Hearing of the House Committee on Homeland Security Subject: Holding the Department of Homeland Security Accountable for Security Gaps

Statement

HEARING OF THE HOUSE COMMITTEE ON HOMELAND SECURITY
SUBJECT: HOLDING THE DEPARTMENT OF HOMELAND SECURITY ACCOUNTABLE FOR SECURITY GAPS

CHAIRED BY: BENNIE THOMPSON (D-MS)
WITNESS: MICHAEL CHERTOFF, SECRETARY, DEPARTMENT OF HOMELAND SECURITY

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We now yield five minutes to the gentleman from Alabama, Mr. Rogers.

REP. MIKE ROGERS (R-AL): Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Welcome back. Glad to see you. I understand in your earlier testimony -- I just came from the Armed Services hearing -- but I understand that you had already testified to the Border Patrol training status, and --

SEC. CHERTOFF: Yes.

REP. ROGERS: -- we, according to testimony, now have over 14,000 trained Border Patrol agents.

SEC. CHERTOFF: That's correct. We have sworn in 14,471.

REP. ROGERS: And I understand further that your testimony was that within 16 months, at the end of '08, you're going to have a threshold of 18-3 in targeting.

SEC. CHERTOFF: Correct, correct.

REP. ROGERS: Well, that's admirable. I'm pleased to hear that. As you know, that's an area that I paid a lot of attention to. And I hope that you're right, and you all hit that target.

But what I want to talk with you more specifically about today is K-9s. You've talked with this committee before about that and you've already expressed your respect for that asset and its efficiency and effectiveness. As you're probably aware in the 9/11 commission act that we passed and was signed into law by the president, it requires the establishment of a national explosive K-9 training team, and give you 180 days to get that set up and begin producing these dogs.

Do you know where that program is at present?

SEC. CHERTOFF: I don't. I do have to obviously say, as you know, money has to be appropriated in the '08 fiscal year for this, so -- and we don't yet have a bill. So obviously all this is contingent on Congress appropriating the money. Other than that, in terms of where we are in the planning on that, I would have to get back to you on.

REP. ROGERS: Okay, if you would.

One of the things that I've found in my visits to the various border ports of entry is that we're grossly understocked in K-9 assets. And because of that rotation of the dogs on and off, many of the spotters watching folks come across the border are able to alert their clients as to when is a good time to come across.

SEC. CHERTOFF: Right.

REP. ROGERS: So that's not acceptable.

But we also found recently when I went down to Mississippi for a field hearing that they don't have enough cadaver dogs either in service. One of the things I would urge you to consider is in addition to explosive detection dogs and, of course, dogs that can detect drugs, that we do look at cadaver dog training programs as well. As you know, post-Katrina and 9/11, with the biggest hurricanes, we always have a need for these. And we could establish some real partnerships with local governments to allow them to maintain them once we get them trained up. They'll be called up for service when they're necessary and from my understanding, these are very inexpensive dogs to train up. They don't require the same sophisticated breeds.

Which brings me to the second point, and that is in touring the various facilities around this country and seeing the teams, both in the Department of Defense and in Homeland Security, find that most of the dogs that we have in service are obtained from overseas. We don't have a sufficient level of breeding programs here domestically. These dogs are brought in primarily from Germany and Holland and places such as that. And we urged in the bill that you all try to find ways to obtain an adequate source, but also look at possibly establishing domestic breeding programs.

Is that something that you would feel comfortable pursuing, given that we hear it's an over-reliance of foreign sources for these assets?

SEC. CHERTOFF: Well, first of all, I have a very high opinion of the dogs. And I would be, again subject to appropriations, happy to see what we can do to increase the supply. I recognize that, you know, not all the dogs succeed in training, so you have to breed more dogs than you're actually being able to deploy. But time and again, they seem to be, in terms of reliability, portability and usefulness, about top of the line on a whole variety of functions: human smuggling as well as explosives and things of that sort.

So I'd certainly be interested in pursuing, you know, whatever we can legally do -- I don't know whether some of this would be Department of Agriculture -- to promote breeding of these dogs.

REP. ROGERS: Well, y'all -- within your TSA organization, you've got some pretty sophisticated breeding technology -- research going on out at Lackland. And there's other research going on domestically. But I just -- I'm concerned about the fact that we are relying so heavily on foreign imported dogs. And frankly, many of our allies in Europe are also. And that's just not prudent, in my view.

I want to change gears. Recently Chairman Carney and I had a field hearing on agroterrorism in Pennsylvania. And we had the department's chief veterinarian testify before us, and we were concerned at the fact that he only had one full-time employee beside himself in there and some pretty aggressive planning and policy-making goals set before him. And I understand that by 2010 he's to have 37 people.

I know the challenges you have in getting personnel in the department, but can you speak to this specific instance and what you think you can do to step up that personnel level?

SEC. CHERTOFF: You know, the foundation for setting this up -- and let me begin by saying, you know, we recognized early on that we needed to have a focus on health, and that involved not only human health but animal health and food safety, which tend to be linked together.

Now, obviously the real expertise is in the Department of Agriculture and the FDA. But we needed to have our own capability, particularly through the NBIS system or NBIC (sp) system, which is the integration of all the intelligence.

We now have an Office of Health Affairs set up. We did put a veterinarian in as the number two -- and again, subject to appropriations, and we have asked for a budget for this year that would grow that office. We are looking to expand it, particularly -- not because we want to supplant the Department of Agriculture, but because in doing our planning and our coordinating for incidents, we want to make sure we have enough in-house expertise so that we can do that in an intelligent way.

At the same time, through the -- our Operations Coordination Division and the president's HSPD-5 incident management executive order, we do have Department of Agriculture and HHS expertise on issues like food and animal health participating in our integrated planning and our incident management, if we have an incident, so we can draw upon those existing resources to supplement what we have.

REP. ROGERS: Right. Thank you, sir.

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