Bills Introduced – 11-22-19

On Friday with both the House and Senate meeting in pro forma sessions (Congress left Washington a little early for their Thanksgiving holidays) there were 18 bills introduced. One of those bills may receive additional coverage in this blog:

HR 5260 To improve understanding and forecasting of space weather, and for other purposes.  Rep. Perlmutter, Ed [D-CO-7] 

Actually, the term ‘space weather’ covers a broad array of solar related events that are not typically mentioned here. In this blog I would only be interested in space weather events that resulted in geomagnetic storms as those can have potential safety and security consequences, particularly for the electric grid. So this bill will only receive coverage here if it specifically addresses geomagnetic storm forecasting.

Bills Introduced – 04-19-16

With both the House and Senate in session yesterday there were fourteen bills introduced. Two of those may be of specific interest to readers of this blog:

S 2814 A bill to authorize appropriations for fiscal year 2017 for military activities of the Department of Defense and for military construction, to prescribe military personnel strengths for such fiscal year, and for other purposes. Sen. McCain, John [R-AZ]

S 2817 A bill to improve understanding and forecasting of space weather events, and for other purposes. Sen. Peters, Gary C. [D-MI]

As always I will be watching the DOD spending bill for cybersecurity provisions. Maybe this year we will actually see the Cyber Command broken out in the spending bill as a separate item. The appropriations committees have been talking about this for a couple of years now.

For those concerned with electromagnetic pulse (EMP) issues in grid security geomagnetic storms (or space weather) are a major thing. Understanding and being able to forecast geomagnetic storms really could be an important part of securing the electric grid. It will be interesting to see how this bill deals with this and how much money Peters thinks is necessary.