there. The apparent odd-ball of the list, the FCC, means that positive train control (PTC) issues will be discussed as the FCC is one of the current impediments being blamed on potential delays in PTC implementation.

To get a real discussion of the crude oil issues going, the Subcommittee should have included a representative from Railway Supply Institute and let a panel including them the API and the AAR duke it out in a cage match. All three of these organizations will each have a major stake in the outcome of any Congressional action on crude-by-rail shipments and will be responsible for any real solution to the safety issues involved. Leaving the RSI out of this hearing is a sure way for them to get stuck holding the blame sack.

EO 13650

The Senate Environment and Public Works Committee will be holding an oversight hearing on the President’s Executive Order on Improving Chemical Facility Safety and Security. Okay, by definition, Congress doesn’t have any oversight authority over an Executive Order but that’s what Senator Boxer is calling this. No witness list has yet been posted, but if this hearing is to mean anything at all (I’m not holding my breath, Sen. Boxer’s committee accomplishes little if anything of importance) it will include the three Assistant Secretary’s that head the Working Group.

On the Floor

The House has a full election-year schedule going this week. There are lots of political posturing bills that will get full debate and party line votes. Some real work will get done though.

As I predicted HR 4076, the Home Heating Emergency Assistance Through Transportation (HHEAT) Act of 2014, will come to the floor this week. It will be considered on Tuesday under suspension of the rules and will pass with near unanimous support (there may not even be a recorded vote). There will not be any discussion of the increased risk of transportation accidents by allowing the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration to continue its emergency suspension of transportation safety rules to allow timely fuel oil and propane deliveries to the hard hit communities in the north and east. I’m pretty sure that more lives will be saved from cold injuries than will be expended in transportation related accidents, but that trade off should be specifically addressed in the debate; it won’t. Life-and-death cost-benefit analysis is not something that politicians are willing to go on the record debating; it opens them up to too much potential criticism.