HR 3429 Introduced

Cybersecurity Education Support

Last month, Rep Lieu (D,CA) introduced HR 3429, the New Collar Jobs Act of 2023. The bill would provide employer incentives to provide cybersecurity training to employees and would provide federal loan forgiveness to certain individuals student loans. No new spending is authorized by this bill. The bill is virtually identical to HR 4389 which was introduced last session by Lieu. No action was taken on that bill.

Definitions

While the bill does not provide any definitions for the entire scope of the bill, it does add a definition for the term ‘cybersecurity job’ to 20 USC 1087e, the William D. Ford Federal Direct Loan Program.

Employer Benefits for Cybersecurity Training

Section 3 of the bill adds a new §45U to the Internal Revenue Code of 1986. It would provide a 50% employee cybersecurity education credit for up to $5,000 per employee per year for qualified employee cybersecurity education expenses.

Section 7 of the bill would require changes to Subpart 15.3 of the Federal Acquisition Regulation to provide a 5% score increase for competitive contract proposals from offerors who claimed the cybersecurity training credit described above at least once in the previous three years.

Cybersecurity Incentives for Individuals

Section 4 of the bill would amend 20 USC 1087e by adding a new subsection (r), Loan repayment for cybersecurity workers in economically distressed area. Qualified individuals could have up to $25,000 of the balance of the principal and interest on their William D. Ford Federal Direct Loan Program loan forgiven.

Section 5 of the bill would amend 15 USC 7442, the Federal Cyber Scholarship-for-Service Program, by adding ‘cybersecurity course instructors’ to the list of future jobs in §7442(a) to be targeted by Cybercorps Scholarship for Service program. Similarly, it adds the same as one of the cybersecurity positions that would fulfil the obligation requirements of §7442(d). Finally, it removes the 80% job placement in federal agencies requirement.

Moving Forward

Lieu is a member of the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee to which this bill was assigned for primary consideration. This means that there may be sufficient influence to see the bill considered in Committee. While no spending is authorized by the bill, the loan forgiveness provisions may draw the ire of the Republican budgetary-hawks, so there may be some organized opposition for that reason. I suspect that there would be some bipartisan support for the bill, but not enough to see the bill considered under the suspension of the rules process if it were to make it to the floor of the House. That means that the bill would not likely be considered by the House because of the influence of the conservative minority on the Rules Committee.

Commentary

While there are no specific mentions of control system cybersecurity in the legislative requirements, two of three congressional findings in §2 of the bill address manufacturing control system security issues. Thus the ‘congressional intent’ clearly applies (not exclusively, to be sure) the education support provisions to control-system-security educational programs.