Senators Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.) and James Lankford (R-Okla.) have introduced the Federal Acquisition Supply Chain Security Act, meant to mitigate and address risks from the global procurement network, The Hill reported Tuesday.
The bipartisan bill would create the Federal Acquisition Security Council, which would coordinate with industry to assess supply chain threats and help guide federal strategies on risk management, the report detailed.
“We can’t simply respond to supply chain threats piecemeal, we’ve got to have a system in place to assess these risks across the government,” McCaskill said in a statement.
Lankford said the bill establishes criteria on how each federal agency identifies risk, to protect government information technology systems from security threats.
The Senate sanctioned China’s ZTE in an annual defense policy bill passed Monday. In addition, the Department of Homeland Security banned products by Russian-based Kaspersky Lab last year.
