House Homeland Security Committee Chairman Michael McCaul (R-Texas) wants the House to act this year on a bill to reorganize the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) directorate responsible for cyber security monitoring and information sharing activities, a committee staffer said on Thursday.
The committee in June unanimously approved the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Protection Agency Act of 2016 (H.R. 5390), which would authorize the DHS National Protection and Programs Directorate to become the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Protection Agency (CIPA). The change recognizes the operational nature of the directorate in helping to protect the nation’s cyber and critical infrastructures.
The committee is “working” to get the bill to the House floor but there are “a lot of other committees involved and we’re doing best we can to hopefully get this done by the end of the year,” Brett DeWitt, the senior policy adviser for Cybersecurity on the Homeland Security Committee, said during a cyber security conference hosted by The Washington Post. “It’s definitely a top priority for Chairman Michael McCaul.”
Congress is currently recessed until national elections on Nov. 8.
DHS proposed the restructuring of NPPD into the CIPA as part of Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson’s Unity of Effort management reform initiatives at the department. He said in September that the proposed reorganization of NPPD would make it a “meaner and leaner” agency.
The bill would create four divisions within CIPA. One for cyber security, another for infrastructure protection, a third for emergency communications, and the Federal Protective Service.
The Senate has yet to act on the bill to reorganize NPPD.
The NPPD includes the DHS cyber security watch center, called the National Cybersecurity and Communications Integration Center (NCCIC), which shares information about cyber threats with public and private sector partners. The NCCIC includes the United States Computer Emergency Readiness Team (US CERT), and the Industrial Control Systems CERT.
NPPD also manages the EINSTEIN cyber intrusion detection, monitoring and prevention platform that helps protect federal civilian agencies from cyber threats.
DeWitt said that McCaul is also working to get Congress to approve two other pieces of cyber legislation that the House has already approved to better enable federal assistance to state and local authorities. These bills “are pending in the Senate so we’re trying to shake them loose over there,” DeWitt said.