The House Appropriations Subcommittee on Defense voted to approve today by voice vote a full-committee draft released earlier this week for proposed fiscal year 2023 defense funding, including $11.2 billion for cybersecurity, cyberspace operations, and cyber research and development.
The next step in the process for the defense funding bill will be a markup by the full House Appropriations Committee.
The $11.2 billion funding would be divided amongst three different areas:
- $6.6 billion would be allocated towards network modernization, encryption solutions, infrastructure defense, zero trust architecture, and other increased and improved network protections;
- $4.2 billion would go towards cyberspace operations that include cyber collection, cyber effects operations, resiliency of key systems, and support for the Cyber Mission Force teams; and
- $400 million for research into key cyber areas, such as network resilience.
“The Fiscal Year 2023 Defense Appropriations bill is a responsible investment in our national security that will keep our nation strong and the American people safe,” said Defense Subcommittee Chair Betty McCollum, D-Minn. “The Subcommittee held a total of 18 hearings, both public and classified, to gather input from the Biden administration as we wrote this legislation which makes strategic investments in our national security needs in order to keep America safe, secure, and strong.”
Overall, the draft legislation provides a total of $761 billion to fund programs in the Department of Defense (DoD) and intelligence community (IC). That’s s an increase of $32 billion from FY 2022.
In addition to the cybersecurity-related funding, the defense funding bill would provide $131.7 million for DoD research, development, test and evaluation to invest in “basic and applied scientific research, development, test and evaluation of new technologies and equipment.”
