Committee Hearings – Week of 1-22-17

This will be a very short (two-day) week for both the House and Senate and there will be relatively few congressional hearings as a result. Most of the scheduled hearings in the House will be organizational in nature and will include the Appropriations Committee and the Energy and Commerce Committee. Most of the scheduled hearings in the Senate will be confirmation hearings. There is one markup hearing scheduled in the Senate that may be of specific interest to readers of this blog.

The Senate Commerce, Science and Technology Committee will hold a markup hearing tomorrow. In addition to voting on the nomination of Elaine Cho to be the Secretary for the Department of Transportation the Committee will markup a number of bills; including S 88, the Developing Innovation and Growing the Internet of Things Act or “DIGIT Act”.

The GPO has not yet published an official copy of this bill yet (probably today or tomorrow) so I have not yet posted my review of the bill. The Committee web site does include a link to the Committee draft of the bill. As expected is quite similar to the version of S 2607 that was reported out of the same Committee last session. That bill never made it to the floor for a vote.

A quick review of the Committee draft does show that there has been a minor cybersecurity provision added to the bill, but it is only found in the portion of the bill that deals with Federal agency use of IOT devices. More on that when I see the official version of the bill.