House Passed HR 4364 – FY 2024 Legislative Spending

Yesterday, the House took up HR 4364, the Legislative Branch Appropriations Act, 2024, and passed it by a vote of 214 to 197, four Democrats joining the Republicans in passing the bill. No amendments were considered.

I do not normally cover this legislation, but the Committee Report (pg 19) did include a building control system security mention, so this technically is of ICS security interest.

When the Senate takes up this bill, they will first substitute the language from S 2302 for the House language, before they consider the bill. Neither that bill or its associated Report contain cybersecurity language.

Committee Hearings – Week of 10-29-23

This week, with both the House and Senate in Washington, there is a very light hearing schedule. There is one hearing in the Senate of potential interest on threats to the Homeland.

Homeland Security

On Tuesday, the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affair Committee will hold a hearing on “Threats to the Homeland”. The witness list includes:

• Alejandro N. Mayorkas, DHS, and

• Christopher A. Wray, FBI,

• Christine Abizaid, Director of National Intelligence

With these witnesses, this will be a high-level overview of the potential threats facing the US. Their will be some level of discussion about cybersecurity issues. I would not be surprised to hear at least one question from Committee members about the effects of the termination of the CFATS program.

On the Floor

This is going to be a busy week for spending bills. The Senate will continue to work on amendments to HR 4366, the MilCon spending bill. The House is currently scheduled to take up three spending bills this week:

HR 4364 – Legislative Branch Appropriations Act, 2024,

HR 4821 – Department of the Interior, Environment, and Related Agencies (IER) Appropriations Act, and

HR 4820 – Transportation, Housing and Urban Development, and Related Agencies (THUD) Appropriations Act, 2024

With a short work week (just three-days; Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday) the House will have to fly through these bills, probably with a number of en bloc amendment considerations. Friday sessions tend to end early so that members can catch flights home. It will be interesting to see what happens this coming Friday.

It was an interesting move by the leadership to take up HR 4820. The Senate is already considering the THUD spending in their substitute language for HR 4366. While they could have let this one slide in order to get spending bills complete (a priority for Republicans this year), passing this bill will provide a list of provisions that could be included in the conference report on HR 4366.

Review - Rules Committee to Look at HR 4394 – FY 2024 EWR Spending

The House Rules Committee will hold a rule hearing this afternoon that would include HR 4394, the Energy and Water Development and Related Agencies [EWR] Appropriations Act, 2024. The deadline for submitting amendments for the Committee to consider including in the Rule was last Friday, 122 amendments have been submitted.

Three of the 122 amendments may be of specific interest here:

#	Version	Author
19	Version 1	Hudson (NC)
28	Version 1	Fallon (TX)
115	Version 1	Walberg (MI) , Latta (OH)

Moving Forward

The Rules Committee meets at 4:00 pm EDT. Barring some drama from the three Republican 11 representatives on the Committee, a rule will be formulated for this and HR 4364, the Legislative Branch spending bill. The House will begin taking up the two bills on Tuesday.

Commentary

The House was scheduled to start a two-week District Work Period. Normally, this would be a break from Washington while the two appropriations committees started work on an omnibus spending bill. It appears that McCarthy still intends on attempting to pass standalone bills. Between the time the Senate needs to act on these bills and the individual conference committees needed to reconcile the House an Senate versions, this will take up every bit of the time to the new November 17^th deadline.

 

For more information about the upcoming meeting, including the details of the three amendments, see my article at CFSN Detailed Analysis - https://patrickcoyle.substack.com/p/rules-committee-to-look-at-hr-4394 - subscription required.

HR 4364 Introduced – FY 2024 Legislative Branch Spending

Back in June, Rep Amodei (R,NV) introduced HR 4364, the Legislative Branch Appropriations Act, 2024. At the same time, the House Appropriations Committee published their Report on the bill. While there are a couple of cybersecurity mentions in the bill, they are entirely (and legitimately) focused on protecting the information technology systems used by members of congress. There is one building control system security mention in the Report (pg 19); a $2.1 million listing for “BASnet Cybersecurity Hardware and Network Programming Upgrades”.

Moving Forward

The House Rules Committee will be meeting on Monday afternoon to formulate the rule for the consideration of this bill, along with HR 4394 [removed from paywall], the Energy and Water Development and Related Agencies [EWR] Appropriations Act, 2024. To date, only one amendment has been proposed for the Committee’s consideration. This bill normally gets substantial bipartisan support and this year should be no different.

Commentary

Okay, I have to mention this because it is video surveillance related. The one amendment proposed to the House Rules Committee was submitted by Rep Massie (R,KY). The amendment reads:

“No funds appropriated in this bill shall be used to allow the department of defense (sic) to install or operate cameras on the Capitol complex.”

Just a tad bit of paranoia showing? Besides if an outside agency (and DOD would not be my first suspect) would use their own funds to install such a camera network (if they did not just hack the current security camera system) and if the capital security folks were compromised sufficiently to allow such installation, it would not take any ‘funding’ from Congress to ‘allow’ the installation. Of course, seeing the poor-quality camera images from Saturday’s FireAlarmGate incident, maybe Congress should get DOD to install their internal surveillance systems. DOD certainly has access to better quality cameras.

Bills Introduced – 6-27-23

Yesterday, with the House meeting in proforma session, there were 37 bills introduced. Six of those bills may receive additional coverage in this blog:

HR 4364 Making appropriations for the Legislative Branch for the fiscal year ending September 30, 2024, and for other purposes. Amodei, Mark E. [Rep.-R-NV-2]

HR 4365 Department of Defense Appropriations Act, 2024 Calvert, Ken [Rep.-R-CA-41]

HR 4366 Military Construction, Veterans Affairs, and Related Agencies Appropriations Act, 2024 Carter, John R. [Rep.-R-TX-31]

HR 4367 Making appropriations for the Department of Homeland Security for the fiscal year ending September 30, 2024, and for other purposes. Joyce, David P. [Rep.-R-OH-14]

HR 4368 Making appropriations for Agriculture, Rural Development, Food and Drug Administration, and Related Agencies programs for the fiscal year ending September 30, 2024, and for other purposes. Harris, Andy [Rep.-R-MD-1] 

HR 4387 To amend the National Agricultural Research, Extension, and Teaching Policy Act of 1977 to direct the Secretary of Agriculture to establish a program providing for the establishment of Agriculture Cybersecurity Centers, and for other purposes. Nunn, Zachary [Rep.-R-IA-3]

I will be covering HR 4365, HR 4367 and HR 4387.

I will be watching the remaining spending bills for language that specifically cover cybersecurity provisions not dealing with internal agency cybersecurity.

HR 4634 Introduced – TRIA Reauthorization

Last week Rep Waters (D,CA) introduced HR 4634, the Terrorism Risk Insurance Program Reauthorization Act of 2019. The bill is a clean, 10-year reauthorization of the TRIA program.

The bill would amend §108(a) of the Terrorism Risk Insurance Act of 2002 (15 USC 6701 note) by substituting ‘2030’ for ‘2020’ in the termination date. Extensions are also provided for the recoupment provisions of §103(e)(7)(E)(i).

Moving Forward

Waters is the Chair of the House Financial Services Committee to which this bill was assigned for consideration. The bill is currently scheduled for markup in Committee tomorrow. With three Committee Republicans on the list of cosponsors of the bill, it is almost certain that the bill will pass in Committee with substantial bipartisan support. The bill would be likely to be considered in the full House under the suspension of the rules process; limited debate, no floor amendments and a super-majority required for passage.

The last reauthorization of the TRIA program (PL 114-1) passed in both the House and the Senate with bipartisan support.

Commentary

The TRIA was designed to protect insurance companies from severe financial upsets from a major, 9/11 scale terrorist attack. The idea was that without this sort of federal protection that insurance companies would be forced to write their policies with terrorism riders that would disallow policies from paying out for terrorist attacks.

The one thing that Congress ought to consider with this bill is adding language that would specifically allow the TRIA to include a cyber-attack of the same magnitude as intended for physical terrorist attacks. This could be done by modifying the following portions of §102, Definitions:

(1) ACT OF TERRORISM.—

(A) CERTIFICATION.—The term ‘act of terrorism’ means any act that is certified by the Secretary, in consultation with the Secretary of Homeland Security, and the Attorney General of the United States—

(i) to be an act of terrorism;

(ii) to be a violent act, or an act that is dangerous to—

(I) human life;

(II) property; or

(III) infrastructure; or

(iii) to be a cyber threat (as defined in 6 USC 1501) that threatens and or effects a large scale disruption of:

(I) of power, fuel or water distribution;

(II) food supply;

(III) financial markets; or

(IV) healthcare; and

 (iv) to have resulted in damage within the United States, or outside of the United States in the case of—

(I) an air carrier or vessel described in paragraph (5)(B); or

(II) the premises of a United States mission; and

(v) to have been committed by an individual or individuals, as part of an effort to coerce the civilian population of the United States or to influence the policy or affect the conduct of the United States Government by coercion.