Congresswoman Anna Eshoo was elected to Congress for the first time in 1992. Since 1995, she has worked for the Energy and Commerce Committee with an emphasis on health and technology. Last year, she was the first woman elected to sit as President of the Subcommittee on Education. She has authorized 41 bills approved by four presidents.
Eshoo has called for the need to tackle the nation’s excessive dependence on prescribed medicines manufactured overseas. Last September, she had co-authored the Washington Post Op-Ed on the nation’s extreme dependence on China for the manufacture of drugs and their ingredients. On May 1st, Eshoo proposed bipartisan legislation, the Prescription for American Drug Freedom Act, which mandates the National Academies of Science, Technology, and Medicine to convene a panel of professionals to examine the effects of U.S. dependency on life-saving medications and to make suggestions to Congress within 90 days to ensure that the U.S. provides a robust supply chain of medicines to protect the nation from normal or threatening incidents. The legislation was incorporated into the Heroes Act passed by the House, and she is looking forward to Senate to approve it.
Over-reliance on China is not exceptional to the supply chain of medications. It has been a decade since Eshoo has been seriously looking at the impact of the weaknesses in the telecommunications systems that have a significant effect on our national security. On 2 November 2010, she wrote to the FCC conveying major concerns about Huawei and ZTE, which have opaque ties with the Chinese government. Over the last decade, Huawei and ZTE tools have flourished all over the nation because it’s affordable as the Chinese government subsidized them.
They have also introduced a number of initiatives, including measures to set up a process for the federal government to eliminate Huawei and ZTE equipment from American networks and to set up a plan to ‘repair and upgrade’ obsolete equipment manufactured by corporations.
Earlier this year, Eshoo had written to the House on the Appropriations Committee urging them to assign comprehensive financial support for non-defense AI R&D, and 17 of her coworkers in the House supported her request. The financial allocation is an essential investment for the future of the country and should be a primary concern, according to Eshoo.
The Cyber Security gap is mostly occurring in the small businesses, non-profits, and local governments that are too small to hire a cybersecurity specialist and may never have funding to spend on security services. When it comes to developing technologies, thinking about security and privacy is crucial at every step of policymaking and at every level of government. Laws and regulations need to meet the requirement of privacy and security. Selection of vendors should also recognize privacy and information protection, particularly where problems overlap with national security. State enforcement also ought to review privacy and defense.
The federal government must exchange knowledge regarding risks and weaknesses more effectively. It is definitely not expected that the public procurement manager in every local council would be knowledgeable of national security threats related to routers, modems, printers, and a myriad of other Internet-connected devices and electronics. National security is a subject for the federal government. In order to protect individual Americans, the federal government’s concern comprises safeguarding our government (federal, state, and local) and our economic interests.
