House Homeland Security Committee Chairman Rep. Mark Green (R-Tenn.) late Tuesday criticized President Biden for not mentioning cybersecurity in his State of the Union address, saying the issue needs to be a priority and the president has been weak in responding to cyber-attacks against the country.
“The White House has continuously had a weak response to cybersecurity threats,” Green said in a statement following the president’s address to Congress. “In the past two years alone, Russian hackers have attacked America’s fuel and food supply and the software that underpins everything from how Americans get their paychecks to where they get their healthcare. Russia will not stop attempting to undermine the U.S. cyber border until they know the consequences will be dire.”
Green also said that Biden “has only shown weakness in responding to blatant attacks on American critical infrastructure and must impose real costs on cyber adversaries like China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea.”
Border security and immigration enforcement have been the primary issues congressional Republicans have been clubbing Biden with although Green has consistently raised cybersecurity as another key priority for his committee since being named as the new chairman in January.
On Wednesday, at the outset of the committee’s organizational meeting for the 118th Congress that began on Jan. 3, Green said that the panel will continue bipartisan efforts to defend the nation’s cyber border. He also said that the committee’s cybersecurity jurisdiction was strengthened in the recent House Rules package.
Green last week warned against new cybersecurity regulations for the private sector, a direction the Biden administration has been pursuing on a small scale but appears poised to expand in a new national strategy, according to various media reports during the past month. On Wednesday, he said the committee will continue to work with the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency to strengthen the networks of the federal government and critical infrastructures “without overly burdening the private sector, which is why I remain concerned with the Biden administration’s aggressive regulatory approach.”
Green said the focus needs to be on “building trust, partnership, and transparency rather than duplicative and ineffective regulatory regimes.”
Earlier on Tuesday, ahead of the State of the Union address, Green said Biden’s touting upcoming deployments of new inspection systems at land ports of entry along the southwest border to help curb the smuggling of fentanyl into the U.S. is just an attempt to take credit for funding appropriated during the Trump administration.
Congress provided nearly $600 million in fiscal year 2019 for non-intrusive imaging (NII) systems that would dramatically increase the number of vehicles and cargo being scanned for contraband as they enter the U.S. Then President Trump, as Green pointed out, signed the FY ’19 Omnibus spending bill into law in February 2019.
The bipartisan bill rejected Trump’s request for more than $5 billion to begin spending on new physical barriers along the southwest border. Instead, Congress provided $1.4 billion toward the border wall. That prompted the president to seek funding for the wall elsewhere, which he did through a series of reprogramming actions, including taking funding from Defense Department accounts.
Green in his statement Tuesday didn’t mention that the Trump administration did not get the NII funds on contract during the final two years of his presidency. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) awarded two sets of NII contracts in 2021 more than a year into Biden’s presidency.
Still, the rollout of new NII systems has proceeded slowly and CBP hasn’t spelled out the reasons for this. The White House on Tuesday said that by FY ’26, CBP will have 123 NII systems deployed in pre-primary inspection lanes at land ports of entry that can scan 40 percent and 70 percent, respectively, of occupied passenger and cargo vehicles entering the U.S. from Mexico. That timeline is three years later than CBP said in May 20222.
Green said Biden is “grasping” to show the public the administration is working to combat the fentanyl smuggling. He said that during the COVID-19 pandemic when ports were closed more and more drugs continued to enter the U.S. However, during the pandemic, while non-essential travel was closed related to tourism and recreation, commercial trade continued.
“If President Biden was serious about stopping the unprecedented amount of synthetic drugs flowing into the country, he would resume law and order at the Southwest border and enforce laws on our books to stop this crisis,” Green said.