Hearing of the House Select Committee on Homeland Security - Homeland Security and 9/11 Commission

Federal News Service September 14, 2004 Tuesday

HEADLINE: HEARING OF THE HOUSE SELECT COMMITTEE ON HOMELAND SECURITY

SUBJECT: HOMELAND SECURITY AND 9/11 COMMISSION

CHAIRED BY: REPRESENTATIVE CHRIS COX (R-CA)

WITNESS: TOM RIDGE, SECRETARY OF HOMELAND SECURITY

BODY:

REP. COX: The Select Committee on Homeland Security will come to order. Pursuant to notice, the committee will proceed today to hear testimony from the secretary of the department, Tom Ridge, on the Department of Homeland Security's response to the 9/11 Commission's recommendations.

The gentleman from Mississippi.

REP. BENNIE THOMPSON (D-MS): A motion for unanimous consent that opening statements be limited to the chair and ranking member.

REP. COX: Is there objection? Without objection, so ordered..

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REP. THOMPSON: Thank you, Mr. Secretary, for being here with us, for all your exceptional service over the past three years.

Mr. Secretary, as you know, there is strong bipartisan support for your department. Every member of this committee wants your department to succeed, and we strongly and support virtually all of the initiatives that you have launched over the past 18 months. Our differences arise with respect to the speed and scope of the administration's homeland security program. We realize that you cannot snap your fingers and instantly achieve all the security that our times demand, yet we continue to have glaring gaps in our homeland security that could be addressed through a more aggressive and robust effort by the administration. Let me mention a few examples.

Chemical plants have been characterized as prepositioned weapons of mass destruction, yet the department has visited only a couple of dozen of the hundreds of chemical plants that present a serious threat to their surrounding communities. There has not been a single hearing in this House of Representatives on the administration's proposal to strengthen security at these plants. Clearly, if this legislation were a priority for the administration, this bill would have passed the House long ago.

Stopping a nuclear and radiological weapons from entering the United States should be our greatest homeland security priority. However, your department's programs to install technology to screen cargo containers for these materials is woefully behind schedule. Radiation portal monitors would not be installed at all our seaports by December 2004, as promised. And under the current budget, it may be years before these devices are available on the southern border. This is unacceptable. The 9/11 Commission identified the failure to screen air cargo as a serious vulnerability in our aviation security system. In response to the events in Russia, your department ordered that all air cargo be screened for flights to and from that country. Consistent with this measure, it seems that the 100 percent screening can be accomplished. It's just a matter of having the desire and will to devote the necessary resources to get it done.

The administration often mentions that it has stockpiled enough small pox vaccine for every person in America. It does not mention that the program to pre-vaccinate thousands of emergency workers was a dramatic failure. Consequently, I do not believe we have an effective program in place to vaccinate our population in the event of a small pox outbreak. We also have only 159 vials of anthrax vaccine in the stockpile, even though a manufacturer has the capability to produce thousands of doses of this vaccine.

Providing effective communication systems for our first responders has been identified as a top priority for your department. Special patch kits have been developed and additional frequencies identified, but improvements have still not been seen nationwide. Also, more resources are needed to ensure first responders can communicate with one another. Remarkably, the administration's budget eliminated the only grant program for interoperable communications in existence, and cut other programs that could be used to address this critical need.

In sum, even though we know that al Qaeda continues to plot attacks against the homeland, we are not moving as quickly or as strongly as we should to close these security gaps. We have the resources to do so. It's just a matter of the administration's priorities.

Mr. Chairman, I -- (inaudible) -- Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

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REP. THOMPSON: Thank you, Mr. Chairman, I will not take up the entire five minutes. Mr. Secretary, you are aware of the lack of inspections of chemical plants, and the fact that we don't have any real security standards for our chemical plants at this point. Is there a reason why we haven't taken stronger mandatory measures to protect chemical facilities up to this point?

SEC. RIDGE: Congressman, your point-there have been no mandatory measures that have been taken, but there have been many initiatives undertaken in conjunction with the chemical industry and hundreds of millions of dollars invested to add security and prevention. You are absolutely right, we literally have thousands and thousands of chemical facilities around the country. Within the unit of the infrastructure protection, I daresay it is one of the top, if not the top, priority. And what we've done is take a look at these facilities and, by and large, provide the Homeland Security advisor of each state as well as the operators of the facilities certain documents and planning tools as we beef up security. Characteristics and common vulnerabilities-some of them have-many of them have the same kinds of vulnerability. So to a certain extent, once size does fit all. We've given them indicators of what they might look for potential terrorist activity in terms of surveillance reconnaissance, mindful of their need to limit access to critical areas within their facilities. And we've also given them a buffer zone protection plan so they can begin working both internal-inside their operations and external-outside the community-to protect these facilities, and, in time, these have all been distributed, and we've begun working with some of the largest and most critical companies to see that the vulnerabilities are assessed and the buffer-zone protection plans are put into place, and then working with the state and particularly the local police and fire chiefs to go in an confirm that the vulnerability gaps have been closed and the buffer protection plans have been put in place.

But we still have a long way to go, Congressman. There are thousands of those facilities out there, but we, frankly, started with those closest to the most densely populated areas that have the greatest potential for harm if they were turned from an economic asset into a weapon.

REP. THOMPSON: Thank you, Mr. Secretary. Of those thousands of facilities you mention, how many do you have knowledge that your department has actually visited?

SEC. RIDGE: I believe your earlier comment with regard to a couple dozen is probably correct. I'll get that number back to you. I think one of the challenges that we have is to understand, one, that there are common vulnerabilities among many of them and, two, we are going to rely heavily upon those first responders at the state and local level to help us make some of these assessments and help us ensure that the buffer zone protection plans are put into place. After all, these are the men and women who are going to respond to it in the first place, and there have been a lot of initiatives that they've undertaken as well. So I can get back to you with a specific number that we have visited but, again, part of our challenge in trying to deal with thousands and thousands of chemical locations is building a standard at certain level for protection. And that's our first effort-to create a standard of best practice for certain facilities that we want to see adapted across the board. To date, the chemical industry estimates they've invested about three-quarter of a billion dollars in security measures. I'm not in a position to confirm it, but we are aware that we've gone into some of the chemical facilities where literally there have been hundreds of thousands of dollars' worth of investments made.

REP. THOMPSON: So is it your department's belief that the voluntary approach to working with chemical plants is working, and it's better than having a mandatory situation with the chemical plants?

SEC. RIDGE: It is our-until such time as Congress mandates a specific approach, we will continue to work in collaboration not only with the chemical companies but in collaboration with the first responders, who are the ones that are going to be called in the event something happens in that community. We'll begin to see that the best practices are adopted and the appropriate investments are made, and we will continue to prioritize within all these chemical companies and go out and personally visit and personally oversee the development of the protection zones around those and just work our way down the list with the help of state and local first responders.

REP. CAMP: The gentleman's time has expired. Mr. Secretary, the need to improve border security and have a national strategy for the management of our borders has been evident for some time-for decades, some might say-and your testimony goes to improvements that have been made --

REP. DICKS: Will the chairman yield just for a point of inquiry?

REP. CAMP: Yes.

REP. DICKS: Are we going to go vote at the end of the chairman's --

REP. CAMP: We're going to continue to stay in session, and the chairman has gone to vote and will come back, and we'll continue to move forward. So we're going to continue to question during the vote, yes. There's 10 minutes of debate, we think, on a motion to recommit, and we'll continue to question as long as we can during the vote. I believe the chairman said he had to leave at 4:30. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Secretary, and your testimony-obviously, we have a lot of improvements that we need to make at our border. Your testimony goes to some of the changes in bringing travelers and cargo into the U.S. more safely, and as chairman of the subcommittee on border and infrastructure, we've had a lot of hearings on the progress that has been made there.

But my question is this-in a single day-and there's a recent article in "Time" magazine that's coming out highlighting this-in a single day, more than 4,000 illegal aliens crossed the 375- mile border between Arizona and Mexico-every, single day. And as the article indicates, there's no searches for weapons, there's no shoe removal, there's no ID check. Where are we in stopping that, and where is this administration on that specific issue?

SEC. RIDGE: Well, first of all, I'm familiar with the article and regret that, at least to my knowledge, there was no effort to contact the Department that has some statistics that might have been helpful to the author and to highlight some of the changes that we've made over the past 18 months. Having said that, I'm not in a position to confirm any of their statistics one way or another. I am in a position to tell you, however, that we've got-because of congressional bipartisan support, we've got about 1,500 more agents-border patrol, folks down there-than we did before. We are now using unmanned aerial vehicles to get us to places where heretofore it's been pretty difficult for the border patrol to get to. We've adjusted our tactics accordingly. But we've heightened, particularly, our effort in the areas that had previously been very, very poor since the Arizona Border Patrol Initiative, where we continue to pick up, I think, probably, 50 percent more people than we did in previous years, and there's a list of initiatives that we've taken at the border that were not reflected in the article. I'm not going to say to you, Mr. Chairman, that the border is no longer porous, there are no longer illegal immigrants coming across, and in the span of 18 months between more technology, more sensors, more border patrol agents and, frankly, better integration of effort, I think we're doing a lot better job in the past 18 months than we probably did in the past 18 years.

REP. COX: Thank you, Mr. Secretary.

SEC. RIDGE: There's still more work to do, though. I'm the first one to admit we still have more work to do.

REP. COX: I'm going to yield the rest of my time to Ms. Dunn.

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