Congressional Hearings Week of 11-07-11

The House is working at home this week, so we only have the Senate to watch and there is only one hearing currently scheduled in the Senate that might be of interest to the chemical security community. That is a TSA oversight hearing on Wednesday before the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee.

As is usual whenever Congress looks at TSA, they will almost certainly spend most of their time looking at passenger air security issues. Other issues that might come up, however, will be air freight screening, rail security issues and pipeline security. If we are really lucky someone might ask some uncomfortable questions about highway freight security, but I won’t hold my breath.

BTW: The House did not finish work on the Coast Guard authorization bill last week. They’ll take that up again (if they don’t get tied up in another short term spending bill) the following week when they return to Washington.

Congressional Hearings Week of 11-15-10

With Congress starting back up from their long election recess there looks to be a lot of work that will need to be completed before the end of the year. Part of this work is to conduct some investigative hearings for recent security incidents. There are two such hearings scheduled for this week that might have implications for the chemical security community. And of course there is the Stuxnet hearing I’ve already mentioned.

Air Cargo Security

The Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee will be holding a hearing on November 16th at 2:30 pm EST on “Closing the Gaps in Air Cargo Security”. Two witnesses are currently scheduled; TSA Administrator John S. Pistole and US Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Alan D. Bersin. The focus will inevitably be on the recent ‘Toner Bombs’ incident, but it will certainly be expanded to address the general issue of air cargo screening, particularly inbound aircraft from overseas locations.

TSA Oversight

The Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee will be conducting an oversight hearing looking at TSA on November 17th at 10:00 am EST. No witness list is currently available, but will almost certainly include Administrator Pistole. I suspect that this will also focus on the ‘Toner Bombs’ but could include a variety of TSA issues. I would hope that someone would ask about rail freight security implementation, and pipeline security rule development.