Review - S 1050 Introduced – Bulk Power System Protection

Last month, Sen Scott (R,FL) introduced S 1050, the Protect American Power Infrastructure Act. The bill would prohibit owners of defense critical electrical infrastructure from buying covered electrical power supply equipment from companies owned or controlled by foreign adversaries. No funding is authorized by this legislation.

Moving Forward

Scott is not a member of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee to which this bill was assigned for consideration, nor are his three cosponsors. This means that it is unlikely that there will be sufficient influence to see the bill considered in Committee. I suspect that there would be some industry opposition to this broadly written rule, so if the bill were considered in Committee it is unclear at this point if there would be sufficient support for the bill to be favorably reported. I do not think that there would be enough support to see the bill considered under regular order by the full Senate.

 

For more details about the provisions of the bill, see my article at CFSN Detailed Analysis - https://patrickcoyle.substack.com/p/s-1050-introduced - subscription required.

Bills Introduced – 3-29-23

Yesterday, with both the House and Senate in session, there were 612 bills introduced. That is not a typo or misprint, 612 bills were introduced, 521 [HR 1844 thru HR 2364] of those bills were introduced by Rep Biggs (R,AZ) and five of his fellow Republican bomb-throwers. It looks like they are targeting every major spending category, if that is the case, more bills are coming as a lot of agencies have not yet been mentioned. DHS, DOE and DOD have not yet been targeted, but I do not think that they will be exempted from this attack.

 It will be a while before we see the text of these bills, but I suspect that they are another attempt to gum up the works of the House. It is certainly going to be a problem for the Government Printing Office and the Clerk of the House. I currently only plan on ‘following’ one of these bills, HR 1844, just to see what is going on, but I will mention any future additions to the list.

Of the remaining 91 bills introduced yesterday, there are two that will see additional coverage in this blog:

S 1044 A bill to improve rail safety practices and for other purposes. Fetterman, John [Sen.-D-PA]

S 1050 A bill to secure the bulk-power system in the United States. Scott, Rick [Sen.-R-FL]