Sponsored by
Rep. Thompson, Bennie G. [D-MS-2]
ID: T000193
Follow the money
The bill
HRES. 113, 119th Congress — read as touching Cybersecurity.
The sponsor
Every bill has someone who introduced it. That name is where the paper trail starts.
The money
20 itemised contributions to this sponsor, pulled from FEC filings.
The alignment
This bill's text tracks the "Introduction" section, p. 195-197 of the Mandate for Leadership.
Track this bill's progress through the legislative process
Latest Action
Placed on the House Calendar, Calendar No. 7.
March 4, 2025
📍 Current Status
Next: The bill will be reviewed by relevant committees who will debate, amend, and vote on it.
1. Introduction: A member of Congress introduces a bill in either the House or Senate.
2. Committee Review: The bill is sent to relevant committees for study, hearings, and revisions.
3. Floor Action: If approved by committee, the bill goes to the full chamber for debate and voting.
4. Other Chamber: If passed, the bill moves to the other chamber (House or Senate) for the same process.
5. Conference: If both chambers pass different versions, a conference committee reconciles the differences.
6. Presidential Action: The President can sign the bill into law, veto it, or take no action.
7. Became Law: If signed (or if Congress overrides a veto), the bill becomes law!
Another brilliant example of congressional theater, where our esteemed representatives pretend to care about transparency and accountability while actually just playing a game of bureaucratic CYA.
**Main Purpose & Objectives:** The main purpose of this resolution is to give the illusion that Congress is doing something about the Department of Homeland Security's (DHS) alleged mishandling of sensitive information and its workforce. The objective is to create a paper trail that will supposedly "hold DHS accountable" for its actions, while in reality, it's just a dog-and-pony show.
**Key Provisions & Changes to Existing Law:** The resolution demands that the Secretary of Homeland Security hand over a laundry list of documents related to DHS policies and activities concerning information security, recruitment, and retention. Oh, wow, how bold! It's like they're trying to uncover some deep, dark secret... or just going through the motions.
**Affected Parties & Stakeholders:** The affected parties include the Department of Homeland Security (because they have to pretend to care), the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), and various other government agencies that might be implicated in this "scandal." The stakeholders are the usual suspects: politicians trying to score points, bureaucrats covering their behinds, and lobbyists who will use this as an excuse to peddle more "security solutions."
**Potential Impact & Implications:** The potential impact of this resolution is zilch. It's a symbolic gesture designed to placate the masses while allowing DHS to continue its questionable practices. The implications are that Congress will continue to grandstand, DHS will stonewall, and the public will remain none the wiser.
Diagnosis: This bill suffers from a severe case of "Congressional Theater-itis," a disease characterized by meaningless posturing, bureaucratic doublespeak, and a complete lack of actual substance. The symptoms include:
* Overuse of buzzwords like "transparency" and "accountability" * A laundry list of demands that will never be fulfilled * A complete disregard for the underlying issues
Treatment: None required. This bill is already DOA. Just let it wither away in committee, where it belongs.
Prognosis: The patient (i.e., the American public) will continue to suffer from a severe case of "Government-induced Frustration Syndrome" until they wake up and realize that their elected representatives are more interested in playing politics than actually governing effectively.
Rep. Thompson, Bennie G. [D-MS-2]
Congress 119 • 2024 Election Cycle
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Hub layout: Politicians in center, donors arranged by type in rings around them.
Showing 26 nodes and 20 connections (25 secondary connections hidden)
Total contributions: $67,700
Showing top 19 donors by contribution amount
Which industries are materially affected by specific provisions in this bill. 1 helped, 1 harmed.
Section (7) requires documentation related to investigating access to employee data, implying a need for cybersecurity measures
Section (8) mentions a 'freeze on the hiring of Federal civilian employees', which could negatively impact labor unions
This bill shows semantic similarity to the following sections of the Project 2025 policy document.
— 163 — Department of Homeland Security The old practice of relying on Executive Secretary taskings to pull documents for congressional requests does not work: It is slow, the metrics for what documents are gathered and how are unclear, and the components do not gather responsive material in an efficient manner. Document gathering should come from the Office of the Chief Information Officer or a relevant technological element within the department that can pull responsive communications quickly. OFFICE OF LEGISLATIVE AFFAIRS (OLA); OFFICE OF PUBLIC AFFAIRS (OPA); AND OFFICE OF PARTNERSHIP AND ENGAGEMENT (OPE) DHS’s external communications function should be consolidated and reformed so that the President’s agenda can be implemented more effectively. The Office of Partnership and Engagement should be merged into the Office of Public Affairs. In many Cabinet agencies, outreach to companies and partner organizations is similarly performed by the Office of Public Affairs. This would also accomplish a needed DHS organizational and management reform to decrease the number of direct reports to the Secretary. Both public and legislative affairs staff in the components should report directly to their respective headquarters equivalent. This would help to avoid a failure by the department to speak with one voice. It would also allow the component staff to perform more efficiently, overseen by expert managers in their trade. This would also allow DHS to respond to crises effectively by shifting staff as needed to the most pressing issues and better use underutilized staff at less active components. Only political appointees in OLA should interact directly with congressional staff on all inquiries, including budget and appropriations matters. To prevent congres- sional staff from answer shopping among HQ OLA, the DHS OCFO, and components, DHS legislative affairs appropriations staff should be moved from MGMT OCFO into OLA. Regarding components, budget/appropriations staff should move from component budget offices into component legislative affairs offices. Because dozens of congressional committees and subcommittees either have or claim to have jurisdiction over some DHS function, DHS staff from the Secretary on down spend so much time responding to congressional hearing and briefing requests, letters, and questions for the record that they are left with little time to do their assigned job of protecting the homeland. The next President should reach an agreement with congressional leadership to limit committee jurisdiction to one authorizing committee and one appropriations committee in each cham- ber. If congressional leadership will not limit their committees’ jurisdiction over DHS, DHS should identify one authorizing and appropriations committee in each chamber and answer only to it. To focus more precisely on the DHS mission, OLA staff should also identify outdated and needless congressional reporting requirements and notify Congress — 164 — Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise that DHS will cease reporting on such matters. For other congressional reports, OLA should implement a sunset date so that Congress must regularly demonstrate the need for specific data. In both OPA and OLA, a change in mission and culture is needed. The clients of both components are the President and the Secretary, not the media, external organizations, or Congress. OPA and OLA should change from being compliance correspondents for outside entities airing grievances to serving as messengers and advocates for the President and the Secretary. OFFICE OF OPERATIONS COORDINATION (OPS) OPS was originally conceived by then-Secretary Jeh Johnson as an entity tasked with coordinating cross-DHS assets on an as-needed basis using a joint operations approach. This role is particularly challenging because of the disparate nature of mission sets across DHS. OPS should absorb a very small number of tactical intelligence professionals from I&A as the rest of I&A is shut down. Such intelligence officers would be a subordinate element within OPS placed within the National Operations Center. The intelligence officers would provide tactical intelligence support for upcoming or ongoing opera- tions in addition to liaising with their agency/component counterparts. There would be no strategic intelligence analysis done as part of OPS or its new I&A sub-element. In addition to facilitating all-of-DHS coordination on a task-by-task basis, OPS would be responsible for ongoing situational awareness for the Secretary and Deputy Secretary. In addition to long-term staffing, OPS would have cycling billets from each of the major agencies and components to facilitate its most effective working rela- tionships across DHS. OFFICE FOR CIVIL RIGHTS AND CIVIL LIBERTIES (CRCL) AND PRIVACY OFFICE (PRIV) The Homeland Security Act established only an Officer of CRCL, not an office. The only substantive function Congress then assigned to the officer was to review and assess information alleging abuses of civil rights. Since then, Congress and CRCL itself have significantly expanded CRCL’s scope and size well beyond its original intent or helpful purpose. CRCL now operates and views itself as a quasi- DHS Office of Inspector General. This results in a considerable waste of limited component resources, which are routinely tasked to address redundant, overly burdensome, and uninformed demands from CRCL. It is therefore important to recalibrate CRCL’s scope and reach. The organizational structure of both CRCL and the Privacy Office should be changed to ensure proper alignment with the department’s mission. The Office of General Counsel should absorb both CRCL’s and PRIV’s necessary functions
— 135 — Department of Homeland Security Unfortunately for our nation, the federal government’s newest department became like every other federal agency: bloated, bureaucratic, and expensive. It also lost sight of its mission priorities. DHS has also suffered from the Left’s wokeness and weaponization against Americans whom the Left perceives as its political opponents. To truly secure the homeland, a conservative Administration needs to return the department to the right mission, the right size, and the right budget. This would include reorganizing the department and shifting significant resources away from several supporting components to the essential operational components. Prior- itizing border security and immigration enforcement, including detention and deportation, is critical if we are to regain control of the border, repair the historic damage done by the Biden Administration, return to a lawful and orderly immi- gration system, and protect the homeland from terrorism and public safety threats. This also includes consolidating the pieces of the fragmented immigration system into one agency to fulfill the mission more efficiently. The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) is a DHS com- ponent that the Left has weaponized to censor speech and affect elections at the expense of securing the cyber domain and critical infrastructure, which are threat- ened daily.2 A conservative Administration should return CISA to its statutory and important but narrow mission. The bloated DHS bureaucracy and budget, along with the wrong priorities, provide real opportunities for a conservative Administration to cut billions in spending and limit government’s role in Americans’ lives. These opportunities include privatizing TSA screening and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) National Flood Insurance Program, reforming FEMA emergency spending to shift the majority of preparedness and response costs to states and localities instead of the federal government, eliminating most of DHS’s grant pro- grams, and removing all unions in the department for national security purposes. A successful DHS would: l Secure and control the border; l Thoroughly enforce immigration laws; l Correctly and efficiently adjudicate immigration benefit applications while rejecting fraudulent claims; l Secure the cyber domain and collaborate with critical infrastructure sectors to maintain their security; l Provide states and localities with a limited federal emergency response and preparedness; — 136 — Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise l Secure our coasts and economic zones; l Protect political leaders, their families, and visiting heads of state or government; and l Oversee transportation security. OFFICE OF THE SECRETARY (SEC) In the next Administration, the Office of the Secretary should take on the fol- lowing key issues and challenges to ensure the effective operation of DHS. Expansion of Dedicated Political Personnel. The Secretary of Homeland Security is a presidentially appointed and Senate-confirmed political appointee, but for budgetary reasons, he or she has historically been unable to fund a dedi- cated team of political appointees. A key first step for the Secretary to improve front-office functions is to have his or her own dedicated team of political appoin- tees selected and vetted by the Office of Presidential Personnel, which is not reliant on detailees from other parts of the department, to help ensure the completion of the next President’s agenda. An Aggressive Approach to Senate-Confirmed Leadership Positions. While Senate confirmation is a constitutionally necessary requirement for appointing agency leadership, the next Administration may need to take a novel approach to the confirmations process to ensure an adequate and rapid transition. For example, the next Administration arguably should place its nominees for key positions into similar positions as “actings” (for example, putting in a person to serve as the Senior Official Performing the Duties of the Commissioner of CBP while that person is going through the confirmation process to direct ICE or become the Secretary). This approach would both guarantee implementation of the Day One agenda and equip the department for potential emergency situations while still honoring the confirmation requirement. The department should also look to remove lower-level but nevertheless important positions that currently require Senate confirmation from the confirmation requirement, although this effort would require legislation (and might also be mooted in the event of legisla- tion that closes portions of the department that currently have Senate-confirmed leadership). Clearer, More Durable, and Political-Only Line of Succession. Based on previous experience, the department needs legislation to establish a more durable but politically oriented line of succession for agency decision-making purposes. The ideal sequence for line of succession is certainly debatable, except that in cir- cumstances where a career employee holds a leadership position in the department, that position should be deemed vacant for line-of-succession purposes and the next eligible political appointee in the sequence should assume acting authority. Further,
— 135 — Department of Homeland Security Unfortunately for our nation, the federal government’s newest department became like every other federal agency: bloated, bureaucratic, and expensive. It also lost sight of its mission priorities. DHS has also suffered from the Left’s wokeness and weaponization against Americans whom the Left perceives as its political opponents. To truly secure the homeland, a conservative Administration needs to return the department to the right mission, the right size, and the right budget. This would include reorganizing the department and shifting significant resources away from several supporting components to the essential operational components. Prior- itizing border security and immigration enforcement, including detention and deportation, is critical if we are to regain control of the border, repair the historic damage done by the Biden Administration, return to a lawful and orderly immi- gration system, and protect the homeland from terrorism and public safety threats. This also includes consolidating the pieces of the fragmented immigration system into one agency to fulfill the mission more efficiently. The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) is a DHS com- ponent that the Left has weaponized to censor speech and affect elections at the expense of securing the cyber domain and critical infrastructure, which are threat- ened daily.2 A conservative Administration should return CISA to its statutory and important but narrow mission. The bloated DHS bureaucracy and budget, along with the wrong priorities, provide real opportunities for a conservative Administration to cut billions in spending and limit government’s role in Americans’ lives. These opportunities include privatizing TSA screening and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) National Flood Insurance Program, reforming FEMA emergency spending to shift the majority of preparedness and response costs to states and localities instead of the federal government, eliminating most of DHS’s grant pro- grams, and removing all unions in the department for national security purposes. A successful DHS would: l Secure and control the border; l Thoroughly enforce immigration laws; l Correctly and efficiently adjudicate immigration benefit applications while rejecting fraudulent claims; l Secure the cyber domain and collaborate with critical infrastructure sectors to maintain their security; l Provide states and localities with a limited federal emergency response and preparedness;
Showing 3 of 4 policy matches
Policy matches are calculated using semantic similarity between bill summaries and Project 2025 policy text. A score of 60% or higher indicates meaningful thematic overlap. This does not imply direct causation or intent, but highlights areas where legislation aligns with Project 2025 policy objectives.
Vicksburg National Military Park Boundary Modification Act
119/hr/4467
Directing the Secretary of Homeland Security to transmit to the House of Representatives certain documents relating to Department of Homeland Security policies and activities related to domestic preparedness and collective response to terrorism and the Department's cybersecurity activities.
119/hres/114