Letter to John Boozman, Chairman of the Senate Subcommittee on Financial Services and General Government - Need to Fully Fund Agencies that Need Cybersecurity Upgrades

Letter

Dear Chairman Boozman,

In light of the recent cyberattack on the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) affecting the personal information of over 4 million federal employees, we are writing to urge you to fully fund the President's FY2016 request for the Agency's Information Technology and cybersecurity budget. OPM's FY 2016 request is $32 million above their FY 2015 appropriation, with the majority of the funds directed towards investments in IT network infrastructure and security.

We appreciate that the current sequester-level Budget Control Act (BCA) spending caps are complicating this year's Appropriations process. As you know, the Senate Democratic Caucus supports equal relief from sequestration for both defense and non-defense spending. This attack clearly highlights how critical it is for our national defense that Republicans and Democrats negotiate another bipartisan sequester relief package. This attack on OPM's IT infrastructure is not the first and will likely not be the last. The federal government's analysis of this attack, which occurred in December of last year, has concluded that the OPM is now a target of cyber-attackers.

As the keeper of sensitive data -­ including personally identifiable information for 32 million federal employees and retirees - OPM has a huge responsibility to maintain and consistently upgrade their cybersecurity controls. The funding requested includes $21 million to continue and finish upgrades initiated after a FY2014 attack and represents the recommendations of a comprehensive security analysis meant to protect OPM's network well into the future. While OPM may need to revise their request further in light of the most recent attack, it is abundantly clear that technology and cyberattackers evolve in real time and the federal government needs more resources and budget certainty to keep their infrastructure current and strong. The request also includes:

Maintenance for a sustained security operations center (SOC) to provide critical oversight of OPM's security posture and real-time 24/7 monitoring of network servers to detect and respond to malicious activity
Support for stronger firewalls and storage devices for capturing security log information used for analysis in the event of cyber-attack
Additional staff for the SOC to monitor the security of the network and permit faster response time to cyber-attacks
In closing, we urge you to work towards fulfilling OPM's full FY2016 funding request so that the federal government has strong and robust cyber defenses against foreign attacks.

Sincerely,

U.S. Senator Angus King

U.S. Senator Mark Warner

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