Senate

Senators push for extra OPM funding

by Jordain Carney - 06/10/15 10:22 AM ET

Sens. Angus King (I-Maine) and Mark Warner (D-Va.) said Wednesday they want additional funding for the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) in the wake of a cyberattack that compromised the personal information of millions of federal workers.

The two senators said they were leading a letter to Senate appropriators to give the office an extra $32 million, which would largely go to increasing IT infrastructure and boosting the office’s cyber protections.

{mosads}”The administration recognized this problem and requested additional funds in the ’16 budget,” King said during a conference call with reporters. “What happened demonstrated they were right. We just didn’t have the funds in time.”

The senators are linking the need to bolster cyber spending to a push by Democrats to roll back congressionally mandated budget caps under sequestration. Democrats argue that to fully protect the United States, nondefense spending must be increased along with defense spending.

Warner, calling cyberattacks “an enormous threat,” added that he and King “feel very strongly that we need to get rid of the stupidity of sequestration.”

The push for extra funding comes after OPM announced last week that a hack had resulted in the theft of 4 million current and former employees’ records.

King said he couldn’t say that the budget restrictions allowed for the hack, but, “here’s what I can argue: Sequestration will cause future breaches.”

The two are also pushing for additional across-government cooperation on combating cyberattacks, including working to boost the country’s offensive cyber capabilities.

“If there’s no deterrent for these kind of attacks, they’re going to come,” King said. “If you’re in a boxing match and you’re not allowed to punch back, eventually you’re going to lose.”

Republicans announced Tuesday that they were going to link a cyber information-sharing bill to the annual defense policy legislation currently being debated by the Senate.

King and Warner said while they both agreed that the Senate needs to pass cyber legislation, they would prefer that the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act, or CISA, be considered separately.

“Why attach one of the most important bills of the session to a bill that you already know is going to be vetoed?” King asked, referring to the White House’s veto threat of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA).

The Maine senator suggested that cyber legislation is needed to prevent a “catastrophic” attack.

“I don’t know how many warning shots we’re going to have to have on cyber before we have a catastrophic attack of some kind,” he said. “I don’t want to be standing around saying what we might have done. …If we don’t do something about it, shame on us.”

Tags Angus King Mark Warner