Bills Introduced – 01-17-19

Yesterday with both the House and Senate in session there were 86 bills introduced. Of those, three may receive additional coverage on this blog:

HR 648 Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2019 Rep. Lowey, Nita M. [D-NY-17] 

HR 680 To provide for the establishment of a pilot program to identify security vulnerabilities of certain entities in the energy sector. Rep. Ruppersberger, C. A. Dutch [D-MD-2]

S 174 A bill to provide for the establishment of a pilot program to identify security vulnerabilities of certain entities in the energy sector. Sen. King, Angus S., Jr. [I-ME]

HR 648 is another version of an FY 2019 spending bill that addresses the spending for the shut down agencies in the Federal government (except for DHS). I will only be looking at this bill if there are specific provisions of the bill of interest. The schedule for next week has not yet been published, but I expect that it will be considered on the floor next week. This will be another attempt to get Republican support to re-open the government over Trump’s opposition.

It looks like the other two bills are companion bills, but I cannot be sure until I see the actual bills.

House Passes Two FY 2019 Spending Bills

Yesterday the House passed two FY 2019 spending bills; HR 265, for Agriculture, Rural Development, Food and Drug Administration, and related agencies; and HR 267, for Department of Transportation, and Housing and Urban Development, and related agencies. Both bills passed by near party-line votes; HR 265 – 243 to 183 and HR 267 – 244 to 180.

The final spending bill in this series (HR 266, for Department of the Interior, environment, and related agencies) will be considered on the floor today. A similar result is expected.

NOTE: None bills contains cybersecurity or chemical security/transportation provisions that would lead to detailed coverage here.

None of these spending bills is likely to be considered in the Senate. Yesterday during an attempt to consider HR 21, the FY 2019 Consolidated Spending Bill, under the Senate’s unanimous consent process, Sen. McConnel (R,KY) objected to consideration of the bill (pg S 113). In his discussion leading up to the official objection to proceeding McConnel noted:

“We [McConnel and Sen. Schumer (D,NY)] agreed that we wouldn’t waste the Senate’s time on show votes related to government funding until a global agreement was reached that could pass the House, pass the Senate, and which the President could sign.”

Thus, until all five (McConnel, Schumer, Rep. Pelosi (D,CA), Rep. McCarthy (R,CA) and President Trump) reach an agreement on the termination of the Federal Funding Fiasco, the Senate is unlikely to consider any spending bill.

Bills Introduced – 01-08-19

Yesterday with both the House and Senate in Washington there were 132 bills introduced. Of these 8 may receive further attention in this blog:

HR 265 Making appropriations for Agriculture, Rural Development, Food and Drug Administration, and Related Agencies programs for the fiscal year ending September 30, 2019, and for other purposes. Rep. Bishop, Sanford D., Jr. [D-GA-2]

HR 266 Making appropriations for the Department of the Interior, environment, and related agencies for the fiscal year ending September 30, 2019, and for other purposes. Rep. McCollum, Betty [D-MN-4]

HR 267 Making appropriations for the Department of Transportation, and Housing and Urban Development, and related agencies for the fiscal year ending September 30, 2019, and for other purposes. Rep. Price, David E. [D-NC-4]

HR 269 To reauthorize certain programs under the Public Health Service Act and the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act with respect to public health security and all-hazards preparedness and response, to clarify the regulatory framework with respect to certain nonprescription drugs that are marketed without an approved drug application, and for other purposes. Rep. Eshoo, Anna G. [D-CA-18]

HR 327 To prohibit entities from requiring individuals to submit to arbitration for disputes arising from a security breach, and for other purposes. Rep. Lieu, Ted [D-CA-33]

HR 328 To require the Secretary of State to design and establish a Vulnerability Disclosure Process (VDP) to improve Department of State cybersecurity and a bug bounty program to identify and report vulnerabilities of internet-facing information technology of the Department of State, and for other purposes. Rep. Lieu, Ted [D-CA-33]

HR 334 To increase cybersecurity education and job growth, and for other purposes. Rep. Lieu, Ted [D-CA-33]

HR 350 Making continuing appropriations for the Coast Guard. Rep. Van Drew, Jefferson [D-NJ-2]

FY 2019 Spending Bills

It looks like the Democratic leadership in the House has accepted that the Senate will not take action on the two spending bills that they had passed last week (no surprise here). So they are going to go through the ‘normal’ legislative process for each of the four (of five) spending bills that were not passed last session (well they missed the DHS bill, but I think they are going to go with the CR for DHS that was passed last week for the time being). I have not included HR 264, Financial Services and General Government, in the list above because there is little in that bill that I am interested in.

The House will begin considering these bills today, starting with HR 264. This is a major change from the legislative plan for the week that was announced last Friday. The GPO has not yet printed any of these bills (they are behind because of the large (but not unusual) number of bills introduced in the first days of this session), so we will only get to see ‘draft’ copies on the Majority Leader’s web site sometime the day before the bill is considered. The leadership is already violating their ’72 hour’ rule, but this was to be expected in ‘fast moving’ situations like this.

The House Rules Committee adopted a single rule yesterday for the consideration of all four of the spending bills. It provides for a closed rule with limited debate and no amendments. I expect that we will see a party-line vote on each of these bills in the House and the Senate will ignore them as well (at least until some sort of agreement is reached between the Democrats and the President).

In any case, the Democrats will point to these actions as ‘proof’ that they are actively working on opening the government. Political grandstanding? Just a little.

HR 269

This is the medical emergency response bill that I discussed yesterday. It was passed in the House last night on a very strongly bipartisan vote of 401 to 17 with very little debate. It will be interesting to see how long it takes the Senate to take up this bill, but there is no guarantee that it will. If it does reach the Senate floor, I expect that it will do so under their unanimous consent process.

Bills Introduced – 01-03-19

Yesterday, the first day of the 116^th Congress, with both the House and Senate in Washington there were 302 bills introduced. Of those, seven will probably receive further coverage on this blog:

HR 21 Making appropriations for the fiscal year ending September 30, 2019, and for other purposes. Rep. Lowey, Nita M. [D-NY-17]

HR 43 To require the Secretary of Homeland Security to submit a report on cyber vulnerability disclosures, and for other purposes. Rep. Jackson Lee, Sheila [D-TX-18]

HR 52 To require a report and assessment regarding Department of Homeland Security responses to terrorist threats to Federal elections, and for other purposes. Rep. Jackson Lee, Sheila [D-TX-18] 

HR 57 To require the Secretary of Homeland Security to conduct a study on the feasibility of establishing a Civilian Cyber Defense National Resource in the Department of Homeland Security. Rep. Jackson Lee, Sheila [D-TX-18] 

HR 70 To abolish the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, and for other purposes. Rep. Biggs, Andy [R-AZ-5]

HJ Res 1 Making further continuing appropriations for the Department of Homeland Security for fiscal year 2019, and for other purposes. Rep. Lowey, Nita M. [D-NY-17]

S 21 A bill making continuing appropriations for Coast Guard pay in the event an appropriations act expires prior to the enactment of a new appropriations act. Sen. Thune, John [R-SD]

NOTE: All bills introduced in the 115^th Congress are now dead. A bunch of them will be reintroduced in the coming days as the authors try to get work completed on the bills, but most of them will die a silent death. There may be some action in the House on bills that were introduced by Democrats last session, but few of those will be taken up by the Senate if they are passed in the House.

FY 2019 Spending

The House passed the two of these bills yesterday, HR 21 and HJ Res 1, that would, if passed by Senate and signed by the President, would take care of the current funding issue that has about a quarter of the government either shutdown or working on the hope for funding.

HR 21 would provide funding for Interior, Financial Services, Agriculture, Transportation, HUD, Commerce, Justice, Science and State through the end of the fiscal year. Details of that funding are not currently available as the House passed the bill on a near party-line vote (241-190) without any text of the bill being available.

HJ Res 1 is a continuing resolution providing for short-term spending for the Department of Homeland Security. Again, this was passed by a near party-line vote (239-192) without any text of the bill being available. So, we do not currently know how long the extension would be for (sometime in February?) or if the DHS CR will provide a program extension for the Chemical Facility Anti-Terrorism Standards (CFATS) (probably with the same date as the CR).

It looks like the new Democratic House Leadership decided to split the spending issue into two parts to get most of the funding moving while leaving the most contentious issues (the ‘wall’ and immigration reform) to be resolved separately. According to news reports that does not appear to be a successful move, but we will have to wait and see.

CFATS Program Extension

I was surprised to not see a CFATS bill introduced in either House. I expected Sen. Johnson (R,WI) to reintroduce S 3405 given the fuss he made about the bill last November. On the House side I did (do) not expect to see HR 6992 introduced as it had no support from anyone of consequence in the House Homeland Security Committee from either party.

Depending on the wording of any CFATS extension in HR 21 (low probability of mention) or HJ Res 1 (probably short term) I would expect to see a bill similar to HR 7188 that would formally extend the CFATS program for a year to give the new leadership at Homeland Security and the Energy and Commerce Committees to craft a longer term extension of the bill. If Democrats continue to form on CFATS, that would include formal whistleblower protections, worker involvement language, emergency response planning requirements and possibly some sort of inherently safer technology language. All of these would cause problems with Johnson and the Republicans in the Senate. Because of these conflicts I suspect that we will return to year-by-year extensions until one of the two parties gains controls of both houses of Congress.

Committee Hearings – Week of 06-10-18

This will be a busy week in Washington with both the House and Senate in session. Spending bills will continue to be big items of interest as will the Senate consideration of HR 5515, the FY 2019 NDAA. But we also have two CFATS hearings, a roads and bridges hearing that may look at cybersecurity, and a markup hearing that looks at drones and cybersecurity.

Spending Bills

• Tuesday – Senate – Subcommittee - Commerce, Justice, Science, and Related Agencies;

• Wednesday – House – Committee – DOD; and

• Thursday – Senate – Committee - Commerce, Justice, Science, and Related Agencies;

CFATS

With the Chemical Facility Anti-Terrorism Standards program set to expire in December these two hearings would seem to be reauthorization hearings, but it is looking increasingly like we will have to rely on the Appropriations Committee and the DHS spending bill to reauthorize CFATS for the short term. But, these two hearings could inform future, more substantial action by Congress.

On Tuesday the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee will hold a hearing looking at “ROUNDTABLE - Examining the Chemical Facility Anti-Terrorism Standards Program”. The witness list includes:

• David Wulf, DHS;

• Christopher P. Currie, GAO;

• Randall Eppli, Columbus Chemical Industries, Inc;

• Andrew T. O'Hare, The Fertilizer Institute;

• Debra S. Satkowiak, Institute of Makers of Explosives;

• Linda Menendez, Austin Powder Company;

• William Erny, American Chemistry Council;

• Jesse LeGros, Jr., AFGE National Local #918;

• Jennifer Gibson, National Association of Chemical Distributors

The House Energy and Commerce Committee will hold a hearing on Thursday looking at “The Chemical Facilities Anti-Terrorism Standards Program (CFATS) – A Progress Report”. No witness list is yet available, but we can expect to see David Wulf and Christopher Currie back at the witness table.

The GAO report will be the big item in both hearings. The GAO will find problems (that is after all their mandate), but we will have to watch the questioning to see how serious Congress thinks those problems are.

BTW: The ‘competition’ between Energy and Commerce and Homeland Security in the House to oversee the CFATS program is probably one of the stumbling blocks to a reauthorization bill in this session.

Autonomous Vehicles

On Wednesday the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee will hold a hearing on “Examining the Effects of Emerging Autonomous Technologies on America’s Roads and Bridges”. No witness list is currently available for this hearing. It will be interesting to see how much play cybersecurity of these systems gets in this hearing. Unfortunately, I do not expect much.

Mark-Up Hearing

On Wednesday the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee will hold a business meeting to look at a couple, okay three, nominations and markups of seven bills. Three of the bills have yet to be introduced (and probably of little interest here in any case), but two of the remaining four have been covered in this blog:

• S 2836, the Preventing Emerging Threats Act of 2018; and

• S 2392, the Cyber SAFETY Act of 2018

There are problems with the scope of the first bill (both too broad and too narrow in different areas) and there are some critical definitions missing in the second. We will see if HSGAC takes any action to correct those problems.

Committee Hearings – Week of 06-03-18

This week with both the House and Senate back from their extended Memorial Day Weekend spending bills will be the major topic on the Hill. There will also be two other hearings of potential interest to readers of this blog. The first will be a committee markup of a number of homeland security related bills. The second will be a hearing dealing with drone defense and S 2836.

Spending Bills

In addition to the Rules Committee hearings and floor consideration of HR 5895 that I mentioned in an earlier post, there will be some additional spending bills marked up this week:

• Tuesday – Senate – Subcommittee - Transportation, Housing and Urban Development (THUD), and Related Agencies;

• Tuesday – Senate – Subcommittee - Military Construction, Veterans Affairs, and Related Agencies;

• Wednesday – House – Committee - Interior, Environment, and Related Agencies;

• Thursday – House – Subcommittee – DOD;

• Thursday – Senate- Committee – THUD;

Markup Hearing

On Wednesday the House Homeland Security Committee will be holding a markup hearing to look at 10 bills. Of those, three may be of specific interest to readers of this blog:

• HR 5733, the DHS Industrial Control Systems Capabilities Enhancement Act of 2018;

• HR 5729, the Transportation Worker Identification Credential Accountability Act of 2018; and

• HRes 898 Directing the Secretary of Homeland Security to transmit certain documents to the House of Representatives relating to Department of Homeland Security policies and activities relating to homeland security information produced and disseminated regarding cybersecurity threats posed by the ZTE Corporation, headquartered in Shenzhen, China.

The resolution is effectively a subpoena to be issued by Congress. It was introduced by Rep. Thompson (D,MS). It is a straightforward listing of the types of documents that Thompson expects to be provided by DHS without any of the politically loaded ‘Congressional findings’ that frequently accompany such documents. Practically speaking, since Thompson is the Ranking Member of the Committee, he should be influential enough in his own right to have this resolution considered by the Committee, but I suspect that there will be at least some bipartisan support for the resolution.

Drone Defense

On Wednesday the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee will hold an informational hearing on S 2836 and Countering Malicious Drones. The witness list includes:

• David J. Glawe, Department of Homeland Security;

• Hayley Chang, Department of Homeland Security;

• Scott Brunner, Federal Bureau of Investigation; and

• Angela H. Stubblefield, Federal Aviation Administration

This hearing will be focused on policy and the legal aspects of counter-drone operations. I suspect that the witnesses will be generally supportive of S 2836, but it will be informative looking at how down into the weeds they get into the legal aspects.

I am glad to see Chairman Johnson holding this type of hearing before moving to a markup of his bill. I think that it would also be helpful if the Committee held a hearing looking at the types of technology currently available to conduct counter-drone operations.

Committee Hearings – Week of 5-6-18

With both the House and Senate back in Washington after a week back in their districts/States the focus starts to get serious on FY 2019 spending bills. We also have two other hearings of potential interest to readers of this blog; the FY 2019 NDAA markup and a hearing on unmanned aircraft systems (UAS).

Spending Bills

The Senate Appropriations Committee is still looking at Trump’s budget requests. This week’s hearings of potential interest include:

• DHS – 5-8-18;

• DOD – 5-9-18;

The House Appropriations Committee is starting to markup actual spending bills. Mark-up hearings of potential interest include:

• Commerce, Science, and Justice – Subcommittee – 5-9-18;

FY 2019 NDAA

The House Armed Forces Committee will conduct a full committee markup of HR 5515, the FY 2019 National Defense Authorization Act on Wednesday. The week before last saw subcommittee markup completed. The Subcommittee on Emerging Threats and Capabilities added six sections to the bill concerning cybersecurity. They were:

• §1631—Amendments to Pilot Program Regarding Cyber Vulnerabilities of Department of Defense Critical Infrastructure

• §1632—Budget Display for Cyber Vulnerability Evaluations and Mitigation Activities for Major Weapon Systems of the Department of Defense

• §1633—Transfer of Responsibility for the Department of Defense Information Network to United States Cyber Command

• §1634—Pilot Program Authority to Enhance Cybersecurity and Resiliency of Critical Infrastructure

• §1635—Procedures and Reporting Requirement on Cybersecurity Breaches and Loss of Personally Identifiable Information

• §1636—Study and Report on Reserve Component Cyber Civil Support Teams

Section 1634 would allow DOD to detail up to 50 people per year to DHS to support cybersecurity operations of DHS (including NCCIC). Section 1636 would require a joint study to be conducted by DOD and DHS about establishing Reserve Component Cyber Civil Support Teams in each State.

UAS Hearing

On Tuesday the Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee will hold a hearing on “Keeping Pace with Innovation – Update on the Safe Integration of Unmanned Aircraft Systems into the Airspace”. The witness list includes:

• Earl Lawrence, Federal Aviation Administration;

• Brian Wynne, Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International;

• Matthew S. Zuccaro, Helicopter Association International;

• Todd Graetz, BNSF Railway Co.

I doubt that we will hear much of anything about protecting critical infrastructure from UAS based attacks on critical infrastructure, but I could be pleasantly surprised.

Committee Hearings – Week of 4-7-18

Both the House and Senate are coming back to Washington this week after their two-week Easter Recess. There are no hearings of specific interest to readers of this blog in the strictest sense, but there are two categories of hearings that may be of general interest. They deal with (non-ICS) cybersecurity and money.

Cyber Hearings

April 10^th, Senate Judiciary, “Facebook, Social Media Privacy, and the Use and Abuse of Data”;

April 11^th, House Energy and Commerce, “Facebook: Transparency and Use of Consumer Data”;

April 11^th, House Armed Services, “Cyber Operations Today: Preparing for 21st Century Challenges in an Information-Enabled Society”;

April 11^th, Emerging Threats and Capabilities Subcommittee (House Armed Services), “A Review and Assessment of the Department of Defense Budget, Strategy, Policy, and Programs for Cyber Operations and U.S. Cyber Command for Fiscal Year 2019”;

Zuckerberg gets a chance to respond to Congressional critics and the military will talk about cyber operations.

Budget and Spending Hearings

April 11^th, Homeland Security Subcommittee (House Appropriations), “FY 2019 Department of Homeland Security”;

April 12^th, Transportation and Protective Security Subcommittee (House Transportation), “Examining the President’s FY 2019 Budget Request for the Transportation Security Administration”;

We are still too early in the FY 2019 process for any particular details to begin to emerge but, listening to the questions asked at these hearings can give a picture of what may be coming down the road.