Congressional Hearings – Week of 2-10-11

While the focus this week will be on the President’s State of the Union speech, Congressional hearings will be taking place this week. There will be three organizational hearings for committees of interest in the Senate. There will also be three hearings addressing background issues that might impact future hearings and legislation; two in the House and one in the Senate.

Organizational Meetings

Three Senate committees will be holding short (scheduled for 30 minutes in two cases) organizational meetings this week. The committees are:

• Energy and Natural Resources Committee, 2-12-13;

• Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, 2-13-13; and

• Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee, 2-13-13

The most important thing that will come out of these meetings will be the listing of subcommittee chairs and members. This is all decided in advance, but the democratic trappings must be observed.

Sequestration Hearing

The Senate Appropriations Committee will be holding a hearing on Valentine’s Day looking at sequestration issues. There will be much wailing and gnashing of teeth about the devastating effects of sequestration on the Federal government. Among the dire prognosticators will be Secretary Napolitano. I doubt if CFATS or computer security will receive special mention, but you can never tell.

Threats to the Homeland

The House Homeland Security Committee will be holding a hearing on Wednesday that will look at a “New Perspective on Threats to the Homeland”. I expect that we will be hearing more about al Qaeda in Africa and homegrown threats and perhaps cyber-threats. The witnesses will all be from the civilian sector, so the testimony will all be unclassified and more openly opinionated. The witnesses include:

• Admiral Thad Allen, Senior Vice President, Booz Allen Hamilton

• Mr. Shawn Henry, President, CrowdStrike Services

• Mr. Michael Leiter, Senior Counselor, Palantir Technologies

• Hon. David M. Walker, Founder and CEO, The Comeback America Initiative

• Mr. Clark Kent Ervin, Partner, Patton Boggs, LLP

Infrastructure

The House Transportation Committee will also meet on Wednesday. They will be looking at the “Federal Role in America’s Infrastructure”. Topics of interest are sure to include maintaining, replacing and securing that infrastructure. Again, they will all be private sector witnesses, but it looks like they will have a slightly more diverse background. They will include:

• Thomas J. Donohue, President and CEO, U.S. Chamber of Commerce

• Edward G. Rendell, Co-Chair, Building America’s Future, and former Pennsylvania Governor

• Terry O’Sullivan, General President, Laborers’ International Union of North America

On the Floor

There is nothing currently on the agenda for the coming week on the floor of either the House or Senate that looks to be of particular interest to the chemical security or cybersecurity communities. The Collinsville Renewable Energy Promotion Act (HR 316) will be coming up in the House under suspension of the rules so there will be no amendments, little debate, and it will probably pass. This bill restores and extends federal permits to construct two hydropower facilities in Connecticut. Nothing of interest here, you can move along.

DHS IP Stakeholder Input ICR 60-day Notice

Yesterday the DHS Office of Infrastructure Protection published a 60-day notice of their intention to file a new information collection request (ICR) authorizing them to collect information from the infrastructure protection community.

The Office of Infrastructure Protection (OIP) is charged with the coordination of “the overall effort to enhance the protection of the Nation's critical infrastructure and key resources” (CIKR, 75 FR 67989). A key portion of that effort includes the sharing “homeland security information relevant to threats and vulnerabilities in national critical infrastructure and key resources with other Federal departments and agencies, State and local governments, and the private sector in a timely manner”.

While OIP has been working on these coordination and information sharing requirements for a number of years now, there has not been an information feedback mechanism established to allow them to gauge the effectiveness of their efforts. To correct that deficiency they are planning on putting such a feedback system into place. The system envisioned would:

• Provide a baseline for the effectiveness of efforts to improve the security of the Nation's infrastructure;
• Assist in validating and achieving IP's strategic and mission area objectives;
• Obtain a better understanding of the evolving infrastructure protection and resiliency requirements of IP's stakeholders;
• Increase the visibility and awareness of the critical infrastructure protection and resilience mission;
• Initiate the coordination and uniformity of outreach efforts by IP, sector-specific agencies, and other partners engaged in the infrastructure protection mission; and
• Collect feedback regarding event, threat or service-specific activities in a timely fashion.

This ICR would support that effort allowing OIP to establish three separate mechanisms to collect information from the various infrastructure protection stakeholders. Those mechanisms would include:

• Surveys,
• Focus Groups, and
• Interviews

The DHS OIP expects to send out 5,980 surveys that would take about 40 minutes to complete; hold focus group meetings (2 hours each) containing a total of about 260 respondents, and conduct about 60 one-hour interviews as part of their information collection process.

Public comments on the Notice are requested and may be submitted via the Federal eRulemaking Portal (Docket #: DHS-2010-0084). Comments need to be submitted by January 3, 2011.