Rules Committee to Look at HR 4394
FY 2024 EWR Spending
The House Rules Committee will hold a rule hearing this afternoon that would include HR 4394, the Energy and Water Development and Related Agencies [EWR] Appropriations Act, 2024. The deadline for submitting amendments for the Committee to consider including in the Rule was last Friday, 122 amendments have been submitted.
Three of the 122 amendments may be of specific interest here:
Hudson Amendment
Amendment #19 was submitted by Rep Hudson (R,NC). It adds a new section to the end of the bill that reads:
“It is the sense of Congress that it is essential that the Department of Energy prioritizes updating and modernizing the electric grid of the United States to mitigate potential physical and cyber threats.”
It does not require (or prohibit) DOE from taking any specific actions. This amendment, if included by the Committee, would likely be considered as part of an en bloc amendment.
Fallon Amendment
Amendment #28 was submitted by Rep Fallon (R,TX). It amends page 26, line 13 by inserting the following after the dollar amount:
‘‘(reduced by $5,000,000) (increased by $5,000,000)’’.
This non-change of the spending is a tool used in spending bill amendments to call attention to a specific program or set of programs that are not large enough to be included in the legislation, or are so broad in scope that they would impact multiple listed programs. In this case (according to the Rules Committee page), Fallon is making the non-change to the spending for DOE’s Office of Cybersecurity, Energy Security, and Emergency Response (CESER) to “prioritize critical infrastructure programs such as CyTRICS and Consequence-driven Cyber-informed Engineering (CCE).”
Walberg Amendment
Amendment #115 was submitted by Rep Walberg (R,MI) and Rep Latta (R,OH). It amends the same place in the bill by inserting the following:
‘‘(reduced by $7,000,000) (increased by $7,000,000)’’.
In this case (according to the Rules Committee page), Walberg and Latta are making the non-change to the spending for DOE’s Office of Cybersecurity, Energy Security, and Emergency Response (CESER) to “to direct the Director to prioritize the testing, analysis, certification, and integration applicability of commercially available non-certificate and non-public key infrastructure based advanced cyber security software to secure the Electrical Power Grid from internal and external unauthorized access and attacks.
Moving Forward
The Rules Committee meets at 4:00 pm EDT. Barring some drama from the three Republican 11 representatives on the Committee, a rule will be formulated for this and HR 4364, the Legislative Branch spending bill. The House will begin taking up the two bills on Tuesday.
Commentary
The House was scheduled to start a two-week District Work Period. Normally, this would be a break from Washington while the two appropriations committees started work on an omnibus spending bill. It appears that McCarthy still intends on attempting to pass standalone bills. Between the time the Senate needs to act on these bills and the individual conference committees needed to reconcile the House an Senate versions, this will take up every bit of the time to the new November 17th deadline.