House Passes HR 244 – FY 2017 Spending

After a nearly party-line vote on the resolution adopting the rule for consideration of  HR 244, the House passed the Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2017 by a bipartisan vote of 309 to 118 (with 103 Republicans voting Nay). The Democratic opposition to the rule vote was an attempt to open consideration of HR 244 to the amendment process on the floor of the House.

Cybersecurity

The rule for consideration of HR 244 also added a new division to HR 244. The new Division N is the Intelligence Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2017. As I have mentioned on a couple of occasions the House has passed various versions of this bill in both the 114^th and 115^th Congress, but the Senate has not taken up any version of this bill.

The version now included in HR 244 does not include any specific cybersecurity provisions beyond a reporting requirement; Sec. 614. Report on cybersecurity threats to seaports of the United States and maritime shipping. I have previously discussed this provision on a couple of occasions, the most recently here.

Moving Forward

The Senate is scheduled to debate HR 244 today and vote on cloture on Friday morning. The current plan for consideration in the Senate does not include a floor amendment process.

HR 244 – DHS Spending

This is the second in a short series of blog posts about HR 244, the Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2017. The initial post in the series was:

HR 244 – FY 2017 Continuing Resolution

This post deals with Division F of the bill, the Department of Homeland Security Appropriations Act, 2017. This Division is generally based upon the earlier appropriations bills from 114^th Congress (HR 5634 and S 3001). As is typical with DHS appropriations bill, the programs of specific interest to readers of this blog do not draw much in the way of specific mention in the actual spending bill (or Division F in this instance). To gather much in the way of information we have to look at the Explanatory Statement for Division F, that effectively updates the Committee reports on the earlier bills.

Cybersecurity

Cybersecurity is now a major reporting category under Title III, Protection, Preparedness, Response, And Recovery, under the National Preparedness and Programs Directorate. Table 1 below lays out the cybersecurity operations and support funding outlined on pages 40-41. The CERT figures probably include ICS-CERT and are part of the NCCIC funding.

	Budget Estimate	Final Bill
Cyber Readiness
NCCIC Operations	$116,168,000	$108,402,000
(CERT)	(94,134,000)	(86,368,000)
NCCIC Planning	92,683,000	88,502,000
(CERT)	(65,788,000)	(61,607,000)
Cyber Infrastructure
Cybersecurity Advisors	13,535,000	12,970,000
Enhanced Cybersecurity Services	16,830,000	16,950,000
Cybersecurity Education and Awareness	7,886,000	14,133,000
Federal Cybersecurity	435,235,000	428,457,000
Total	$682,340,000	$669,414,000

Table 1: Cybersecurity Spending

The budget numbers are from the Trump budget. The breakout from the last Obama budget does not track well with these categories so it is not reasonable to try to compare the two sets of numbers. Even where there are similar category titles (CERT Operations for example) it is not necessarily the same set of budget numbers.

There are no specific control system security related comments in the Explanatory Statement. This is somewhat disappointing since the Senate Report on S3001 that noted (pg 98) increased spending (+$5 Million) on the ICS-CERT ‘Training and Assessment’ account. I suspect that there will still be an increase, but how much of that earlier amount remains to be seen.

Chemical Security

Again, the Chemical Facility Anti-Terrorism Standards (CFATS) program is not large enough to be mentioned in HR 244. It does get a line item in the Explanatory Statement and the numbers do mesh from the previous bills; see Table 2.

	Obama Budget	Trump Budget	Final
Infrastructure Security Compliance	$78,667,000	$76,876,000	$69,557,000

Table 2: Chemical Security

There is no explanation why the negotiators reduced the CFATS program spending to levels below the $72 Million found in both of the earlier House and Senate Reports. Congress has had problems recently with ISCD being able to fill the authorized Chemical Security Inspector slots, but that may not explain this decrease; it may simply be cutting minor programs to provide money’s for increasing other programs.

Surface Transportation

Surface transportation security falls under two different agencies in DHS. The Coast Guard deals with the security of water transportation and its related land based facilities under the Maritime Transportation Security Act (MTSA). There is no mention of that program in either HR 244 or the Explanatory Statement. On the government side this is a very inexpensive program (relatively speaking).

The TSA is responsible for all of the other very limited DHS surface transportation security programs. For purposes of this blog, this includes pipeline, rail and truck transportation security. There is just a single line item to cover all of the TSA surface transportation security spending:

	Obama Budget	Trump Budget	Final
Surface Transportation Security	$122,716,000	$122,716,000	$122,716,000

Table 3: Surface Transportation Security

It really looks like everyone is just marking time on TSA surface transportation operations. Kind of scary looking at the history of attacks on surface transportation across the world.

HR 244 – FY 2017 Continuing Resolution

News reports (here for example) last night indicate that Congressional negotiators had reached agreement on a final spending bill for the remainder of FY 2017. A quick look at the House Rules Committee web page show that HR 244, the Hire Vets Act, is going to be used as the vehicle for the Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2017.

The 1665-page text of the revised bill can be found here. More importantly, for detailed explanations of the provisions of the bill the Rules Committee has provided links to the explanatory statements for each of the Divisions of the bill. The Division of specific interest to readers of this bill (with link to the explanatory statement) are:

• Department of Defense Appropriations ACT, 2017 (Division C)

• Department of Homeland Security Appropriations Act, 2017 (Division F)

• Transportation, Housing and Urban Development, and Related Agencies Appropriations Act, 2017 (Division K)

These explanatory notes contain a huge number of references back to House and Senate comments on the bill. These refer back to 114^th Congress Committee Reports on the original appropriations bills that form the basis for each of the Divisions. I have previously commented on some of those spending bill reports when there were items of specific interest (see the table below), where I have not, I am providing links to the report.

	House	Senate
DOD	HR 5293	S 3000
DHS	HR 5634	S 3001
THAD	HR 5394	S 2844

The Rules Committee is scheduled to meet on HR 244 on Tuesday to develop the rule for the consideration of this bill. Since the negotiations have been so involved, there is no chance that the Rules Committee will provide for anything but a closed rule on this bill. There will be limited debate (probably 1 hour) and no amendments authorized. The final House vote on the bill will probably come Wednesday and the Senate on Thursday. If things go well (an increasingly big IF) this should get to the President well before the Midnight Friday deadline.

More on specific provisions in later posts…. It is a lot of reading.