House appropriators unveiled a temporary funding plan on Tuesday that would keep two cornerstone cybersecurity laws alive through Nov. 21.
The continuing resolution delays the Sept. 30 sunset of the 2015 Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act and the State and Local Cybersecurity Grant Program. The former has been deemed a bedrock law that allows companies to share cyber threat intelligence with the government with liability protections in place.
The brief extension buys Congress time to reconcile differences between House and Senate approaches to longer-term renewals. Many industry representatives had hoped for a clean, ten-year extension of the 2015 law, though this appears to be unlikely in the near term.
Earlier this month, House Homeland Security advanced ten-year extensions of both measures, but the Senate panel will debate its own bill Thursday, according to a planning memo. Senate Homeland Security Chairman Rand Paul. R-Ky. is expected to offer up a version of the CISA 2015 extension that would provide a shorter extension and scale back key liability protections.
Republican leaders hope to bring the stopgap bill to the floor this week, though Democrats’ support is uncertain after President Donald Trump urged Republicans to bypass them in budget talks.
Federal cyber officials are keeping a close eye on the developments.
“We’ll take whatever the Congress decides to authorize us, wherever they see fit within their purview, to authorize and to give us our authorities to be able to use,” Nick Andersen, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency’s executive assistant director for cybersecurity, told reporters last week at the Billington Cyber Summit.
