Description:
S. 3207 would direct the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) to improve the capacity of state and local governments to protect against cybersecurity threats. The bill would require CISA to appoint a cybersecurity coordinator for each state. Those coordinators would help entities affected by malicious cyber activity access the financial, technical, and operational resources that are available from the federal government. For this estimate, CBO assumes that the bill will be enacted in fiscal year 2020. Under that assumption, CISA could incur some costs in 2020, but CBO expects that most of the costs would be incurred in 2021 and later. On the basis of information from CISA, CBO expects that the department would need 56 new employees to serve as cybersecurity coordinators at an average compensation of $179,000. After accounting for the time needed to appoint those coordinators and adjusting for inflation, implementing S. 3207 would cost $37 million over the 2020-2025 period, CBO estimates. Such spending would be subject to the availability of appropriations (see Table 1).
