Earlier this month, the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee published their report on S 2305, the Cybersecurity Opportunity Act. The Committee met on August 4th, 2021 to consider the bill. Substitute language was offered and amended before the Committee adopted the new language. The bill would now require at least 50% of grant funds released under this program to go to “historically Black colleges and universities and minority-serving institutions” and added a five year sunset provision for the grant program. No spending authorization was added to the bill.
Changes in Language
The reported version of the bill has a new §2(a) inserted that provides definitions for five key terms in the bill. The first was defined parenthetically in the original language and no definitions were provided for the other four terms. The terms defined in the new version were:
The renumbered §2(b) was reformatted to change the former paragraphs (a)(1) and (a)(2) into subparagraphs of the new (b)(1) and adding four additional subparagraphs:
The renumbered §2(d), Activities, was further modified by adding a third paragraph that authorized use of the grant funds for “outreach and recruitment to ensure students are aware of such new or existing cybersecurity programs, including cybersecurity partnerships with public and private entities.”
Finally, the revised language added two new subsections:
The Report
The Committee’s Report discusses the need for additional personnel in the ‘cybersecurity workforce’ and for expanding the diversity of that workforce. The Report explains that S 2305 would allow grant recipients to “use these funds to support new or existing cybersecurity programs, including cybersecurity partnerships with public and private entities, to train qualified cybersecurity professionals, and establish National Centers of Academic Excellence (NCAEs) in Cybersecurity. The purpose of the NCAE program is to create standard cybersecurity curriculum and establish a workforce pipeline from NCAE institutions to select federal agencies.13 S. 2305 ensures that NCAEs are established in higher educational institutions that serve underrepresented communities, which will enhance the number of diverse cybersecurity personnel in the federal government” (pg 3).
The Report includes a budgetary estimate from the Congressional Budget Office. While no specific funding is authorized, the CBO notes that similar grant programs have spent about $20 million dollars on such programs over the same type five-year authorization. Of that amount, $4 million is typically spent on administrative efforts to support the program.
Moving Forward
The bill is now cleared for consideration by the full Senate. This bill is unlikely to come to the floor under regular order, it is just not politically important enough to consume that type of time. There is a possibility that this bill could be considered under the Senate’s unanimous consent process, but a single Senator could block that considerations. A more likely possibility would be for the bill to be added to some larger, more important bill as part of the amendment process. If the bill were to be considered on its own under regular order, I would expect the bill to receive significant bipartisan support.