Mr. Speaker, we have now gone about 1,000 days since the attack on this country on 9/11, and this bill is supposed to deal with our efforts to protect the homeland. I think that to evaluate how good those efforts are, we need to compare…
Mr. Speaker, we have now gone about 1,000 days since the attack on this country on 9/11, and this bill is supposed to deal with our efforts to protect the homeland. I think that to evaluate how good those efforts are, we need to compare the challenges with the resources that we are applying to meet those challenges. And if we do, I think there will be no doubt that we are mistakenly trying to do this job on the cheap.
Let me give my colleagues some examples of inadequacies in this appropriations bill.
Air cargo. Air cargo is a huge threat to the safety of the flying public. If the public understood what a tiny percentage of cargo that is shipped on passenger planes is actually inspected, they would be shocked. It is a tiny percentage. We ought to do something about that. This bill prevents us from doing that.
The gentleman from Florida discussed correctly the need for more in- line explosive detection devices at airports. We wanted to try to do that in the bill; but, again, we are precluded from doing that by the budget ceiling. The chairman of the committee himself has indicated how important that is. Yet we are not going to be able to make any significant advances on that front under this bill.
If we take a look at the problem that we have with military pilots being able to communicate with commercial pilots, if you have a terrorist incident or a potential terrorist incident and a military aircraft is trying to track a civilian aircraft, it would be kind of nice if those two pilots could talk directly to each other and to the ground. But right now, we do not have the software system in place that will enable that to happen. That is a dumb omission.
We also have some problems with respect to ports.
Now, the new idea in protecting our ports is to establish inspectors at foreign ports so that they can review what goes into those cargo container boxes before they ever leave that port on their way to the United States. But we have a big problem. There are only 20 ports out of the 45 major ports that we need to cover where we have that kind of inspection activity going on; we have none going on in China, and China imports three times as much through cargo shipping as does Hong Kong, for instance.
Worse yet, the inspectors on the job in those foreign ports are assigned temporary duty for about 6 months apiece. They cannot get to know the territory; they cannot get to know the people they work with in those ports during that time. They should be long-term assignments, but we do not have the money in the bill to do that.
The northern border. The PATRIOT Act, with all of its problems, the PATRIOT Act required that we have a specific number of inspectors on the northern border. We are 2,000 short of the number that was supposedly guaranteed by the PATRIOT Act. First responders, those are the policemen, the firemen who deal with the incidents where they occur in the local community, on the ground, we have been told by the Rudman- Hart Commission that there is about $90 billion worth of need that we need to address. We have only met about 15 percent of that need.
We have fewer firefighters in this country today than we had on 9/11. Do you call that progress?
And then, we have the massive problems in the Homeland Security Agency. Of the 500 career slots in that agency, or roughly 500 career slots, 171 of them are vacant. Twenty-five percent of the slots in that agency are filled by political appointees. Is it any wonder that there is considerable chaos?
More than a year after the reorganization, that agency still does not have a phone directory. I was talking to a fellow 2 days ago who was trying to talk to the Homeland Security Agency about getting a contract, to meet a need that they were advertising; he did not even know who to call or how to find out because they do not have a phone directory.
It does not make a lot of sense.
General Zinni has made the point that when it comes to dealing with this terrorist threat that we have a lot of tactical activities going on but not very many strategic. I just think we need to face the fact this bill is not adequate.
And then, as has already been mentioned by several other Members, it has this weird feature which allows the Homeland Security Agency to give a contract that would be valued up to $10 billion to a company for the purpose of tracking who crosses our borders, they want to give that contract to a company that has already jumped our borders and decided they will locate for tax purposes in Bermuda. That means they duck their taxes, and your constituents and mine get the privilege of making up the difference.
Great deal. Great deal. That is why I would urge every Member of this House to vote against the previous question on the rule so we can offer amendments to correct these problems and to vote against the rule if we cannot bring down the previous question.
Mr. Speaker, I am inserting in the Record at this point the text of the comments I made in the report accompanying the Homeland Security Appropriation bill made in order by this rule.
Additional Views of David Obey
It has been a thousand days since al Qaeda launched its
first successful attack within U.S. borders. Since that time
many changes have taken place inside our country and in the
way we deal with other nations around the world. Most of
those changes have been justified as steps that were
necessary to insure that nothing like September 11th ever
happens again. But how much progress have we really made? How
far have we come in reducing the likelihood that it will
happen again?
One thousand days has often been viewed as a period of time
for communities and even whole nations to stop and take
stock. What have we done right? What have we done wrong? What
are our largest remaining areas of vulnerability? What are
our prospects of getting hit again?
I think our efforts to prevent future terrorist attacks can
be divided into three stages. The first step was to hit al
Qaeda and hit them hard. Take the battle to them. Destroy
their leadership; their ability to communicate; their ability
to raise and transfer funds; their ability to obtain weapons
and to move members between countries and most importantly,
their capacity to organize attacks against the United States.
The second step was to understand the factors in the Arab
and Muslim worlds that feed this kind of senseless anger and
why that anger has been directed toward the United States.
Why did so many ordinary people in the Muslim world cheer on
September 11th and what does it take to reduce or at least
redirect the anger that is now so focused on us.
Thirdly, what are we doing to upgrade our defenses here at
home? What goals have we set? Do they make sense? How well
have we performed in reaching those goals?
Attack Against Al Qaeda
With respect to the first goal, I think the United States
has for the most part performed well particularly if we look
at the early stages of our effort and if we view al Qaeda as
an organization, rather than an idea or a cause. The
organization's leadership has been significantly diminished.
While a number of its most senior leaders have survived, the
best evidence indicates that they have grave difficulty
communicating with others in the organization or playing any
kind of day-to-day leadership role. Significant numbers of
lesser figures in the organization are still at large and
they are very dangerous. But they face much greater
challenges moving about the world, receiving the training
necessary to successfully execute large scale attacks and
getting the materials and support necessary to launch such
attacks.
The initial phases of our attack against al Qaeda were
highly successful. The planning and execution of the
overthrow of the Taliban in Afghanistan was a high-water mark
in our efforts against terrorism. The initial cooperation
that we received in the wake of September 11th--from our
traditional allies in Europe and also from nations across the
globe that have at times been less than friendly to U.S.
interests was also impressive.
losing focus in afghanistan
But somehow, we lost our focus. Having destroyed the
Taliban's capability to rule Afghanistan we did not move
aggressively to insure that the government that we support in
its stead could fill the void. We did not invest anything
like the level of resources for Afghanistan that was needed
to make rapid, noticeable changes in the quality of life.
Because of that, in a large portion of the country, we did
not have the leverage to strengthen the hand of central
government, extend the rule of law, and deny terrorists safe
haven. We also did not sufficiently exert our influence to
insure that the Afghan army that we were attempting to build
was representative enough of the various ethnic and tribal
groups across the country to become a credible force for
stability and unification.
But the attack on al Qaeda began to loose steam outside of
Afghanistan as well. Talented intelligence operatives with
highly specialized knowledge of Arab culture, language and
political behavior were diverted from the listening posts and
operations centers across the Arab world where al Qaeda
activity was most likely to surface to undertake a quite
different mission. Financial resources, talented
administrators and trainers who might have helped our allies
in the Arab world improve their own military and intelligence
capabilities against indigenous terrorist organizations were
also diverted. The striking momentum that characterized the
early phases of our efforts against Al Qaeda has greatly
dissipated. The organization has lost much of its backbone,
but many of its pieces are still out there attempting to
reorganize and regenerate the segments that have been lost.
We no longer have the focus to our effort to insure that that
does not happen.
Still, you would have to say that our efforts against al
Qaeda have been a success--at least if al Qaeda is viewed
simply as an organization. The problem is that al Qaeda is as
much as idea as it is an organization and ideas are hard to
kill. Bullets can kill organizations--they sometimes only
strengthen ideas.
As General Anthony Zinni said recently in a lecture before
the Center for Strategic and International Studies, while we
may be winning the war on terrorism on a tactical level, on
the strategic level we don't appear to even have a plan.
Osama bin Laden never intended al Qaeda to be the command
structure for the jihad against the United States. The term
``al Qaeda'' means simply, ``the base.'' Bin Laden wanted to
create a network to support and encourage jihad. He wanted to
attack and overthrow the Arab governments around the world
that he viewed as corrupt and out of sync with his views on
the teachings of the Koran and he wanted to attack the
foreign power that stood behind most of those governments--
the United States. Bin Laden's challenge was to create a
blueprint that could be used for such attacks and to inspire
large numbers of disgruntled members of the Arab and Muslim
world to follow that blueprint. He wanted to create a
movement that represented more than a small army of
terrorists--a movement that could bring down moderate Arab
governments and, with the overwhelming support of Arab
peoples, drive the United States from the Middle East.
American Image in Arab World
While bin Laden has suffered huge organizational setbacks
over the past thousand days, he has been enormously
successful in progress made toward his one strategic
objective. He has captured the attention of the Arab world
and much of the Muslim world. To a remarkable degree he has
even won their sympathies, and in some instances, their
commitment. If we wish to reverse that, we must begin to
think strategically as well as tactically. We must succeed in
our efforts to take the second step, to reshape the image of
the United States in the Arab and Muslim worlds. We must not
only strengthen the determination of our friends in the
region to resist terrorism but also encourage them to address
the underlying problems that feed it. Even for many of the
brightest and most industrious young people in many Arab
countries, hope is in short supply. While the energy
resources of the region have brought great wealth to a few, a
chance has largely been missed for many governments to use
those resources to build opportunity economies.
How we change our image in the Arab world and what policies
we should pursue to accomplish it is an issue that will spark
debate and some division in this country. That debate needs
to begin and it is the responsibility of leaders in both the
executive and legislative branches to begin it.
Upgrading Our Defenses At Home
Given how poorly we have done over the past thousand days
in stemming the anti-American passions in the Middle East, it
is even more important that we do a good job in the third
step required for a successful strategy: upgrading our
defenses here at home.
In evaluating our performance on that front, it is
important that we distinguish motion from movement. I am
afraid that in many respects we have had more activity than
we have had progress.
On September 11th, we had more than 130 agencies and
activities of the federal government engaged in some aspect
of homeland security. Those pieces of the bureaucracy were
spread across most of the Departments of the federal
government. There was no central capacity to oversee or
monitor how well they worked together. Many of these agencies
had only a fraction of the resources necessary to accomplish
the security tasks that experts in the field believed could
prevent future attacks.
So, after a thousand days, what has changed?
Homeland Security On The Cheap
Well, we are certainly spending more money. The government
is spending about $5 billion a year more just on airport
baggage and passenger screening. We have expanded the size of
the customs service and the immigration service. We have
bought new equipment in our ports to screen cargo coming into
the United States from international shipping and we have had
a significant
growth in law enforcement activities. But if you compare
the challenge we face with the resources we are using to
meet those challenges, it is clear we are trying to do
this on the cheap. We are like someone with a good paying
job who must get to work on time every day in order to
keep that job. But instead of building the most reliable
car he can find, he gets a fifteen year old model--one
that will get him there most of the time but will
eventually cost him his good paying job.
Failure in establishing our defenses against terrorism
places lives at risk. It also puts at risk our capacity as a
society to generate wealth. Although the greatest loss would
most certainly be measured in human life, penny pinching on
necessary security is foolhardy from a simple economic
perspective.
This legislation continues funding failures
Many in government, including the President and the
Attorney General, have warned that we are likely to be
attacked by terrorists on our homeland within the next nine
months. Given this information, you would think that we would
be doing everything humanly possible to improve the security
of our homeland. The legislation accompanying this report is
the prime vehicle to provide the resources to do that.
Unfortunately, it represents a stark failure to improve
protection of our citizens in any meaningful way against the
wide-ranging scope of the threat facing us today.
The fact is that we are not doing all we can to protect
Americans from another terrorist attack. The legislation
accompanying this report provides an increase of $2.8 billion
or 9.4 percent over the previous year. Yet excluding Project
Bioshield and user fees, the bill is only $1.1 billion or 5
percent above the previous year. Despite the Department's
huge security responsibilities, this is only slightly above
inflation.
This legislation provides a resource level equal to only
slightly more than inflation for our customs and border
protection and enforcement operations and for port security.
Worse, this legislation cuts funding for programs designed to
improve the response capabilities of our local police,
firefighters and emergency responders by $327 million or
seven percent from 2004.
OMB's homeland security spending analysis
OMB has prepared an analysis of homeland security spending
which is seriously flawed. Programs that were not counted as
homeland security a few years ago have now suddenly been
shifted into the homeland security category in order to
convey the impression of a greater increase in effort than
has actually taken place. Nonetheless, the OMB exercise is
instructive for getting a big picture sense of what we are
doing to address critical security issues. In total, OMB
argues that we have gone from spending $20 billion a year--or
about two tenths of one percent of GDP in fiscal 2000--to $46
billion a year, or less then four-tenths of one percent
today. That means that, even based on OMB accounting, our
increase in homeland security spending has been less than two
tenths of one percent. To provide some perspective on that
number, the share of GDP paid in federal taxes has dropped
from 20.8% to 16.4% during that same period--a decline of
4.4% or twenty two times the size of the increase in
spending to protect against terrorism.
Another perspective on the level of effort we have made
thus far is the oft-used analogy of Pearl Harbor. Pearl
Harbor led us to the creation of the concept of Gross
Domestic Product. The Roosevelt Administration believed that
it might require 50% of our total output to take on the
Germans and the Japanese simultaneously. They asked the
Commerce Department to develop a method of measuring national
output. They not only produced the concept that is now used
around the world to measure economic activity, but they were
also actually able to reach that goal of spending nearly half
of the nation's output on the war effort.
We do not need to put 50% of our output into this war or
even 5%. Whether you think that our war effort in Iraq is
associated with the war on terror or is a separate and
competing activity, expenditures related to that activity
account for more than 1% of GDP--more than twice as much as
we are spending on activities directly related to protecting
the homeland. Given that fact, it is blatantly ridiculous to
pretend that we cannot afford what we need to protect against
terrorist attacks.
Another major attack could erase a trillion or two trillion
dollars from the total valuation of the New York Stock
Exchange. It could substantially slow the pace of economic
growth for a year or more. Again, the most important
consequence of a terrorist attack is the loss of human life,
but penny pinching on homeland security makes no sense. Even
if we consider only the economics of the issue, the Institute
for the Analysis of Global Security found that the cost of
the 9/11 attack was nearly 2 trillion dollars, including the
loss in stock market wealth, lower corporate profits and
higher discount rates for economic volatility.
Now it should be noted that the Administration's FY 2005
budget attempts to make a case that in future years we can
reduce the size of federal deficits from the current record
levels and still afford additional tax cuts. In making that
case their projections for future year spending levels in
various categories of the budget are revealing. Homeland
Security spending is essentially locked into place at current
levels. In fact, what OMB is telling us is that unless the
American people or the Congress force a change in priorities,
what we have now for securing the nation is all that we are
going to get and could decline by as much as $900 million.
But the question we should be asking is: Are we really
doing enough? Are there things that we really ought to be
doing that the resource levels we have allocated to the
problem prevent us from doing?
aviation security gaps remain
One lesson from September 11th that virtually no one could
miss is the need to secure our airlines and our airways. We
have spent considerably more on this objective than on any
area of homeland security. But there are a surprising number
of resource issues still unaddressed with respect to
protecting our airways.
For example, we still do not have an effective system of
explosive detection. Put more directly, it is still much too
easy to get explosive materials onto passenger airlines.
The Transportation Security Administration has identified
equipment that could have provided us with that capability.
It's expensive, (it would have cost close to $3 billion to
install the equipment nationwide) but it would have
dramatically improved our capacity to detect explosive
materials. It also would have significantly reduced the
number of screeners required in airports around the country.
In fact, the savings in TSA personnel costs from the use of
this equipment was estimated to be large enough to offset the
entire cost of the equipment.
The Transportation Security Administration proposed to OMB
that the agency purchase much of the needed equipment when it
was preparing its plans to meet the 2002 explosive detection
requirement set in law. But OMB decided that the expense
could not be accommodated within the tight, arbitrary limits
for homeland security spending which the President and the
Director of OMB had decided to impose. Republicans in
Congress then adopted a budget resolution that did not
provide the Appropriations Committee with the latitude to
move forward with the purchase. As a result we do not have an
effective system of detecting explosive materials and that
failure is due entirely to artificial constraints on
resources and incompetent budgeting. TSA has recently
acknowledged that the more expensive machines would pay for
themselves within 3 to 5 years.
Following September 11th there was broad recognition of the
fact that we needed to restart the sky marshals program and
insure that there were enough marshals on domestic and
international passenger flights so that potential highjackers
would always have to think twice about the likelihood that a
sky marshal might be present on a targeted flight.
Now the exact number of marshals that the President and the
Congress agreed were necessary has remained classified. But
few people realize that we are no longer operating at that
level. No one has come forward with convincing arguments that
the level was too high or that adequate safety can be assured
at a lower level. We have simply once again allowed arbitrary
budget limits, applied to one small portion of the budget, to
drive a decision that may unnecessarily put a great many
Americans at risk. Under the President's budget submission
for Fiscal 2005, we will have 20% fewer sky marshals than the
President and the Congress agreed that we needed just two
years ago. That is in spite of the fact that there has been a
significant increase during that period in the number of
domestic and international flights and in the number of
passenger miles flown.
We have had--and continue to have--serious communications
problems between military pilots who have the ultimate
responsibility to insure that commercial aircraft are not
used to crash into buildings (and the commercial aircraft and
the FAA system that controls them). Quite simply, military
and commercial flight systems cannot easily and quickly talk
to one another and the potential that leaves for
miscalculation and mistakes it horrific.
Despite the fact that this problem could be solved for
relatively little money, the military felt the commercial
system should foot the problem and the FAA and the airlines
felt it should be addressed in the military budget. OMB
decided the cheapest solution was not to decide.
Finally, last fall, I decided for them. The $10 million
that was needed was earmarked in the Defense Appropriation
bill. I suppose that's a good ending to the story, except
that the delay in funding means that the system will not be
operative until 2006. That gives you one more thing to think
about when you board a plane. It also provides more than a
little insight into how decisions about homeland security are
being sorted out within the executive branch.
rail vulnerabilities
These examples of inaction with respect to airway security
are serious, but they do not begin to compare with the nearly
total abdication of our responsibility to assure the safety
of rail transportation. As the recent attacks in Spain have
demonstrated, our enemy is not wedded to attacks on any
single transportation mode. He will watch and wait until he
finds a vulnerability that can be exploited.
Rail is vulnerable in two ways. One is from attacks against
our freight rail system that handles a huge portion of the
materials,
products and chemicals that allow our economy to function.
The second is from attacks (like those in Spain) against the
roughly 13 million Americans who use passenger rail systems
each day.
Luckily, the Department of Transportation and other
agencies in the executive branch began a process of sharing
classified threat information with the nation's rail freight
carriers in the late 1990s. The plans developed as a result
of that process are in place and provide a foundation for
significant security upgrades. But the plans are dependent
upon the federal government meeting certain obligations it
accepted during the planning process. Under those plans
federal security forces are specifically required to monitor
tracks and facilities. Not only have we failed to do that but
we have not even designated the agency or department that
will supply the forces or establish a means of training them.
As disquieting as the lack of progress in securing our
heavy freight and passenger rail systems may be, the security
efforts on behalf of transit systems is even worse.
lack of progress in transit security
The White House has failed to mediate the dispute between
the Departments of Homeland Security and Transportation over
who is actually in charge of transit security. A General
Accounting Agency report recommending a resolution of the
issue has been rejected by both departments. The impasse
continues despite the fact that it is halting any significant
progress in securing the systems and despite the fact that
transit systems have been the most frequent worldwide targets
of terrorist attacks.
Neither Department is willing to spend even a small
fraction of the security related costs most experts feel is
necessary. Department of Transportation security funding for
transit systems totals $37 million in the current year and
the Department of Homeland Security has allocated only $115
million over the past two years. This legislation contains
only $111 million for rail and transit security needs. In
contrast, the transit industry estimates that $6 billion
is needed for security training, radio communications
systems, security cameras and limiting access to sensitive
facilities.
What is the Department of Homeland Security's answer to
these unmet needs?
They testified this spring that more funds are not
necessary until they have had a better opportunity to define
the problem. Now, that is an orderly approach, which we
should applaud as long as the Department can guarantee al
Qaeda's cooperation with their schedule. My concern is that
the Department is likely to get some help they have not asked
for in developing a definition of the transit security
problem.
The Department has clearly become aware of how vulnerable
they are to criticism about their lack of serious attention
to transit issues. Only two weeks ago, in a classic move to
cover their bureaucratic backsides, they issued a directive
to transit systems ordering them to take a series of actions
that the Department's own data collection system indicates
have already been completed by the vast majority of transit
authorities across the country.
cargo container vulnerabilities
Since September 11 the vulnerability that has most troubled
many experts has been maritime cargo and the exposure of our
ports to a nuclear, chemical or biological attack from a
weapon placed in a shipping container. As the president of
the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Tom Donohue, has pointed out,
such an event could cause death and destruction on a scale
far beyond the attacks launched on September 11. It could
virtually shut down our global trading system for an extended
period of time. The economic consequences would be almost
incalculable. Terms like ``economic downturn'' or
``recession'' would not begin to describe the aftermath.
The Bush Administration has spent billions looking for new
technologies with the capacity to knock a nuclear warhead out
of the sky if it were launched in the nose cone of an
intercontinental ballistic missile. It has invested heavily
in the development of other technologies that are intended to
serve that purpose but probably cannot. But they seem
unresponsive to the fact that a rogue or a terrorist
organization can simply place such a weapon in a shipping
container and explode it upon arrival in New York Harbor or
in Los Angeles, San Francisco, New Orleans or Boston. A ship
can bring into this country a far less complicated weapon
than one which could be placed on an ICBM. It can be massive
in size and its does not need to even be thermonuclear in
order to cause massive numbers of casualties, destruction and
economic chaos.
So what have we done to protect ourselves? Protecting our
ports is not unlike protecting our airports. We need to have
multiple security perimeters. The first should be overseas.
That requires a whole new approach to cargo inspection. It
requires that our inspectors leave the United States,
establish cooperative relationships with port security
officials in countries around the world that ship to the
United States. It requires that they establish a system of
certification and best practices with major exporters
around the world.
This is not a Democratic proposal. This is roughly the
proposal that George Bush's own appointed head of the Customs
Service, Bob Bonner, took to the White House in months
immediately following September 11th. It is the proposal that
the Council on Foreign Relations Task Force, headed by former
Senators Rudman and Hart had endorsed. It is the proposal
that the U.S. Chamber of Commerce has written editorials to
support.
But the White House waited until last year to request the
first dime for this effort. Whatever presence the United
States has had in foreign ports over the past one thousand
days has been entirely as a result of Congressional increases
to homeland security spending--increases that were opposed by
the White House, increases that the White House threatened at
various stages in the legislative process to veto, and
increases which on one occasion the White House did veto.
Last year, the White House reversed themselves and finally
requested a portion of the funds that were needed for
container security. Their position changed from, ``we can't
afford it'' to ``we needed to wait.'' That is a turnaround
and I suppose we should welcome it. But the $126 million that
the president has proposed for FY2005, and is contained in
this legislation, will not adequately fund the program. It
will not even allow us to fully staff the 45 foreign ports
where DHS had planned to inspect all manifest documents. It
will not permit our current foreign inspection programs to
become permanent. We are currently in only 17 ports. We
currently have no container security presence in China, the
biggest U.S. trading partner in terms of cargo containers.
The number of cargo containers arriving to the U.S. from
China is more than three times those arriving from Hong Kong.
More troubling than the mere question of resources is the
lack of political or bureaucratic clout behind this critical
initiative. If having inspection agents working with foreign
customs officials is to be a truly effective means of
understanding what is in foreign ships before they leave for
U.S. ports, it requires developing long term relationships
between our agents and those who control the foreign ports we
wish to monitor.
This involves a new level of training and expertise for our
customs agents. It involves establishing continuity in the
relationship we have with host governments in terms of what
we expect to get and what incentives we can provide to those
who cooperate. Nothing could be more destructive to this
effort than to rotate in and out of foreign ports agents with
only a few months of experience based on a deliberate system
of staffing through temporary assignment. But that is
precisely what we have done. In the few foreign ports where
we do have a presence, that presence is a U.S. customs
officer detailed there on a six-month temporary duty
assignment. Those agents don't even know what the problems
were between the U.S. and the host government when the
program was initiated. They are certainly not people that
officials of the host government would want to invest much
time in getting to know--they will be gone before there is
any pay off from developing a relationship.
port vulnerabilities
If the overseas effort to identify the contents of cargo
containers is the outer perimeter for protecting our ports,
the ability of the Coast Guard to interdict, board and
inspect U.S. bound shipping at sea is the next perimeter. Yet
the Coast Guard's capacity to perform that function has also
been restrained by lack of resources. The Administration
frequently states that the Coast Guard is now boarding all
vessels that are deemed to be ``high interest.'' That means
80% of all other vessels are not boarded.
Observing, tracking and controlling ships as they approach
and enter into American waters is the next perimeter in
securing our ports. Systems have been developed that are very
similar to the systems by which air traffic control directs
airplanes entering into U.S. airspace and approaching U.S.
airports. These systems, however, are available in only nine
ports, leaving 45 major ports without such a system. Again,
this is penny wise and pound foolish. It is also a bad
decision in terms of long-term cost effectiveness. More
automated systems permit more rapid detection of ships that
are not following control directives; they can be operated by
fewer people and are long-term cost savers.
And, inside our ports, there are numerous critical issues.
One is preventing unauthorized persons from having access to
ships, containers or post storage areas. A second is
protecting hazardous chemicals and materials from attack. The
Coast Guard estimated that the 185 commercial seaports in the
United States would need about $7 billion to assess
vulnerabilities and take necessary action to correct those
vulnerabilities. These port authorities do not, in most
instances, have the revenue raising authority to pay any
significant portion of these costs. This year was the first
time the Administration requested any money whatsoever for
this purpose, and it only requested $46 million. The Congress
has been able to appropriate only $587 million or less than
10% of the money needed to do the job. This legislation
includes an additional $125 million for port security, which
will keep us on the slow-moving path to addressing all of our
port vulnerabilities.
securing our land borders
Another major priority has been securing our land borders--
in particular, the 3000 mile U.S. border with Canada or 5000
miles if we include Alaska. Despite our continuing strong
economic and political ties to Canada, the situation of the
two nations with respect to potential terrorist attacks is
quite different. Canada's smaller role in world affairs and
the image of Canada in the eyes of
the international community make it a much less likely target
of attack than the U.S. At the same time, Canada's vast
geography and relatively small population have led to far
more lenient immigration policies than those in place in the
United States.
As a result there will continue to be significant
differences between the two countries on how external
security concerns are managed. That means that the question
of how to control our border and the movement of people and
cargo across that border is suddenly a matter of much greater
concern.
Recognizing that concern, the Congress included language in
the Patriot Act calling for the tripling of the number of
border agents and inspectors on the Canadian border above the
levels we maintain on September 11th. As of October 2003, we
were still more than 2000 people short of this goal. In
addition, there was a clear need for significant additional
equipment on the Canadian border to insure that those new
people would be efficiently put to work: equipment like air
stations, radiation monitors, and surveillance equipment.
To date we have fewer than 4000 agents and inspectors on
the border. In other words, about one third of the positions
promised in the Patriot Act are still unfilled. The FY 2005
budget promises no increases from current levels. And the
President' out-year budget projection provides a strong
indication that personnel strength at the border will
actually decline rather than increase over the next five
years. With respect to equipment, we have provided the first
air station (again one not requested by the Administration)
and some radiation monitors, but have made no critical
investments in things such as surveillance equipment.
preparing those who respond to terrorist attacks
The events of September 11th made clear that the brave men
and women serving in the police, fire and emergency medical
units in New York, New Jersey, Virginia, District of Columbia
and Maryland needed a significant amount of additional
equipment and training to more effectively respond to the
types of attacks that occurred on that day. It was also
apparent that first responder units across the nation did not
have most of the equipment they would need to deal with a
nuclear, chemical or biological attack.
The needs of local first responders were spelled out in
considerable detail in the Rudman-Hart reports. But the
federal government has already allowed most of the burden to
fall on local governments. Since the capacity of those local
governments to support such investments in the tough economic
times is limited, progress in equipping first responders has
been minimal.
Of the $98 billion in first responder needs identified by
the Rudman-Hart report, the Feds have provided less than
$14.5 billion, or 15%. As a result only 13% of fire
departments can effectively respond to a hazmat incident. An
estimated 57,000 firefighter's lack the personal protective
clothing needed in a chem-bio attack. An estimated \1/3\ of
firefighters per shift are not equipped with self-contained
breathing apparatus and nearly half of the available units
are 10 years old. Only half of all emergency responders on
shift have portable radios. And we still have massive needs
for interoperable communications equipment. On site emergency
personnel working for different agencies need to be able to
talk to each other. We will probably never know how many
victims in the World Trade Centers could have been saved if
they had known that they needed to evacuate the buildings. We
know that was a communication problem of disastrous
proportions.
This legislation cuts funding for programs designed to
improve the response capabilities of our local police,
firefighters and emergency responders by $327 million or
seven percent from 2004. These professionals are put on the
front line risking their lives every day. They are especially
put at risk when terrorists attack our homeland, as we saw
from the number who died at the World Trade Center. These
professionals need to be prepared for the various types of
attacks we may face and they are not fully prepared today.
It is disgraceful that this legislation provides less
funding in this area, not more.
These are only a few examples of where corners have been
cut in establishing the line of defense here at home.
inadequate homeland security leadership
But there is more to the story than simply talking about
resources. In many instances, we have not had the leadership
necessary to organize available resources in effective ways.
Prior to the creation of the Department of Homeland
Security, the White House identified 133 separate agencies
and activities within the federal government that played a
role with respect to homeland security. The creation of a
Department was the Administration's answer as to how to
better manage and coordinate those disparate activities. The
problem, however, is that only 22 of those 133 activities
became part of the new department. A total of 111 agencies
and activities, including the FBI, the CIA, the Defense
Department and many other key components of the overall
effort remained on the outside.
But for whatever reason, the effort to have centralized
control and coordination of all of those activities within
the White House was diminished. When Tom Ridge went to DHS
his replacement within the White House was not given the same
clout to knock heads together and insure that Departments and
agencies are working together toward a common mission. Too
frequently, we have had 112 units of government headed off on
their own with no central coordination, as Attorney General
Ashcroft's press conference and the reaction within the
administration to that press conference last week so clearly
demonstrated.
And even within the new department there have been serious
problems. In its first year of operation, DHS has
disappointed even those with low expectations. Bureaucratic
snarls have been so intense that on its first anniversary the
Department still did not have a working phone directory. My
staff has been asking for one for more than six months and
has yet to receive it. It has also been reported that when
callers phone the Department's hotline number, it just rings
and rings. Members of Congress from the President's own party
have expressed grave concerns about the inability of the
Department to respond to requests for information in any kind
of a reasonable time frame.
One possible cause of the rampant chaos at the department
has been the injection of a huge number of political
appointees. Since the creation of the Department more than
one quarter of all personnel who have been hired for
departmental operations have been political appointees. These
individuals often appear more fixated on positioning
themselves politically than on the nuts and bolts security
problems, which the Department must address. We have seen a
huge number of press releases promoting the Departments
efforts but we have few concrete efforts worthy of such self-
promotion. We, for instance, still do not have regulations
regarding the licensing and registration of hazardous
material truckers nor do we the detailed guidance for
flight and cabin crew training to prepare for potential
threat conditions which was mandated by the Aviation and
Transportation Security Act more than two years ago.
Typically, political appointees remain in their appointed
positions for less than 24 months. At that point, they are
off to some other part of the administration or headed back
into the private sector. That means building true long-term
competency within any Department is heavily dependent on
recruiting a committed professional career staff. But the 114
political appointees now swarming the halls at DHS have--if
anything--impeded that process. Of the 500 career positions
needed to run the department, 171 remain vacant. One of the
most critical positions in any Department is that of Budget
Director. In only 14 months DHS has had three budget
directors.
Ironically, this legislation provides funding that is
sixty-two percent higher than this year for Departmental
Operations. Even though we were told that formation of the
Department of Homeland Security would not cost us a dime, it
now appears that the Administration has realized that this
was not true: $65 million is provided in this legislation for
the Department's headquarters and $70 million is provided for
the ``security-critical'' new personnel system. I do not
question the need for this funding. But I do think that it is
instructive that these are higher priorities for the
Administration and the Committee majority than are protecting
our border, ports, transit, and aviation system.
Instead, this $135 million could have been used to purchase
and install hundreds of additional radiation portal monitors
at our borders and ports. The Committee majority admits that
it is, and I quote this report, ``aware of a need for over
1,000 more'' radiation portal monitors than are funded by the
Committee.
Instead, this $135 million could have been used to inspect
a much greater percentage of air cargo for explosives than we
do today. While the Committee report calls for a doubling of
the screening for explosives of cargo carried on passenger
airplanes, this ``doubling'' still leaves a large percentage
of such cargo at risk.
Instead, this $135 million could have been used to secure
additional critical infrastructure, like chemical facilities,
transit systems and ports. The Committee majority agreed with
the Administration's plan to have only thirty-five percent of
protective actions that it recommends actually implemented
for ``first tier priority critical infrastructure
components''. What this means is that sixty-five percent of
the actions the Department recommends to protect the public
will not be implemented next year.
The Administration and the Committee majority seem to be
very patient when it comes to protecting our citizens on our
homeland. Unlike them, I remain unconvinced that terrorists
will wait a decade for their next attack.
congress should not abdicate its role
About a year and a half ago I spoke to a group of reporters
at the National Press Club about where the country stood at
that time in protecting itself against terrorist attacks. I
feel that the coverage of that event was fair and I think we
exposed some problems that, as a result of that coverage,
have been fixed. But I also think that the press and the
public have a presumption that this is such a complex issue
that we simply have to trust the President and his advisors
in the Executive Branch to do what is right. I think many of
my colleagues in Congress have felt the same way. While I
understand people's tendency to leave this complex calculus
to the ``experts,'' I think this town is currently awash in
new information about the decision making process within this
administration which indicates that is a bad idea!
First of all, that is not the approach to decision making
that the Constitution requires of us. It is our job to
second-guess. When so much is at stake, the Congress, the
press and the public have the clearest possible obligation to
insure that the decision making within the Executive Branch
is measured, deliberate, based on the best available
information, and consistent with the quality of judgment
befitting the seriousness of the risks to which we are
exposed. Had that happened in the wake of 9/11 or even a year
and a half ago there are many points in this statement that I
might have been able to leave out.
One problem in all of this, frankly, is that it was hard
for the press and the public to believe much of what I
reported a year and a half ago. While the facts presented in
that statement were well documented they presented a picture
of executive branch decision-making that was wholly
inconsistent with what the nation or the press corps wanted
to believe. It was hard to accept the idea that in this
moment of great national crisis we did not have systematic
methods of screening information, examining policy choices,
debating the pluses and minuses of each alternative, and
making strategic choices based on an exhaustive effort to
find the best possible alternative. But in recent months we
have learned time and time again that this was not the nature
of decision-making within this administration.
Ron Suskind, using the exhaustive notes and papers of
Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill, tells of an extraordinary
decision making process in which information is collected on
the basis of decisions that preceded them. Richard Clarke
describes a process both before and after 9/11 that was quite
similar. So does Bob Woodward.
My own experience with the President himself, demonstrates
that this President has listened as infrequently to those in
the Congress who know something about homeland security as he
did to our allies or the career American military before
rushing into Iraq.
But any one who has been listening these last few months is
pretty well aware of the fact that we were not vigilant and
were not picking up on clear information of elevated threat
levels prior to 9/11. We did not respond in the summer of
2001 to that threat in the same manner that we responded 18
months earlier when similar threat information triggered a
massive response to the millennium threat. We did not have an
orderly or honest process to measure the pluses and minuses
of invading Iraq. People at the highest levels silenced,
dissent and criticism and irreversible actions were taken
based on flawed information.
We based our plans for security and reconstruction of Iraq
on intelligence from a single organization outside of this
government which both the State Department and the CIA said
was unreliable. Unfortunately, that is all spilt milk. Even
if we understand those mistakes, we can't go back and try it
again.
What I am talking about today is not spilt milk. We can
correct these policy mistakes and we can possibly correct
them in a time frame that will prevent the next attack. It
all depends on whether we are ready to get real.
Now, I am not optimistic by nature. Perhaps it is merely my
nature that leads me to believe that the cauldron that is
today boiling in Southwest Asia, North Africa and the Middle
East will likely spill over once more onto the shores of
North America. If we are not ready, I do not want to look
myself in the mirror for the rest of my life and wonder why I
didn't ask tougher questions or insist on more responsible
and responsive policies. I think the overall performance of
our government to date in the area of homeland security
merits a greater sense of skepticism and urgency on the part
of the press and the general public as well.
We lived in a more dangerous world prior to September 11th
than most Americans realized. Our efforts to making the world
safer have met with mixed results and the numbers of persons
who wish us harm and will go to great lengths to inflict harm
have grown steadily during the past thousand days. Clearly
some of our efforts have done little more than fed the flames
of discontent and hatred.
That places even greater pressure on our last lines of
defense, protecting our borders, our transportation systems
and our capacity to respond to terrorist acts in this country
if, God forbid, they are again committed. But as the facts I
have today outlined well document, those efforts remain under
funded and poorly managed. The President proposed that we
have 20% fewer sky marshals than we had a little more than a
year ago. We have hired only two-thirds the people that the
Patriot Act mandated for protecting our Northern Border. We
have invested one-tenth what is needed to protect our ports.
We have only just begun to take the steps needed to protect
our rail and transit systems. Our first responders have only
a fraction of the tools they need. And worse still, the
agencies that have been entrusted with the responsibilities
are still wallowing in bureaucratic chaos.
As we saw last week the Justice Department and the Homeland
Security Department are still in the business of surprising
each other. Simply hoping that these problems will somehow
work out is not unlike the wishful thinking that many engaged
in as they prepared to invade Iraq. Misinformation and bad
planning can lead to excruciatingly painful results. The time
to reexamine our security, our security budgets and our whole
thinking in this area is now. The Congress must act to put a
stop to this mindless, non-information based approach to
policy and national strategy. It is as likely to prove
catastrophic in the defense of our homeland as it has been in
installing democracy in Iraq.
Congress may control nothing more than the purse strings--
but that is enough. The Congress has all the power it needs
to reopen this discussion, insure that assumptions are well
founded, the information is the best available, the
management is sound and the resources are adequate. What it
will take to significantly improve the systems that protect
this nation is small in the relative scheme of things--a few
tenths of a percent of GDP may be no more than we are now
spending on Iraqi reconstruction and one-twentieth of what
we have handed out in tax breaks. Given the stakes, we
cannot afford to do less.
amendment offered in committee to provide $3 billion more
That is why I offered an amendment in Committee to provide
$3 billion to fix some of the most critical security holes.
Our homeland security agencies could do more with this
additional funding--
They could put more radiation and surveillance monitors at
our borders and ports;
They could increase surveillance on our transit systems;
They could increase surveillance by local police of
critical infrastructure facilities;
They could improve the ability of our police and
firefighters to communicate with each other and be suited
properly;
They could inspect additional containers coming into the
United States;
They could put more air marshals on flights;
They could increase our stockpile of antibiotics;
They could increase air patrols of our borders; and
They could fix some holes in our current aviation security
screening system.
This $3 billion, however, would have only been available to
do this if the President agreed. It is disappointing and
shortsighted that the Committee voted along party lines not
even to give him that choice.
The Chairman of the Committee said during markup that he
would probably support my amendment if he had additional
budget allocation. The budget allocations are severely
restricted because the Administration has decided that tax
cuts and the costs of a war should go hand-in-hand. This
squeezes spending on virtually everything else.
We need to stop being penny-wise and pound-foolish. We need
to push the Department of Homeland Security to make needed
security investment now, so that we can be protected
tomorrow. If we do not make those investments until tomorrow,
our protection may come too late.