National Cyber Director (NCD) Harry Coker used a Jan. 7 farewell address prior to the new Trump administration taking office to recap his office’s work on range of security initiatives since 2021, and to urge the incoming administration and Congress to push over the finish line his office’s long-sought goal of achieving “harmonization” of Federal cybersecurity regulations.
The push for regulatory harmonization is a core tenet of the White House’s National Cybersecurity Strategy published in March 2023, and Coker has been a vocal proponent of recent legislative activity to achieve that goal.
Those efforts include the Streamlining Federal Cybersecurity Regulations Act introduced in July by Sens. Gary Peters, D-Mich., and James Lankford, R-Okla., that would task the NCD to lead a regulation harmonization committee and publish a harmonization framework within a year.
The bill was approved by the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee but failed to gather traction with the full Senate.
Coker’s office did its part to further the goal when it announced last summer that it was building a pilot reciprocity framework to be used in a critical infrastructure subsector which will give it “valuable insights” into how to best design a harmonized cybersecurity regulatory approach.
The new pilot, the Office of the National Cyber Director (ONCD) said, is based off the findings from responses from its July 2023 request for information that sought input from stakeholders to understand existing challenges with cybersecurity regulatory overlap and inconsistency. ONCD received more than 2,000 pages in responses from 86 organizations representing 11 of the 16 critical infrastructure sectors.
During a Jan. 7 address to the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, Coker talked about the harmonization effort and its enduring importance.
The NCD said achieving regulatory harmonization remains one of several “hard problems” that remains on his office’s list, and one that “our partners in industry and critical infrastructure have long said gets in the way of their ability to do business and to focus on cybersecurity.”
“Armed with the industry’s call to streamline, we worked with Congress to write bipartisan legislation that would bring all stakeholders, including independent regulators, to the table to advance the regulatory harmonization and reciprocity that industries need,” Coker said.
“Many of us were disappointed that this hasn’t become law yet, but we’ve laid the groundwork for the next administration and Congress to do the right thing for our partners in the private sector,” he added.
Looking ahead beyond his own service as national cyber director, Coker said that the “mission will endure.”
“There are two things that I am certain of,” he said. The first is that “our digital foundation is getting stronger and the proactive approach will continue to help protect our great Nation.”
The second, Coker said, is that the ONCD team “will serve the American people in the Trump Administration and beyond with dedication and excellence. My ONCD colleagues don’t know any other way.”
