Bills Introduced – 01-03-19

Yesterday, the first day of the 116^th Congress, with both the House and Senate in Washington there were 302 bills introduced. Of those, seven will probably receive further coverage on this blog:

HR 21 Making appropriations for the fiscal year ending September 30, 2019, and for other purposes. Rep. Lowey, Nita M. [D-NY-17]

HR 43 To require the Secretary of Homeland Security to submit a report on cyber vulnerability disclosures, and for other purposes. Rep. Jackson Lee, Sheila [D-TX-18]

HR 52 To require a report and assessment regarding Department of Homeland Security responses to terrorist threats to Federal elections, and for other purposes. Rep. Jackson Lee, Sheila [D-TX-18] 

HR 57 To require the Secretary of Homeland Security to conduct a study on the feasibility of establishing a Civilian Cyber Defense National Resource in the Department of Homeland Security. Rep. Jackson Lee, Sheila [D-TX-18] 

HR 70 To abolish the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, and for other purposes. Rep. Biggs, Andy [R-AZ-5]

HJ Res 1 Making further continuing appropriations for the Department of Homeland Security for fiscal year 2019, and for other purposes. Rep. Lowey, Nita M. [D-NY-17]

S 21 A bill making continuing appropriations for Coast Guard pay in the event an appropriations act expires prior to the enactment of a new appropriations act. Sen. Thune, John [R-SD]

NOTE: All bills introduced in the 115^th Congress are now dead. A bunch of them will be reintroduced in the coming days as the authors try to get work completed on the bills, but most of them will die a silent death. There may be some action in the House on bills that were introduced by Democrats last session, but few of those will be taken up by the Senate if they are passed in the House.

FY 2019 Spending

The House passed the two of these bills yesterday, HR 21 and HJ Res 1, that would, if passed by Senate and signed by the President, would take care of the current funding issue that has about a quarter of the government either shutdown or working on the hope for funding.

HR 21 would provide funding for Interior, Financial Services, Agriculture, Transportation, HUD, Commerce, Justice, Science and State through the end of the fiscal year. Details of that funding are not currently available as the House passed the bill on a near party-line vote (241-190) without any text of the bill being available.

HJ Res 1 is a continuing resolution providing for short-term spending for the Department of Homeland Security. Again, this was passed by a near party-line vote (239-192) without any text of the bill being available. So, we do not currently know how long the extension would be for (sometime in February?) or if the DHS CR will provide a program extension for the Chemical Facility Anti-Terrorism Standards (CFATS) (probably with the same date as the CR).

It looks like the new Democratic House Leadership decided to split the spending issue into two parts to get most of the funding moving while leaving the most contentious issues (the ‘wall’ and immigration reform) to be resolved separately. According to news reports that does not appear to be a successful move, but we will have to wait and see.

CFATS Program Extension

I was surprised to not see a CFATS bill introduced in either House. I expected Sen. Johnson (R,WI) to reintroduce S 3405 given the fuss he made about the bill last November. On the House side I did (do) not expect to see HR 6992 introduced as it had no support from anyone of consequence in the House Homeland Security Committee from either party.

Depending on the wording of any CFATS extension in HR 21 (low probability of mention) or HJ Res 1 (probably short term) I would expect to see a bill similar to HR 7188 that would formally extend the CFATS program for a year to give the new leadership at Homeland Security and the Energy and Commerce Committees to craft a longer term extension of the bill. If Democrats continue to form on CFATS, that would include formal whistleblower protections, worker involvement language, emergency response planning requirements and possibly some sort of inherently safer technology language. All of these would cause problems with Johnson and the Republicans in the Senate. Because of these conflicts I suspect that we will return to year-by-year extensions until one of the two parties gains controls of both houses of Congress.

Congressional Bills Introduced 01-22-13

No, I haven’t forgotten my intent to report briefly on interesting bills as they are introduced. There just hasn’t been anything of interest until today. The first day that the Senate has been allowed to introduce bills gives us what will probably be the cybersecurity bill for consideration in that body.

Cybersecurity Legislation

S 21, A bill to secure the United States against cyber attack [that’s not the final title; we won’t know that until the bill is published], was introduced by Sen. Rockefeller (D,WV). It will be a couple of days before we will see an actual copy of the bill to be sure what it contains, but I suspect that it will be based upon something like S 3414 from last session. It will be interesting to see what changes will have been made to make it easier to get the bill to the floor of the Senate. That’s further down the road; I’m sure we will be seeing some hearings before we get there.

It is strange to look at the list of co-sponsors to the bill and not see the names Lieberman or Collins on the list. It will be interesting to see who becomes the cybersecurity broker in the Senate now that that team is no longer around.

Disappointing Bill Introductions

The 113^th Congress seems to be going a little slow in introducing legislation. The Senate only introduced 53 bills on their opening day and the House is only up to HR 350 as of yesterday. It just doesn’t seem as if their heart is in it.

Cybersecurity Legislation in the Senate

Tuesday was the first day for legislation to be introduced in the Senate for the 112th Congress and 187 bills were introduced. This produces the typical backlog for the printing process, but based on the basic information available on Thomas.LOC.gov there were only two bills that might be of interest to the chemical security community; S 21 and S 158. The later is a reauthorization of the Surface Transportation Board (STB) and may contain provisions on rail shipments of TIH chemicals. The former may be the cybersecurity jackpot legislation for this session.

Interestingly this bill was introduced by Sen. Reid (D, NV); that would make the bill important enough. More important though is the fact that both Sen. Rockefeller (D, WV) and Lieberman (I, CT) are co-sponsors of the bill. They had competing versions of cybersecurity legislation last session and the participation of these three important Senators (and five other senior Democrats) probably indicate that this is a compromise version of the various bills from the last session.

The title of the bill is currently an unwieldy description of its general intent: “A bill to secure the United States against cyber attack, to enhance American competitiveness and create jobs in the information technology industry, and to protect the identities and sensitive information of American citizens and businesses”. No way to tell if it addresses control system security, but I would suspect that there will be provisions that will have some affect on the chemical security community.

I’ll be watching for this to be printed.