Pipeline Markup Hearing Added – 9-17-25

This afternoon the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee added a markup hearing for this week. The Wednesday hearing will consider three bills; including, HR 5301, the Pipeline Efficiency and Safety (PIPES) Act of 2025. The hearing will consider substitute language for each of the bills. The substitute language for HR 5301 can be found here. 

Another Markup Hearing – 9-3-25

This afternoon, the House added another markup hearing to the schedule for this week. Tomorrow the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee will hold a business meeting tomorrow to consider three items. One of those items is of interest here: HR 5061, the Counter-UAS Authority Security, Safety, and Reauthorization Act of 2025. The Committee plans to consider substitute language for that bill.

cUAS Hearing Added to House Schedule – 2-6-25

Today, the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee added a hearing for tomorrow on “Counter-Unmanned Aircraft Systems”. The Aviation Subcommittee will hear testimony from:

Catherine Cahill, The Alaska Center for UAS Integration (ACUASI),

Lisa Ellman, Commercial Drone Alliance, and

Chris McLaughlin, Dallas Fort Worth International Airport

Would have been nice to include someone from the FAA to discuss the legal limitations on cUAS activities. Similarly, hearing from one of the companies that develops cUAS systems would also have been helpful, balanced of course by a domestic UAS manufacturer. Maybe in a future hearing.

Added Spending Bill Hearing – 6-14-23

The House Appropriations Committee announced this evening that it would hold a mark up hearing for the FY24 Agriculture, Rural Development, Food and Drug Administration (ARD) on Wednesday. The announcement includes links to the full Committee draft language for the bill and the FY 2024 Suballocation of the Budget Allocations for Agriculture, DHS, Legislative Branch, and Military Construction. The suballocation was based on the fiscal year 2024 discretionary spending limit included in the Limit, Save, Grow Act of 2023 (H.R. 2811), not the spending limits set forth in the debt limit bill.

Hearing Tomorrow to Look at TSA

The Transportation and Maritime Security Subcommittee of the House Homeland Security Committee announced this morning that they would be holding a hearing tomorrow on “The State of the Transportation Security Administration”. The sole witness is Administrator David Pekoske. While this is not billed as a cybersecurity hearing, I would be very surprised if both the testimony and the questions from the Subcommittee members do not touch on the pipeline and surface transportation cybersecurity directives that have been issued by the TSA over the last year.

 

Public Input to Congressional Hearings

One of the things that I do on a routine basis is to look at a variety of Congressional web sites to keep track of upcoming hearings and votes. While Congress is on an extended recess, I do this much less frequently because changes do still occur. The latest change of note is a change in the format of the House Energy and Commerce Committee web site. Of particular interest is the addition of a public comment feature on the Hearing pages (see for example).

Public Comments – Old Style

Now people have always been able to get information entered into the record by sending it to a friendly congresscritter. Of course, if that critter didn’t agree with the point of view of the personal submission it wasn’t likely to get into the record. And, of course, money talks, so the big lobbying organizations were more likely to get their letters entered into the record than was JQ Public.

The down side of that type of submission has always been that it is seldom part of the ‘public record’. Well officially it is there and available if you dig hard enough, but I have never seen any of these letters published on a congressional hearing web page; that is the real public record even though it may not legally qualify as such.

The New Public Comment Form

What the folks at Energy and Commerce have done is to add the same type of public comment tool that you see on many web sites now days. It includes a place for name (no indication if anonymous comments will take), email address (not to be made public?), web site address (if you have such a thing), and a block for your comments. There is no word about how long the comment may be.

More importantly, there is no indication if comments filed via this tool will become part of the ‘real public record’ or will be just shunted to a file cabinet somewhere, to be read only by Committee Staffers tabulating points of view.

Since I saw this form first on the web site for an upcoming hearing about the CFATS program {The Chemical Facility Anti-Terrorism Standards Program – A Progress Report; September 11^th, 2012}, I thought that I would post a comment to see what happens. So the next section contains the text of the comment that I will be submitting. We’ll see how it shows up in the ‘record’.

CFATS SSP Comments

Since the Committee will be looking at the progress of the CFATS program, here are some of points that I would like to see addressed by the Committee and the witnesses at the hearing. They all are pertinent to the lack of progress on the authorization of Site Security Plans.

1. Since Congress, in its §550 program authorization, has forbidden DHS from establishing specific criteria that facilities must implement to have their security plans authorized, ISCD is not legally able to tell facilities what security measures should be implemented to achieve authorization. How, then, does ISCD communicate deficiencies in the Site Security Plan to owners so that they might make appropriate corrections to their plans?
2. ISCD has stated on a number of occasions that part of the delay in authorizing SSPs has been an inadequate amount of details in the submissions made via the SSP tool in CSAT. This would seem to indicate that the SSP tool was lacking in the information that it was requesting, either in specificity about particular areas or by not asking the appropriate questions. Why hasn’t the SSP tool been modified to correct those deficiencies?
3. Since alternative security plans must still meet the 18 risk-based performance standards set out in the CFATS regulations (6 CFR 27.230) no one has explained how a facility might gain an advantage by using an ASP. Did Congress intend for the certification authorities supporting security programs developed, for example, by the American Chemistry Council, to be used as SSP authorizations instead of having ISCD perform the necessary SSP reviews?
4. Early in the CFATS process DHS established the Chemical Facility Security Academy as a training venue for its Chemical Facility Security Inspectors. The Anderson-Wulf memo apparently implies that there is no current training program for CFSI. Why was the CFSA discontinued?

DHS Budget Hearing 2-24-10

I missed a chance to watch the first two budget hearings ‘live’ on the web yesterday and today because of other commitments. This evening was the first chance that I had to watch either of the two Senate hearings (Homeland Security yesterday and Appropriations today). I flipped a coin and watched the webcast of Sen. Byrd’s (D, WV) Homeland Security Subcommittee questioning Secretary Napolitano. While many of the questions were pointed or demanding, it was generally a friendly exchange. As I expected with the Secretary as the sole witness, there was very little mention of CFATS specifically or chemical security issues in general. While I half expected (hoped) someone would ask about the one year CFATS authorization extension; that question was never asked. The only chemical security related question came in the second round of questions asked by Sen. Byrd. Safety vs Security Byrd mentioned the recent fatal chemical accident at the Dow facility in Belle, WV where first responders (an ambulance crew) were not able to get any information about the accident (chemicals involved, extent of the leak, chemical protection requirements) until they had actually arrived at the scene. He noted that it reminded him of last years hearing when he described another chemical incident in West Virginia and he had asked Secretary Napolitano then what DHS was doing to make operations at high-risk chemical facilities safer. He asked the same question today. This year the Secretary was able to reply that the CFATS implementation was rolling along and would take care of the security issues. It wouldn’t have been a politically sound move for her to tell the SENIOR Senator that DHS is not really a safety organization it is a security organization, that the Senator’s particular question should be addressed to OSHA or EPA. Actually, to be fair to Sen. Byrd, there are some questions asked in the SSP questionnaire that kind of obliquely address the issue of communications with first responders. In a blog from last spring I noted that there were a number of questions dealing with first responder capabilities that could only be addressed by talking with the appropriate emergency response agencies. But, this is all the closer CFATS gets to requiring high-risk chemical facilities to provide information to those response agencies. Of course, Chairman Byrd’s hammer is control of the budget pathway for DHS. This tends to make many things look like security issues; when the only tool you have is a hammer many things begin to look like a nail. Too bad he doesn’t have the EPA Administrator or the Labor Department Secretary to call to task for the situation; but they are covered by other sub-committees.

Hopefully I will get to the Homeland Security hearing webcast tomorrow morning. There is probably a better chance for getting a CFATS question or two there.