House committee chairman that have oversight of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) have agreed to regularly authorize the department, which hasn’t been the subject of a comprehensive policy bill since its creation in 2002, Rep. Michael McCaul (R-Texas) said on Thursday.
“We are finally on a solid path to overhaul the Department of Homeland Security and make sure it stays ahead of threat to our country,” McCaul, chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, said in a statement. “I am pleased that the committee chairmen with jurisdiction over DHS have come together, for the first time, and formally agreed on a path forward to comprehensively reauthorize the department in the 115th Congress and beyond.”
In the past, different components and entities within DHS have been reauthorized by Congress but only on a piecemeal basis at best. Excluding funding responsibility, which resides with the House and Senate Appropriations Committees, policy oversight of DHS in the House resides within eight committees. Jurisdictional battles among the various committees have prevented any comprehensive DHS authorization bill from being hammered out in the past 15 years.
The House committees that oversee DHS policy are Energy and Commerce, Intelligence, Homeland Security, Oversight and Government Reform, Judiciary, Science and Technology, and Ways and Means.
Under the Jan. 11 Memorandum of Understanding signed by the chairman of the relevant committees, each committee will authorize their respective areas of DHS that they oversee. The goal is that by the end of the 115th Congress in 2018 the work done by each committee will be wrapped into a single authorization bill, an aide to the Homeland Security Committee told Defense Daily.
Once the House gets the first authorization bill done, the hope is that with each new Congress the House will be able to complete a new comprehensive authorization of DHS, the aide said.
Regular policy legislation is critical to helping guide DHS leaders and components in their duties and in helping the department to improve the way it works. In the 114th Congress that ended in December DHS had proposed a reorganization of its National Programs and Protection Directorate, which has responsibilities for cyber security and infrastructure protection, but the competing jurisdictional issues in the House prevented that restructuring.
DHS wants NPPD to become the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Protection Agency and for it to become an operating component of DHS. The directorate’s cyber security responsibilities include sharing cyber threat data with the private sector and within the federal civilian government. It also provides cyber incident response capabilities.
McCaul’s committee last year approved the DHS request for CIPA but the legislation didn’t advance in the House, which he has blamed on the jurisdictional overlap. McCaul is working to resurrect the bill early this year. The Senate must also approve the legislation.
“I look forward to working hand-in-hand with my colleagues in the House, the Senate, and the new administration to reauthorize DHS and ensure it is equipped to protect the United States and our people more effectively, efficiently, and decisively,” McCaul said.