Proposed pending on support and procurement for the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) is up handsomely in a minibus bill approved by Congressional appropriators on Monday and passed by the House on Tuesday.
The agency will likely get $135.9 million more in its acquisition spending for fiscal year 2020 in the bill, which is expected to pass the Senate later this week.
The National Security Appropriations Minibus (H.R. 115), which also includes the Departments of Defense, Commerce, Justice, Treasury, and NASA and other agencies, funds CISA’s two ongoing cyber security acquisition programs at $379.4 million.
The two programs are the Continuous Diagnostics and Mitigation (CDM) effort, which procures tools to gain visibility into federal civilian networks and to better protect them, and the National Cybersecurity Protection System, better known as EINSTEIN, which provides a boundary layer of protection to federal civilian networks.
The appropriations bill provides $213.5 million for CDM, $53.5 million more than requested, and $165.8 million for EINSTEIN, a $70.8 million increase.
The increase supports “evolving” needs in the CDM program, including “federal network infrastructure evolution and modernization; data protection and dashboard deployments; deployment of protections to mobile devices; and other enhancements,” the bill says. It also says at least $3 million must go toward endpoint protection.
For EINSTEIN, the increase is to create and operate a centralized federal domain name system egress service.
The Department of Homeland Security section of the minibus bill shows a $186.4 million increase to the request for CISA’s operations and support functions related to cyber security. The bill provides $493.7 million for various federal cyber security efforts, $43.1 million more than requested.
The cyber readiness and response line item is funded at $367.1 million, $118.8 million more than requested, and the cyber infrastructure resilience line is funded at $86.5 million, $24.6 million above the request.
The primary operations and support increases include $58 million to increase CISA’s capacity to service federal, state and local, critical infrastructure, and industrial control systems. The bill also adds $34 million for threat detection and response to “help address gaps across CISA’s threat-focused efforts, including analysis, counter-threat product development, operations planning, operational coordination, and hunt and response teams.”
The bill also provides $19.4 million more for state and local government to help with election security and to counter foreign influence in elections. Overall, the appropriators provide $43.5 million for the Election Infrastructure Security Initiative.
The appropriators also increased the federal cyber security request by $13 million to “accelerate data protection and dashboard deployment” related to CDM. CISA is also required to report to Congress on how it plans to modernize CDM and EINSTEIN to maintain their effectiveness “given changing trends in technology, the federal workforce, threats, and vulnerabilities.”