House to vote today on landmark defense bill with numerous cyber provisions
November 14, 2017
The House is expected to vote today on the final version of the fiscal 2018 National Defense Authorization Act -- containing a landmark cybersecurity doctrine among many other cyber provisions -- with many stakeholders seeing the defense bill as an opportunity for major advancement of cyber policy amid legislative challenges.
Lawmakers will vote on the conference report for the NDAA today, according to House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy’s (R-CA) office. The Senate has not announced its plans for floor consideration of the conference report, but a Senate Armed Services Committee aide said the panel is hoping the chamber will act “soon” on the measure.
The bipartisan, bicameral measure -- unveiled last week -- directs the president to develop a national cyber strategy to employ “all instruments of national power,” including offensive cyber capabilities, to deter hackers, and tees up multiple initiatives on securing critical infrastructure and developing new cyber tools.
Cyber policy analysts and stakeholders see the NDAA as a major step for cyber policy, perhaps the largest since passage of the landmark cyber information-sharing bill, the Cybersecurity Act of 2015.
Betsy Cooper, executive director of the University of California, Berkeley’s Center for Long-Term Cybersecurity, told Inside Cybersecurity that the inclusion of extensive cyber provisions in NDAA reflect a frustration on Capitol Hill over the slow pace of cyber policy development and the difficulties in passing legislation more generally.
“The movement in the NDAA also reflects the fact that relatively few pieces of legislation are passing Congress generally, so the NDAA represents a rare hook on which to attach companion legislation,” Cooper said. “That is one difference between this year's action and the 2015 legislation; because the 2015 legislation passed Congress and was signed by the President as an independent piece of legislation, it had a more coherent feel. The cybersecurity pieces in this legislation were largely introduced as independent amendments, and so represent a wider diversity of cybersecurity priorities identified by individual Congressional members.”
Other policy analysts noted lawmakers’ frustrations about the administration’s cyber policy progress, with some noting that NDAA’s cyber language indicates a shift beyond traditional cyber considerations to information operations and could codify much of the work the current administration is doing on cybersecurity under President Trump’s cybersecurity executive order, signed in May.
Floor consideration of the NDAA measure comes after weeks of negotiations between the House and the Senate, after the Senate version passed in October. -- Joshua Higgins (jhiggins@iwpnews.com)
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