Security Advocates Descend on Capitol Hill

In early March, 61 security industry executives – a mixture of manufacturers, integrators, distributors, and association executives – held 73 meetings on Capitol Hill in one day as part of the third Security Hill Day, hosted by the Security Industry Association (SIA), with support from the Electronic Security Association (ESA) and The Monitoring Association (TMA).

This now annual tradition promotes important policy priorities that affect the security and monitoring industries every day. Security Business caught up with Jake Parker, SIA’s Senior Director of Government Relations, to give us an overview of the important two-day event.

What were the main themes you wanted to attack on Capitol Hill?

Parker: The overall theme is just communicating with the policymakers about the value that the security industry provides for society as far as protecting people and property. For the first time, we had an economic analysis done on the impact of our industry that showed our industry has a direct economic impact of over $130 billion per year and an indirect total impact of over $400 billion, including more than 2 million jobs in the United States. We were sharing that with everyone.

When you communicate that to a Senator or a Congressperson, what's their reaction?

I think our industry is just not very visible to a lot of people – our services and products are often operating in the background. People benefit from it without even realizing it. Just getting more visibility and explaining that is helpful. Also, with the new Congress starting, there are a lot of new members – so it is a good time to introduce ourselves as an industry.

Is there a big difference between meeting with Congresspeople during an established administration vs. three months into a new administration?

It is definitely harder to get into a lot of details as far as legislative requests when this stuff is all just being formulated. It is a new Congress, and a lot of the legislation we're talking about hasn't even been written yet. So it is more high-level.

What are some of the top issues that were discussed?

One of the big things that is going to impact [SIA] members this year is tax policy. The current tax system needs to be renewed by the end of 2025 or revert back to what it was prior to the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. That would be a huge change if it were to happen. No one expects it to all just to expire, but it has to be renewed and adjusted. There were a couple of priorities. One is depreciation – it is currently phasing out, but under the renewal it would allow businesses to expense 100% of the cost of building improvements in the first year, for example. That would help encourage upgrades and renovations.

I know an ongoing issue of concern for the industry is a proposal to the FCC to reorganize the Lower 900 MHz frequency (from 902-928MHz). Was that discussed?  

That's probably the biggest issue that we're hearing about from members right now. There could be some really bad consequences to basically making that section of the band work less well or creating interference for our devices that are used widely throughout access control, video, and alarm systems. Last year, the FCC received comments on it, which SIA commented among a lot of other members. That is still hanging out there. That was definitely a multi-dimensional initiative – we are talking to the White House, the FCC and to the Hill on that. The FCC has a new chair, Brendan Carr – who was on the commission before – and two new members.

Were there other things that you really zeroed in on? I'm curious if tariffs were discussed.

When we had this event the tariffs were supposed to get into effect that day, and then they got delayed. It's been a pretty complicated thing to track. But certainly I know members did talk about the potential impact of tariffs in their meetings. This is a [Presidential] action, so Congress isn’t involved, at least right now, but I'm sure they will be. I know our members in particular are concerned about tariffs on products for Mexico, considering that's where a lot of electronics manufacturing has moved to from China after the last round of tariffs.

Was the uncertainty factor – especially with tariffs – addressed at all with some of the members of Congress?

Certainly, there's never really been a situation like this where things have happened so quickly in a new administration. Everyone's out there trying to track what's happening from day to day or changing from hour to hour as the case may be. It is not yet clear exactly what the point of all this is about tariffs. If it is going to be a long-term policy, that is different than just threatening them to get certain concessions on things that don't have to do with trade. I know some manufacturers are considering some price increases just to cover what is anticipated. But I think we'll start to see the actual impact a little bit later in the spring.

What about AI and privacy regulations?

Policies in those areas will potentially affect many of our members. That's why SIA is on record supporting a national data privacy law. We joined a group of trade associations asking Congress to consider this again. I'm not optimistic there's going to be such a law passed in this Congress, but at least there's an opportunity to start over from what we had seen in the last Congress. There is a new group out of the Energy and Commerce Committee in the House looking at introducing something that would align all of the common provisions among the state data privacy laws so far into a federal framework, which makes a lot more sense than turning all that upside down. Twenty states now have their own data privacy frameworks which are not identical, but they're mostly similar. Notably, that includes Texas, and Ted Cruz is the new Commerce Chair in the Senate.

Is SIA advocating for EU-style AI regulations?

No, not at all. The AI measure in the EU is really problematic. It is going to slow down and limit development of deployment of AI solutions in Europe. But a lot of people think a data privacy law as a first step would actually take care of a lot of the concerns about AI. So really it doesn't make sense to legislate on AI nationally until we have a national data privacy law.

Was there a lot of education on what our technology is intended to do and what it isn't intended to do?

We had a number of biometrics companies participate in the event, and I'm certain that's one of the things that they were talking about with Congressional offices. Just demystifying how biometrics works – there are so many myths out there, as you know, and differentiating between those different types of use-cases is super important.

What about school security? I know there was talk of a national school security standard in the past.

That is something members are talking about. We didn't get into the weeds, because there isn't a new proposal to discuss there. I think our talks were more focused on maintaining or hopefully increasing the current grant program funding that covers school safety. But there are standards in development. The new administration hasn't spoken on this yet, but we're hoping that they're going to re-emphasize the physical security aspects of school safety – hopefully in some official way.

We did hear from a Department of Education official who spoke at our dinner and said that the Federal Commission on School Safety is going to be reconstituted, and they are going to update their recommendations for schools. This was one of the big things coming out of the Parkland tragedy that happened during Trump's first administration.