Committee Hearings – Week of 12-7-25
With both the House and Senate in Washington this week, there is a relatively light hearing schedule. The House Rules Committee will meet to formulate the rule for the consideration of S 1071, the vehicle for the FY 2026 National Defense Authorization Act. The Senate will see a committee vote on the NASA Administrator nomination. And there will be a House hearing on threats to the Homeland. In addition to the floor consideration of S 1071, there will be two other bills of tangential interest here that will be considered in the House.
Nomination Votes
Today the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee will hold a business meeting to vote on eight separate nominations. Three nominations are of potential interest here:
Jared Isaacman, to be Administrator of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration
Richard Kloster, to be a Member of the Surface Transportation Board
Adm. Kevin E. Lunday, to be Commandant of the United States Coast Guard
There should be some level of bipartisan support for each of these nominees. Interestingly, the Isaacman nomination may draw some Republican opposition from supporters of Secretary Duffy continuing to act as NASA Administrator, while some Democrats may find Musk’s support for Isaacman hard to swallow. Still, I suspect that the Committee will favorably report the nomination.
Threats to the Homeland
On Thursday, the House Homeland Security Committee will hold a hearing on “Worldwide Threats to the Homeland”. The witness list includes:
Kristi Noem, Department of Homeland Security, and
Joseph Kent, National Counterterrorism Center
This periodic review of terrorism threats started out as a method of keeping Congress and the country updated about terror threats. The open hearing has always limited the amount of information that was really being made available. In recent years this has become more about political grandstanding and this hearing will be no different. Democrats will certainly take the opportunity to grill Noem about a large swath of departmental issues, some only tangentially related to terrorism. It will be interesting to see how many Republicans ask critical questions.
On the Floor
S 1071 has not yet made it to the House weekly schedule, but it will almost certainly come to the floor this week. Two other bills of potential interest here (though not specifically covered in this blog) are scheduled to be considered under a rule this week:
HR 3638 – Electric Supply Chain Act, and
HR 3668 – Improving Interagency Coordination for Pipeline Reviews Act
The Senate will continue to ‘consider’ HR 4016, a FY 2026 minibus spending bill, but do not expect any votes or amendment consideration. The bill will probably have significant bipartisan support, but fringe Republican Senators are holding up the process because the bill is not extreme enough; though if they got their way, it would not be able to meet the 60-vote threshold for passage. There is an interesting article on TheHill.com about this problem.