to
jumpstart greater private sector
investment in cyber security
we launched a new public-private
initiative in april
it begins with a 100-day sprint to
improve cyber security in the electric
sector
and we'll follow that with similar
initiatives in natural gas pipelines
water and other sectors
well okay for more on why the buy
administration
not doing anything to protect our actual
infrastructure
we're going to welcome back former
chairman of the homeland security
committee
senator ron johnson republican from
wisconsin thank you very much senator
i just want to ask what is this public
private
thing that biden started in april and
where has that surfaced and what is it
doing
i have no idea it may just be rhetoric
but larry
i will first off say this is a very
difficult issue
the folks on offense have a huge
advantage on people on defense
i think as your previous guest said
information sharing is key i think one
of the most effective things have been
put in place
is really the information sharing and
analysis centers
these are basically information sharing
hubs between different
players in individual industries you
know there's one for the electrical grid
uh there's a number of them financial
services as well
so i i you know i don't have a great
deal of faith in government i think
government can play a role
certainly in terms of sharing
intelligence and information that it has
but as your previous guest
said the government often times is a
one-way
sharing uh center it only sucks up
information doesn't
distribute it very well um so again it's
it's just a huge issue it's a real
problem
uh yeah got it so senator just one i
don't want to
pick at nits but in his uh rift there
that we showed on
on the tape he mentioned brandon biden
mentioned we have to protect
our electricity grid and he included
natural gas
well that's good but the green new deal
is going to take out natural gas does he
understand that
uh maybe uh but that's but that's
that's our ideology that's that's what
they want to do is as crazy as it seems
to so many of us
as much as we realize it's going to
increase energy prices
it's going to put us at a competitive
disadvantage globally it's going to harm
our economy this is going to hurt
real people uh the the very people they
purport to
to try and help uh it's gonna harm
things so again
that's the democrat mindset i i can't
get inside a democrat mind
well i'm just thinking um
there's look dan briet who appeared
before you former energy secretary
uh said basically there's nothing in
these
quote infrastructure bills that would
deal with cyber security so far as he
knows
and maybe they're going to rush into
that now
with these announcements today from the
white house although i didn't hear
anything concrete
you're a keen observer of both the
homeland security
and the infrastructure are you aware of
anything that they put
in there to protect our nation's um
cyber security no i'm not you know for
example one thing i've been advocating
for a long time
is to get in place some of these large
power transformers that if
in case of a cyber attack or potential
emp
or gmd event we could have backup
transformers to put in place right away
we haven't funded those yet that would
be a reasonable thing to do and we
haven't done it
across administrations we just don't
take this seriously
too often times we think this is just
too horrible to contemplate something
like this would happen
my concern what we just witnessed is
this may just be
a demonstration in terms of what they
could potentially do you know
they did that in ukraine a number of
times they shut down the electrical grid
just to kind of show ukraine what they
could do
if ukraine didn't buckle so this this is
an existential threat to america our our
electrical grid
our power structure and i don't think
any administration quite honestly is
taken seriously
so they're going to come back at us
again i mean you had this announcement
from the ransomware people
they say they don't want to break
anything up all they want is money i
don't know 100 million dollars
they're located inside russia all right
um they're not attacking russia they're
not attacking uh eastern european as
dan buret just said sounds a lot like to
me like they are russian
or russian-backed and senator johnson
they're going to come at us again
are they not well let's face it u.s we
have the money
and so this could be a plain ransomware
situation or could be state actors
i don't know i'm not sure we'll ever be
able to find out because attribution of
these cyber attacks is extremely
difficult
so this is a huge problem but we need to
be more resilient
we also have to be able to recover
better and that requires planning
and again we're just not very well
prepared all right
senator johnson speaking of
infrastructure as we always do
uh in the papers today the four corners
are supposed to meet with the president
meaning the um
mr schumer and mr mcconnell from the
senate and um
kevin mccarthy and nancy pelosi from the
house when we negotiated we call them
the four corners
and they're going to meet with president
biden in your judgment
is there any possibility of a so-called
compromise
or is this kind of just going to be a
ritual thing
uh for show-and-tell well first of all
when congress is
looking at spending money there's always
a possibility of a bipartisan
agreement that's what concerns me so
much about bipartisanship that
we had four trillion dollars in covered
relief during 2020
hadn't even spent a trillion dollars
when democrats
you know rushed through and passed this
1.9 trillion dollar
uh covert relief package 721 billion of
that isn't even spent until 2022
and beyond so what i've been advocating
inside the conference is fine you know
we do need to re
repair all kinds of aspects of our
infrastructure but why don't we take the
721 billion dollars it clearly wasn't
covered relief because it's not even
spent this year
why don't we rescind that and repurpose
it toward infrastructure spending i wish
that's what the 1.9 trillion dollars
would have done in the first place
senator uh will the conference hold
together
on opposing big tax hikes
well i think in terms of proposing big
tax hikes yes
my concern always when it starts coming
down to spending
so if they oppose the tax hikes
how do you get a compromise bill because
pelosi and schumer
and biden it seems to me want higher now
we've never had that right
infrastructure has never been financed
by
income tax hikes it's usually things
like toll roads and
user fees or bonding in this case to me
it's ideological go after rich people
but if the republican conference says no
big
income taxes either on large or small
businesses or capital gains or
individuals
i don't see how a deal is possible no i
don't either and let's face i think
president biden talked to goodgame when
he was talking about unifying this
nation and healing it
he hasn't done anything of this of the
kind whatsoever so my guess is the
democrats realize they're going to do
this
reconciliation they're going to jam this
through on a
completely partisan basis and that's
what has me so worried because there
will be no moderation then
in terms of how much we spend we're
already 20 trillion dollars in debt by
the end of
this fiscal year will be 30 trillion
dollars then 32 then 34 i mean
where does this end how does it end it
doesn't end pretty larry
all right senator ron johnson sir thank
you thank you for your time
we appreciate it very very much i