Continuing Appropriations Continuing Saga

Yesterday the House passed HR 2055, the [New] Continuing Resolution Act of 2012 by a bipartisan vote of 296-121. Bipartisan is kind of a tricky word here, more Democrats (149) than Republicans (147) voted in favor of the bill. The Senate will take up the bill today under a unanimous consent agreement so no cloture vote is necessary.

To keep the government operating through today, both the House and the Senate approved H. Joint Res. 94 yesterday. That resolution amended the existing Continuing Resolution Act of 2012 by extending the expiration date until midnight tonight. The form of that amendment also extended the CFATS program for the same time period.

Politics

Before the House adjourned for the weekend yesterday they also passed H. Joint Res. 95, another amendment to the current Continuing Resolution Act of 2012, that would re-extend the deadline of that measure until Friday, December 23^rd. This was done just in case the deal on HR 2055 fell through in the Senate. The Senate is not currently scheduled to take up this second Resolution.

Now what I just described for these two resolutions does not exactly track with what I reported in yesterday’s blog. Thursday night Chairman Drier (R,CA) explained (at least three times) that the reason for a short term continuing resolution was the need to get the formal copy of the cobbled-together bill properly prepared for the President’s signature. If that had truly been the case, then HJ Res 94 would have been for more than one day.

An alternative explanation of the purpose of the two part resolution process would be to force the Senate to act today on HR 2055. A full week extension would have allowed for more wheedling, politicking, and deal-making in the Senate. This would also account for why the two resolutions were not brought to the floor of the House until after HR 2055 passed.

The lack of listing H. Joint Res. 95 on the unanimous consent agreement kind of supports this thinking. That would only be true though if the Senate leadership had such a low opinion of the average Senator that they thought they wouldn’t be aware that the House passed the second resolution.

Moving Forward

Oh well, the debate in the Senate today should be short. The Unanimous consent agreement only allows for 15 minutes of debate.

I still haven’t had a chance to closely look at the bill for chemical- and cyber-security provisions. Yesterday was a travel day and it’s hard to read to read while you are driving.

BTW: HR 1540, the DOD authorization bill, passed Thursday in the Senate and should be on the President’s desk.

House passes HR 1540

This evening the House passed HR 1540, the FY 2012 DOD appropriations bill, by a bipartisan vote of 283 – 136. Democrats were evenly split on their voting on the bill and the Republican leadership was apparently able to hold more of their caucus under control for this bill, keeping all but 43 Republicans voting in favor of the bill.

While the Senate could vote on it this evening it may be tomorrow before it comes to the floor of the Senate. The Senate will almost certainly also vote to pass this bill; then it will go to the President. There are some unconfirmed media reports that President Obama’s threatened veto has been quietly lifted.

Cyber Security Provisions of HR 1540

I’ve had a chance to review the Conference Report on HR 1540. There are three cyber-security provisions included in the revised language and the one chemical security related provision (Pakistani IED precursors) that I previously reported on has been removed. The three cyber-security provisions are (links to previous discussion provided):

• §911 Harmful interference to Department of Defense Global Positioning System (it includes the stronger House language prohibiting the LightSquared deployment);

• §953 Strategy to acquire capabilities to detect previously unknown cyber-attacks; and

• §1090 Cybersecurity collaboration between the Department of Defense and the Department of Homeland Security

There will be no further changes to the bill (besides the inevitable technical correction) and it will almost certainly pass in both the House and Senate this week.

Congressional Hearings – Week of 12-12-11

Both the Senate and House will be working this week waiting to see what the leadership comes up with as far as compromise on the spending bill for the rest of the government. With a Friday deadline once again approaching it is always possible that another short term CR will be passed. The DOD authorization bill conference report is also expected this week. With all of that waiting going on there is only one committee hearing currently scheduled for this week that will be of interest to the chemical safety community, a Senate hearing on transportation issues.

HAZMAT Transportation

The Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee will be holding an executive session (markup/final action) on Wednesday on four transportation related bills. Two of those bills will be of particular interest to the chemical safety and transportation communities;

• S 1950, the Commercial Motor Vehicle Safety Enhancement Act of 2011; and

• S 1952, the Hazardous Materials Transportation Safety Improvement Act of 2011.

Both bills were introduced last week, but there are currently no publicly available copies of the bill for review. Hopefully the GPO will have them available later today or tomorrow as there could be lots of interesting things in these two bills crafted by Sen. Lautenberg and co-sponsored by Chairman Rockefeller.

Pipeline Safety Bill

The House Rules Committee web site and the Majority Leader’s web site both indicate that HR 2845, Pipeline Safety, Regulatory Certainty, and Job Creation Act of 2011, will be brought to the Floor this week to be considered ‘under the suspension of rules’. This procedure limits the amount of debate and prohibits amendments to the bill. It also requires a larger number of votes to pass the measure so it is reserved for relatively non-controversial bills. It is also an indicator that the leadership expects the bill to pass easily.

It is scheduled to be considered on Monday, though a vote, if a recorded vote is demanded (likely), could be postponed until Tuesday.

NOTE: This is not the pipeline safety bill that I have been following closely in this blog (HR 2937). I'll have more info on this bill in a later post.

DOD Authorization

The House-Senate Conference Committee was working on HR 1540, National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2012, last week. According to the Majority Leader’s web site the bill will be brought to the Floor later this week. This will be considered under a rule, but Rules Committee does not yet have a hearing scheduled on that Rule nor has the conference report been printed. Both are likely to happen on Tuesday with floor action on Wednesday or Thursday. It will be a closed rule with very limited debate. Bipartisan support is expected.

S 1867 Becomes HR 1540

I missed this last Friday when I was looking at the Congressional Record for Thursday. After passing S 1867, the Senate also passed HR 1540, the House passed version of the DOD authorization bill. The passage of HR 1540 was one of those political games that Congress frequently plays; the Senate substituted the language of the just passed S 1867 for the language of the House version of the bill. BTW: no vote, no debate, just maneuvering.

Typically the Senate does this before the debate on a bill starts, but it achieves the same end. HR 1540 will go to Conference unless the House agrees to accept the Senate version of the bill. He House will take this up on the floor tomorrow. According to the Majority Leader's web site it is listed as “Motion to go to Conference on H.R. 1540” so it certainly looks like this will go to Conference. The floor action in the House will go quick tomorrow.

The new Senate language for HR 1540 was published in yesterday’s Congressional Record. It is also available on the GPO site. We’ll have to wait to see what comes out of the Conference Committee.

HR 1540 Passes in House

This afternoon the House passed HR 1540, the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2012 by a recorded vote of 322 to 96; a margin that must be counted as ‘bipartisan’. The bill was heavily amended, so the bill looks quite different than when it was approved by the House Armed Services Committee.

Amendment Results

I have been watching two particular amendments that could be of potential interest to the chemical security community; one dealing with cyber security, and the other dealing with GPS interference. Yesterday the Langevin (D, RI) cyber security amendment failed on voice vote and that ‘failure’ was confirmed this afternoon by a recorded vote of 172 to 246. While this isn’t technically the death of HR 1136 (the bill from which this amendment was extracted as nearly whole cloth), the vote almost ensures that no committee will take any time considering this legislation.

The Turner (R, OH) amendment was grouped into an ‘en bloc’ amendment with 10 other less than controversial amendments for a single period of debate and a single vote. It was the sixth such en bloc amendment considered today in an effort to speed up the processing of this bill on the House Floor. As is typical with en bloc amendments this passed by a voice vote.

Senate Action

Interestingly this bill is being sent to the Senate on the same day that the Government Printing Office (GPO) finally got around to printing a similar bill produced by the Senate Armed Services Committee; S 981, the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2012. Typically we would expect the Senate to substitute the language of S 981 for the House passed language of HR 1540. The differences would then get worked out in Conference.

I haven’t had a chance to peruse S 981 yet, but rest assured I’ll be looking for cyber security language in that bill.

First House Floor Vote on Cyber Security

Last night, during the debate on HR 1540, the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2012, one of the measures that was debated and voted upon was an amendment offered by Rep. Langevin (D, RI) that specifically dealt with cyber security issues; making it the first time this session that the whole House has taken a vote on a cyber security measure.

HR 1136

Looking at the actual language for Amendment #49, found in House Report 112-88 (the report accompanying H. Res 276, the rule governing the debate of HR 1540), it turns out that this ‘Amendment’ was actually a virtual copy of HR 1136, the Executive Cyberspace Coordination Act of 2011, a bill introduced by Langevin back in March. As I noted in a blog about the bill when it was introduced, this bill was essentially an IT security bill dealing mainly with Federal cyber security. There was a section on ‘critical infrastructure’ that actually mentioned SCADA systems, but there were no real ICS cybersecurity requirements.

After the authorized 10 minutes of debate on the amendment the House voted it down on a voice vote. A recorded vote was ‘demanded’ by Rep. Langevin. As of 11:00 pm EDT last night that vote had not yet occurred. In bills with these lengthy debates and amendment processes (152 amendments were offered on this bill) the House pulls a bunch of these recorded votes together to minimize the time the Members actually have to spend on the floor of the House. A vote will be held sometime today.

This vote on a virtual copy of HR 1136 does not mean that this bill is legally dead. It is technically possible that the bill could still wend its way through the committee review and voting process to make its way back to the floor of the House. Possible but unlikely, otherwise Langevin would not have taken this to the floor as an amendment to a virtually unrelated bill; controversial amendments like this seldom pass as an amendment.

GPS Interference

Earlier this week in a blog posting about this bill I discussed the provisions of HR 1540 dealing with the GPS interference controversy. In that I dismissed an amendment by Rep. Turner (R, OH) modifying provisions of §911 of the bill dealing with the FCC’s approval of the new cell phone service by LightSpeed. That was based upon the summary of the amendment that described it as a ‘Sense of Congress’ measure. The actual amendment was published in the House Rules Committee report and it is a tad bit more potent than a ‘Sense of Congress’ measure.

The language of the Turner Amendment would actually prohibit the FCC from providing final approval of the LightSpeed license “until the Commission has resolved concerns of widespread harmful interference by such commercial terrestrial operations to the Global Positioning System devices of the Department of Defense.” {§911(a)}. This would be a much more effective response than what I had described.

Unfortunately, this still does not address the potential for interference with GPS timing signals used by some control system components. No one has actually reported interference problems with the timing signals, but I have found no reports that anyone has bothered testing this issue.

Turner’s amendment is #149 in the list of amendments to be debated on the floor during the consideration of this bill, so it will be one of the last ones considered. It will probably come up for a vote late this evening. It will be interesting to see how this vote turns out.

Continued Debate

I don’t know how long the House continued their debate of this bill last night. They will be back at it again when the come back to work today. A final vote on the bill will certainly be held before the House goes home for the long Memorial Day Weekend. The final version of the bill will almost certainly pass, probably with bipartisan support.

HR 1540 and Cybersecurity

In an earlier blog on the introduction of HR 1540, the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2012 I mentioned that I saw no cyber security provisions but thought that that would change as this moved through the committee process. I was not completely wrong; I have found one fairly obscure reference to cyber security in the Committee Report on HR 1540.

In one of the reporting requirements that show up in committee reports but not the actual legislation, the House Armed Services Committee “directs the Secretary of Defense to conduct a study on the threat to the readiness of military installations from possible cyber attacks on civilian critical infrastructure” (pg 199). The requirement includes the inevitable ‘Report to Congress’ on the results and potential mitigation efforts.

The prior discussion makes it fairly clear that the Committee was concerned about potential attacks on local utilities supporting military bases. Interestingly the discussion makes no specific reference to Stateside facilities, so presumably it would also require DOD to look at potential affects on bases in foreign countries.

I am more than a little disappointed that the Committee has taken such a narrow view of the definition of ‘critical infrastructure’ in mandating this study. It fails to note that many military bases are served by fuel pipelines that could be subject to cyber attacks. Additionally, I would bet that there are military facilities that are located in areas that could be affected by attacks on high-risk chemical facilities and chemical facilities located in port areas covered by MTSA.

Interestingly, the chemical facilities that have the lightest federal security mandate, water treatment facilities, could be covered under this mandated report as long as they provide water service to a DOD facility. It would be interesting to see if there would be any mention of potential cyber attacks that could result in the release of chlorine gas from these facilities as a possible source of danger to military facilities.

Unfortunately we will never see this report. These reports to Congress usually get buried in any case, but this one will certainly be classified, so public release will be even less likely. It would have been nice to see a requirement for an unclassified summary to be included with this report, but Congress has never been keen on sharing their information with the public.

More on GPS Interference

Yesterday while I was perusing the House Armed Services Committee’s report on HR 1540 looking for cyber security related provisions, I came across an interesting discussion (pgs 182-4) about the GPS interference that I reported on this weekend. The discussion is providing a Committee explanation of a provision of the revised version of HR 1540 that is currently being considered by the House Rules Committee in drafting its rule for the consideration of the bill on the floor of the House this week.

The military and a number of other agencies of the Federal government have expressed some concerns about the FCC’s potential approval of the new cell phone service license being sought by LightSpeed. The provision in HR 1540 (§911, Title IX, Subtitle B) would require DOD to report to Congress when it determines that a ‘commercial communications service’ will cause or is causing widespread ‘harmful interference’ with the GPS receivers of DOD. Presumably, then the Congress would react to stop that interference.

According to this discussion the FCC gave conditional approval to LightSpeed in January of this year pending final resolution of the ‘interference’ issue. It also notes that the FCC is scheduled to make their final determination on June 15th. There is a chance that this bill could become law before that date, but it wouldn’t have any direct effect on the FCC’s decision even if it did, it would just require DOD to prepare a report to Congress.

It is disappointing that the discussion says nothing about the potential affect of this interference with control systems. It does mention, in passing, that there is the potential for interference with timing services. That is the portion of this issue that could be of concern to some control systems engineers and is lumped in with “myriad commercial applications”.(pg 183) in the list of areas potentially affected.

One of the amendments being considered by the Rules Committee would take this issue one very small step forward. Rep. Turner (R, OH) has offered an amendment (#76) to HR 1540 that express the ‘Sense of Congress’ that “any commercial communications that interferes with the Global Positioning System (GPS) should not receive final authorization by the Federal Communications Commission until the potential interference with GPS is resolved”. A ‘Sense of Congress’ resolution has no legal effect on Federal agencies.

We’ll have to wait and see if this amendment (as effective as it is) makes it to the short list of amendments that the Rules Committee will allow to be considered during the floor debate. The Rule Committee hearing from yesterday evening is continuing this afternoon.

HR 1540 Introduced – DOD FY 2012 Appropriations

Yesterday the GPO finally made available a copy of HR 1540, the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2012. The bill was introduced by Rep. McKeon on April 14th and outlines the Defense Department programs that would be funded for the next fiscal year.

Interestingly, there is no specific mention of cyber defense programs in this bill. The spending numbers proposed in this legislation do not get down to the program level so the lack of spending numbers is not unusual. Because of the discussion about the role of the military in cyber defense, I would have expected to see some mention of the programs in the bill.

I do expect that the issue will be addressed in the hearings and final committee report on this bill.