Review – Committee Hearings – Week of 10-19-25

This week, with the Senate in Washington and the House sitting quietly on the sidelines, there is a relatively lite hearing schedule. There is one markup hearing of note and a chemical safety hearing.

Markup Hearings

On Tuesday, the Senate Commerce, Science, and Technology Committee will hold a business meeting that will consider three nominations and eight pieces of legislation, with one of particular interest here: S 2975, the PIPELINE Safety Act of 2025.

Chemical Safety

On Thursday, the Subcommittee on EPW Chemical Safety, Waste Management, Environmental Justice, and Regulatory Oversight of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee will hold a hearing on “Examining the Beneficial Use and Regulation of Chemicals”.

 

For more information on these hearings, see my article at CFSN Detailed Analysis - https://patrickcoyle.substack.com/p/committee-hearings-week-of-10-19 - subscription required.

Review - Bills Introduced – 10-6-25

Yesterday, with the Senate in Washington and the House meeting in proforma session, there were 25 bills introduced. One of the bills may receive additional coverage in this blog:

S 2975 A bill to amend title 49, United States Code, to enhance the safety of pipeline transportation, and for other purposes. Cruz, Ted [Sen.-R-TX].

This is the ‘S XXXX’ bill that I mentioned yesterday. Tomorrow the Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee will hold a business meeting that includes markups of seven bills, including S 2975.

 

For more information on these bills, including legislative history for similar bills in the 118^th Congress, including a mention in passing of a bill that would stop income tax during funding fiasco, see my article at CFSN Detailed Analysis - https://patrickcoyle.substack.com/p/bills-introduced-10-6-25 - subscription required.

Senate Consideration of HR 5895 – FY 2019 EWR Spending

The Senate took up debate on HR 5895, the Energy and Water Development and Related Agencies (EWR) Appropriations Act earlier this week. The bill, as passed in the House, also included language from the Legislative Branch, and Military Construction and Veterans Affairs spending bills.

Senate Amendments

Senators proposed about 240 amendments to the bill over a period of four days. Only two of those amendments will be of specific interest to readers of this blog; SA 2910 (pg S3985) from Sen. Shelby (R,AL) and SA 2983 (pg S4053) from Sen. Bennet (D,CO)

Shelby’s amendment is this substitute language for the Senate version of the bill. The EWR language in the amendment comes from S 2975. Senate language from the Legislative Branch, and Military Construction and Veterans Affairs spending bills was also included.

Bennet’s amendment would require the DOE and DOD to conduct an evaluation of military facilities to determine “at which it would be cost-effective to establish a partnership with community colleges, institutions of higher education, and the private sector to train veterans and members of the Armed Forces transitioning to civilian life to enter the cybersecurity, energy, and artificial intelligence workforces”. A report to Congress would be required and no funding is provided.

Moving Forward

After considering (and mostly adopting) a large number of amendments, the Senate finally adopted the Shelby substitute language on Thursday. The Bennet amendment was not considered.

The Senate is scheduled to conduct their final vote on the bill Monday evening.

House Passes HR 5895 – FY 2019 EWR Spending

Today the House completed consideration of HR 5895, the Energy and Water Development and Related Agencies (EWR) Appropriations Act, 2019. The House passed the bill by a somewhat bipartisan vote of 235 to 179 (23 Democrats voting AYE and 16 Republicans voting NAY). The version of the bill debated, amended and passed by the House included language from HR 5894, and HR 5786; essentially combining three of the twelve annual spending bills.

As I have noted earlier, the Senate will not actually take up the language passed in the House today. Instead they will substitute the language from S 2975 that was recently reported in the Senate and amend that language. Then a conference committee will be formed to work out a compromise between the two versions of the bill.

If this process can move forward for this bill, then there is a chance that for the first time in recent history we may have spending bills to the President before the end of the fiscal year ends and will not need a series of continuing resolutions leading to a post-election omnibus bill. If this bill does not move forward (and it is the least controversial of the spending bills) then we will again be forced to hold our collective breaths again, waiting to see if intermediate compromises can be worked out to get interim funding approved.

S 2975 Introduced – FY 2019 EWR Spending Bill

Last month Sen. Alexander introduced S 2975, the Energy and Water Development and Related Agencies Appropriations Act, 2019. Like HR 5895, the bill’s counterpart in the House, S 2975 includes the “Cybersecurity, Energy Security, and Emergency Response” (CESER) reporting category. This version, however, includes a much larger amount of spending on that category; $260 million vs $146 million.

CESER

Since this is a new spending category, it is clear that the two appropriations committees have different ideas on what should be included in the category. The House version only shows three line items; cybersecurity for energy delivery systems, infrastructure security and energy restoration, and program direction. The Senate Report shows those same categories plus (pg 117) from the ‘old’ Electricity Delivery category:

• Transmission reliability;

• Resilient distribution systems;

• Energy storage;

• Transformer resilience and advanced components; and

• Transmission permitting and technical assistance;

The Senate allocation of funds for each of the line items is significantly less than provided in the House bill. For example, the ‘cybersecurity for energy delivery systems’ line item draws only $80.8 million in S 2975 versus $116.5 million in HR 5895. The only reason that the CESER funding is higher is because of the additional line items.

There is a little more cybersecurity detail in the comments portion of the Senate report. For instance, they note that the “Committee recommends $10,000,000 for the DarkNet project to explore opportunities for getting the Nation’s critical infrastructure off the Internet and shielding the Nation’s electricity infrastructure from disruptive cyber penetration” (pg 78).

There is also an interesting comment about grid security research. The Report notes (pgs 80-1):

“The Committee supports the establishment of an EMP/GMD testing facility that can, without posing risk to the existing grid, replicate EMP/GMD events and cyber-attacks on a real-world configuration of critical grid components and systems. Such a facility is necessary to expose entire substations, including devices such as Extra High Voltage Transformers and subsystem components, to the combined effects of the complete composite EMP Waveform for early stage research and development, as well as testing and validation purposes at both the transmission and distribution levels.”

Moving Forward

This bill was reported favorably by Committee with just one vote in opposition. This type of bipartisan support is necessary for a bill this important to move forward to the floor of the Senate. Actually, the Senate will probably not take up this bill. Usually the Senate takes up the House version of the bill (HR 5895 in this case) and immediately substitutes the language from this bill for the House passed language.

The two different versions of the bill that come out of this process will be cleaned up by a conference committee. One of the important things coming out of this year’s committee will be a determination of which line item will end up being reported under the CESER heading in subsequent years.

Bills Introduced – 05-24-18

Yesterday, with both the House and Senate preparing to leave Washington for their long Memorial Day Weekend, there were 75 bills introduced. Of these, four bills may be of specific interest to readers of this blog:

HR 5952 Making appropriations for the Departments of Commerce and Justice, Science, and Related Agencies for the fiscal year ending September 30, 2019, and for other purposes. Rep. Culberson, John Abney [R-TX-7]

HR 5961 Making appropriations for Agriculture, Rural Development, Food and Drug Administration, and Related Agencies programs for the fiscal year ending September 30, 2019, and for other purposes. Rep. Aderholt, Robert B. [R-AL-4]

S 2975 An original bill making appropriations for energy and water development and related agencies for the fiscal year ending September 30, 2019, and for other purposes. Sen. Alexander, Lamar [R-TN]

S 2976 An original bill making appropriations for Agriculture, Rural Development, Food and Drug Administration, and Related Agencies programs for the fiscal year ending September 30, 2019, and for other purposes. Sen. Hoeven, John [R-ND]