Christopher Dodd

Mr. DODD

Mr. DODD. Mr. President, I am pleased to be joined today by my colleague, the ranking member of the Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions, Senator Kennedy, and Senators Harkin, Mikulski, Jeffords, Bingaman, Murray, Reed, Edwards, Clinton, Rockefeller and Daschle in introducing the Head Start School Readiness and Coordination Act. Let's be clear about one fact: Head Start works. More than 21 million children have gone through Head Start since the program began in 1965 and currently around 900,000 children are enrolled. Head Start has to be one of the most studied of all Federal programs. But, with each study, there is no question about the results--Head Start children are learning. Could they learn more? Could they make greater gains? That's what our bill is about. Our bill has four basic points. Our bill will: strengthen the Head Start workforce by requiring stronger Head Start teacher credentials and wages more comparable to public school pre-kindergarten and kindergarten children; improve Head Start's academic focus, particularly instruction in preliteracy; expand Head Start to all eligible preschool children by 2008, including serving 200,000 infants and toddlers through Early Head Start by 2008; and, promote better coordination across all early care and education programs in every State. The biggest problem today with Head Start is not the children Head Start serves, but the children who are left behind--those who are not participating in a Head Start program. While the majority of Head Start children enter the program below national language and literacy norms for all children of similar ages, about 25 percent of children entering Head Start are extremely behind their peers. For these children, Head Start is a particularly important jump start to build school readiness skills. If our goal is to help Head Start children make even greater gains than they are currently making, then we need to raise the educational credentials of Head Start teachers. We require that within 3 years, all newly hired Head Start teachers must either have an Associate's degree or become enrolled in a program leading to an AA degree within a year from when they're hired. In addition, we require a teacher with a Bachelor's degree in every classroom over the next 8 years. Currently, over half of State-funded pre-kindergarten programs require a teacher with a BA. We should require no less for Head Start children. Unlike the House bill, we provide additional funding to meet this stronger teacher requirement--in fact, $3 billion over 5 years. The average Head Start annual salary is about $20,000. The average annual salary for a kindergarten teacher is $43,000. If we do not raise Head Start teacher salaries to be more in line with public school pre- kindergarten and kindergarten salaries, Head Start programs will never be able to attract and retain a stronger workforce. Next, we improve the academic focus of Head Start. We require Head Start programs to align their curriculum and classroom practice with local school districts and state school readiness standards. We require every Head Start teacher to have on-going training in literacy instruction. And, we provide funds for more books for Head Start classrooms so that each classroom can truly be a literature-rich environment. While the House bill does not even include enough funding to keep pace with inflation, our bill expands Head Start to all eligible preschoolers by 2008. In addition, we double the current setaside for Early Head Start from 10 percent of Head Start funding to 20 percent. To me, the earlier we can reach these children, the greater the likelihood that they can make even greater gains than current children, who, for the most part enter Head Start as 4 year-olds. Last, this bill will promote better coordination across all early care and education programs in every state--without a block grant. We require that every state designate or create an advisory council on early care and education. The council will issue a report to serve as a roadmap for how States can better coordinate various early childhood programs and services. An expanded State Head Start Collaboration office would work with the advisory council to ensure that Head Start fits into the big picture set by the state for early childhood education. Children in Head Start can learn more. But, they can't learn more unless we require a stronger workforce and unless we invest the resources necessary to attract and retain that workforce. While I agree that we need to strengthen the literacy focus of Head Start, we cannot do it unless every Head Start teacher is provided with literacy training. The Administration and House Republicans believe that we need a block grant to promote coordination and collaboration. I disagree. The block grant serves only to weaken the comprehensive services offered by every Head Start program. Tell the 208,000 children who needed dental treatment, the 71,000 who needed speech and language help, the 21,961 who had developmental delays, the 47,280 who needed treatment for asthma, the 25,869 who had vision problems, and the 20,260 who had hearing problems, that they did not need the comprehensive services provided by Head Start. Doctors don't water down medicine that's working, and neither should we when it comes to Head Start. But clearly House Republicans have chosen expediency over bipartisanship. That's wrong. Our bill, the Head Start School Readiness and Coordination Act, will further improve Head Start, without weakening the comprehensive services that Head Start children need. While we look forward to working with House and Senate Republicans in an effort to craft a bipartisan bill, we also wish to emphasize that we hold certain fundamental beliefs about Head Start that are in our bill and should be part of any final bill. Last night my colleague, Senator Alexander, introduced legislation to promote better coordination and the creation of Head Start Centers of Excellence. His interest and creativity help stake a marker for basic principles that in addition to my bill should be part of any final bill. I agree with my colleague that there is consensus around improving school readiness, improving coordination, and increasing accountability. I look forward to working with Senator Alexander and Senator Gregg, the Chairman of the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee and others who joined with me today in drafting a bipartisan bill to promote the strongest start possible for low income children prior to beginning kindergarten. In the wake of the No Child Left Behind Act, now is not the time to leave Head Start children behind. I ask unanimous consent that a short summary of the legislation be printed in the Record.

Mr. DODD

Mr. DODD. Mr. President, I rise to pay tribute to Kevin A. Pope, of Waterford, Connecticut, who passed away on July 14, 2003 at the age of 53. I join all those who knew Kevin Pope in expressing my sadness at his untimely passing, and extending my deepest sympathies to his wife Donna, their two sons Jeffrey and Jason, their grandchildren, and Kevin's entire family. In an age when so many of us move around from place to place, Kevin was a true Connecticut son--he was born in our state, grew up there, got married and raised children there, and lived there until his unexpected passing last week. Kevin was a devoted husband and father to his two sons and was a vital member of the Waterford community. He was especially active in youth sports in Waterford, coaching Little League and Babe Ruth baseball and Preteen Basketball, umpiring baseball, softball, and basketball games, and working with the ``Chain Gang'' at Waterford High School football games. He was also a member of the Waterford Democratic Town Committee and the New London Lodge of Elks, and was the president of the New London Central Labor Union. I met Kevin through his association with the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers, where, since 1990, he was a Grand Lodge Representative serving not only Connecticut, but New York, New Jersey, and all of New England. I am grateful for all of the occasions that we had to work together, and I especially appreciate the support he gave me over the years. Kevin was a loyal union man since joining the IAM while working for General Dynamics in 1969. He earned respect throughout Connecticut and the Northeast for standing up for the rights and interests of workers. He was known as a good leader, and a skilled and effective negotiator as well. There are so many people in factories across the Northeast, and nationwide, who have never met Kevin Pope, but their lives are better off today because of his efforts. Kevin represented the best of the State of Connecticut. I know I speak for a great many people in Connecticut when I say that he was taken from us much too soon. Once again, my thoughts and prayers go out to Kevin's family, his friends, and his colleagues. We will all miss him very much.

Mr. DODD

Mr. DODD. I thank our colleague from Nevada for that observation. He represents a unique State, he and the Presiding Officer. Literally millions of people, not just from the United States but from all over the world, visit Nevada. It is a special set of responsibilities that people of Nevada assume by inviting the world to come. And obviously, this could easily be a target. It is hard to imagine what the next target could be, but I promise, there are people planning it. They are planning it as we sit here today. Whether it is a nuclear powerplant, whether it is a major office building, whether it is a recreational facility, they are doing it. I don't like saying that, but I can't say anything less to my colleagues because that is the conclusion of people who have spent hours and days and weeks examining all of this and telling us. I thank my colleague from Michigan. I am grateful to her. She is a remarkable Senator. In a short amount of time, she has made a significant contribution to the public debate. I am very grateful to her for joining me in this particular effort. It is a lot of money. I have never offered an amendment of this magnitude. I see the distinguished senior Senator from West Virginia, who has been around many years. This is almost $15 billion. I have never offered anything quite like this. But I have never felt as concerned and as worried about a situation as I am about this one. Shortly there will be a vote. We will more than likely not prevail. But there will be a record about those who believed we should do more. I hope we get proven wrong. There is no desire that we would like to be proven right. But I have a sense of foreboding that by not taking the steps, we are leaving ourselves very vulnerable. The trauma of America being hit again and being told we should have done more to prepare for it and didn't could have an effect far beyond the damage done by the attack itself, to know that a Congress was convened and was given information that told it to do more and do a better job and was given a chance to do so and turned it down. That is something I think history will judge us very harshly on if we make that mistake. I hope we don't. I hope the majority of my colleagues who may be listening to this brief debate this morning will break ranks and come over and say: We can do better. Let's go back to the drawing board and come up with the resources, provide the support we need for our first responders. I have no further requests for time. I don't know if my colleague from Michigan wishes to be heard further. I appreciate the generosity and kindness of the distinguished Senator from Mississippi who has been very patient listening to us make this case. I am very grateful to him and Senator Stevens, as well as Senator Byrd, for taking as much time, a couple of hours this morning, to express our views on the subject. Again, the Senator from Nevada said it well. I had planned a whole series of smaller amendments on all sorts of pieces of this. The Senator from Michigan and I sat down and decided, instead of just trying to do this item by item by item, we would ask our colleagues to respond based on this report and come up with, in the Office of Homeland Security, a set of priorities that they may determine differently than what our amendment agenda might provide. For those reasons we urge the adoption of the amendment. That can be done by supporting the motion to waive the point of order. I yield the floor.

Mr. DODD. My colleague again raises a very good point. Again, I am told by staff that every one of our men and women in military uniform in Iraq and Afghanistan have with them devices that allow them to determine immediately if they have been affected by chemical or biological weapons. There is a certain amount of equipment or type of equipment they can have which will allow them to immediately know. And they should have it. The fact is, we have nothing like that available to our first responders at home who may be asked to respond to those situations. The Senator makes the point so well. Again, our discussion of what our military needs to protect our country is not the subject of this debate. The mere point we are trying to raise this issue is that we are spending this amount in these places, and if someone were to come in and say we need more--and they will, no doubt; I guarantee you, as I stand here, there will be a request saying we need more--I suspect there will not be just two or three Senators sitting here arguing about whether or not we are going to get it, and if there are budget points of order against an amendment, they will be defeated when they ask for a waiver. I guarantee you, it will go through here like a hot knife through butter when it comes. The issue is, we are making a similar case for a similar set of challenges. Because I don't think my colleague was here when I started the debate, let me just read the first lines of this report written by Les Gelb, who is now stepping down and is being replaced by Richard Haass, the new head of the Council on Foreign Relations. I think my colleague from Nevada will appreciate this: As I sit to write this forward, it is likely that a terrorist group somewhere in the world is developing plans to attack the United States or American interests abroad using chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear, or catastrophic conventional means. At the same time diplomats, legislators, military intelligence officers, police, fire, and emergency medical personnel, and others in the United States and across the globe, are working feverishly to prevent and prepare for such attacks. These two groups of people are ultimately in a race with one another. This is a race we cannot afford to lose. Right now we are losing the race, according to the report of people who tell us we are not meeting the requirements we should have. As we stand here, I promise you there are people somewhere planning to attack us. I know there are people in our Government working hard to stop it at the local, State, and national level. The distinguished group of people who compiled this report, led by a former colleague, says we are dangerously, inadequately not funding what needs to be done. We are losing the race. All our amendment suggests is, let's find the means. We can do this. This isn't brain surgery. This is not that hard. If we were faced with a similar question about whether or not we need more resources to protect our men and women in military uniform, we would do it, and we should do it. We should do no less for those here at home trying to protect us against a terrorist attack.

Mr. DODD. I am happy to yield.

Mr. DODD. The Senator from Michigan is absolutely correct. I represent one of the two most affluent--two or three most affluent States in the United States. Always, each year when they list what is the most affluent State in the country on the per capita, Alaska, Connecticut, and New Jersey are always competing No. 1, No. 2, No. 3. Of course, we also have some significant poverty in our State. But on a per capita basis, Connecticut is one of the most affluent States. I am confident, as I am standing before you, if you ask any of the people in my State who are in the $1 million or more income category--and I have a lot of them in my State and I know them; they are tremendously patriotic, successful individuals--if you ask any one of them whether they would be willing to forgo some of the tax cut we have provided them over the last 2 years in exchange for getting resources to make this country more secure at home, I guarantee every single one of my affluent constituents would say: Absolutely. Absolutely. They would be horrified to think that maybe they are being used as an excuse on why we can't do this, why we can't provide the additional resources. I know we can't break the budget caps. I am not suggesting, nor is the Senator from Michigan, we do that. What the Senator from Michigan suggests is here is a source of revenue for us. Here is a case where some $3 trillion, in 28 months--what is $3 trillion? Mr. President, $1 trillion is one thousand billion dollars. We are talking about $15 billion instead of three thousand billion, $15 billion of it to go to make America more secure, not because the Senator from Michigan and I sat down at some point and concocted a number together. We read, and I now put it in the Record so all America can read it, a report put together by a distinguished group of Americans, former Chairmen of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Director of the FBI, the CIA, and formerly colleagues of ours who said, and I quote from the report, and it is worth repeating again because it needs to be repeated: Congress has dangerously delayed the appropriation of funds for emergency responders. Dangerously delayed. Listen to the conclusion of this report. I will read it again. My colleague, I know, knows this but let me read it. The terrible attacks of September 11 have shown the American public how vulnerable they are. Because attacks on that scale had never happened before, the United States and the American people were caught underprotected, unaware of the magnitude of the threat facing them. In the wake of September 11, ignorance of the nature of the threat or of what the United States must do to prepare for future attacks can no longer explain America's continuing failure to allocate sufficient resources to preparing local emergency responders. It would be a terrible tragedy indeed if it took another catastrophic attack to drive that point home. That is the conclusion of George Shultz, of Admiral Crowe, of Les Gelb, of Director Webster. I read the list of the people who make up this report. These, with all due respect to congressional staffers, are Nobel laureates, William Webster, high-ranking former chiefs of staff of the Army, national security advisers, White House employees over three administrations, Ronald Reagan appointees. This isn't a partisan document. It is compiled by serious Americans who know what they are talking about. And they are telling us we are dangerously inadequate in understanding what needs to be done to make America strong. Many wealthy Americans will be glad to forgo a part of their tax dollars in order to make us more secure at home. I know many of them in Connecticut--and I am confident my colleague from Michigan would say the same thing about her constituents----

Mr. DODD. Yes.

Mr. DODD. In response to my colleague from Nevada, I served with Warren Rudman, as my friend from Nevada did. In fact, I was the fourth cosponsor of the Gramm-Rudman deficit reduction proposal and budget- saving mechanism when it was first introduced and was the subject of such heated debate in this body in the early 1980s. I heard my colleague from Nevada yesterday talk about what a tight- fisted Senator, Warren Rudman was as a Member of this body as well. He was not someone who was known as a profligate spender. He believed very strongly in budget discipline. By the way, we are low-balling the numbers. We are offering a little less than $15 billion. That is based on the assumption that States may be doing more. When you read this report, you will get into some of the details and you will wonder why Senator Stabenow and I didn't offer an amendment with more dollars based on its conclusions. The Senator from Nevada is absolutely correct. Warren Rudman is an individual who does serious work. This is the second report in which he has been involved. He was involved in an earlier one which was prepared along with another former colleague of ours, Senator Gary Hart, and got rave reviews by all who examined it. This report follows on as a result of that first report to determine where are we now after 2 years. As I have said over and over again, and as my colleague from Michigan has said over and over again, the conclusion of these serious people is that we are way short of what we ought to be doing. They tell us what needs to be done, and they lay out in fact where the shortcomings are. Senator Rudman is once again owed a deep sense of gratitude. It is sort of like the mythical figure Cassandra. For those who love mythology as I do, Cassandra was doomed in mythology to always telling the truth and never being believed. Senator Rudman is becoming sort of the Cassandra in this debate, if this goes where I think it is going. The Senator from Michigan and I have no illusions. She is a professional person who understands politics. She served in her State legislature for many years. We knew when we got up here that we probably weren't going to get 60 votes on this. So I am not fooled by what I face here with a waiver that we have to apply to a point of order. But we want to be on record, and we want our colleagues to be on record, to say when I was given a choice of where to be on this issue, this is where I came down; this is the side of the ledger on which I want to be recorded. Maybe we will be surprised and 60 of our colleagues will join us in voting for the waiver. But if that is not the case, let the American public then judge where people were when the choices needed to be made. I suspect we need to talk about this in more concrete terms. I was impressed with the remarks of the Senator from Michigan about the comments of the people in Michigan. I believe she held a number of hearings or discussions with people in her State about first responders. I wonder if she might share with us once again some of the concerns she heard from her fire and police and emergency medical personnel about whether or not they believe they are better prepared. We have heard from our distinguished panel of people who analyze this from more of a global perspective. But on the ground, in local communities--that may not have the benefit of Nobel laureates to examine all the laboratories in the country to look at this from a distance--what are they saying? What are our average police officers and firemen saying? What are our emergency medical personnel saying? How well do they think they are prepared?

Mr. DODD. I thank my colleague for her comments. Maybe there are some who believe that terrorism is no longer a problem, that these organizations are no longer viable. I hope there are very few people who would embrace that belief. One needs only to read the papers every day to learn that even in Iraq it is not just a question of those members of the Baath Party who are apparently engaging in the assassination of our U.S. men and women in uniform in the military. We are now told there are terrorist organizations operating that have gotten into Iraq from Yemen and Saudi Arabia and elsewhere. We know of cell groups. There is hardly a day that does by that we don't read about another group that has been identified or where contacts have been made by organizations. This is a real threat and a growing one. Again, the report points it out. This is serious business. We should never again have to go through what we went through on 9/11 and the wake of 9/11. We cannot guarantee that, but there will be a tremendous indictment, in my view, historically if we don't act. Just look at some of these numbers that we have received on the inadequacy. There are 1 million firefighters who put their lives on the line every day. Yet we are told currently two-thirds of all fire departments operate with inadequate staff--two-thirds of all fire departments, first responders, with inadequate staff. In fact, as pointed out in testimony before the Committee on Science and Technology of the House of Representatives, on October 11, 2001: Understaffing had caused or contributed to firefighter deaths in Memphis TN; Worcester, MA; Iowa; Pittsburgh, PA; Chesapeake, VA; Stockton, CA; Lexington, KY; Buffalo, NY. There is about a fireman a day who loses their life or is seriously injured. Now they are being asked to do that which they never would have imagined, such as dealing with chemical materials. Imagine a major terrorist attack with how we had our departments. Look what they had to do on 9/11. Departments from Connecticut went into New York. Departments from New Jersey went into New York. Other departments tried to backfill to cover our departments that left. It was a nightmare. As the Senator properly points out, they could not even talk to each other. They did not have the proper interoperability of the phone systems. I would like say to my colleague that the problem has been corrected 2 years later, but it has not been. The fact is, it is still an incredible fact that most of our local people cannot even talk to each other, let alone talk across State lines where you have tremendous densities of population. Again, the budget shortfalls at the local and State level are huge. Pick up your newspaper. Today it is California, $38 billion in deficit. I mentioned earlier what the deficit is in Connecticut. I mentioned what I thought was Michigan's number. My colleague may want to correct me, but I believe it is bigger than $4 billion, as she pointed out. I don't know what it is in Nevada or Alaska. But every State is facing tremendous pressures to meet these obligations. So the numbers are shrinking on the State and local levels. By the way, while I have been critical about not doing more, I commend the Appropriations Committee. They upped the number $1 billion from what the President wanted. The Commander in Chief, in my view, ought to be leading on this issue and saying to Congress: I will help you get the money. We are going to provide the resources. With all due respect, we need more help. And if the Commander in Chief is even low-balling a number from what the committee did, below what we are told we need by $15 billion a year, where is the leadership on this issue? I will be happy to yield to my colleague.

Mr. DODD. Madam President, there were amendments to make available additional dollars to increase the number of border personnel offered by our colleagues; amendments to appropriate funds for the Office of the Under Secretary of Information Analysis; amendments to increase the amount of appropriations for fire fighter assistance grants--Senator Mikulski and I offered that amendment--amendments to increase funds for research and to provide funds to increase maritime security; and, funds to increase emergency management performance grants. Senator Boxer offered an amendment to require a classified report to Congress on the security costs incurred by State and local governments, and so forth. A number of amendments have been suggested. With very few exceptions, these amendments have been rejected on points of order. They were in violation of the Budget Act because they would break the caps. I have great respect for those members who serve on the Appropriations Committee. It is not an easy job. But I think what we are faced with here is a problem that is far more significant than caps on these budget requirements under the appropriations bills. You need go no further than to read the report prepared by the Council on Foreign Relations that came out recently. It was begun in March and has been around here for the last several weeks. All Members, I presume, have received copies of it. I want to read various passages of this to try to at least persuade my colleagues about the sense of urgency we ought to have in light of a survey and study done by those who are knowledgeable on the subject matter of international terrorism and very knowledgeable about what needs to be done to make this Nation more prepared. Let me read the conclusion of this report. This was prepared by our former colleague, Senator Rudman, along with a very distinguished task force whose names I will share with the Members in a moment. The terrible events of September 11 have shown the American people how vulnerable they are because attacks on that scale had never been carried out on U.S. soil. The United States and the American people were caught underprotected and unaware of the magnitude of the threat facing them. In the wake of September 11, ignorance of the nature of the threat or of what the United States must do to prepare for future attacks can no longer explain America's continuing failure to allocate sufficient resources in preparing local emergency responders. It would be a terrible tragedy indeed if it took another catastrophic attack to drive that point home. I do not think anything can be more clear than this language. Listen further, if you will. Listen further, if you will, in the foreword of this report by Les Gelb, who was the President of the Council on Foreign Relations. I will quote from his foreword. Les Gelb says: As I sit to write this foreword, it is likely that a terrorist group somewhere in the world is developing plans to attack the United States and/or American interests abroad using chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear or catastrophic conventional means. At the same time, diplomats, legislators, military and intelligence officers, police, fire, and emergency medical personnel, and others in the United States and across the globe are working feverishly to prevent and prepare for such attacks. These two groups of people are ultimately in a race with one another. This is a race we cannot afford to lose. In October 2002, the Council on Foreign Relations-sponsored Independent Task Force on Homeland Security issued the report ``America--Still Unprepared, Still in Danger.'' The Task Force, co-chaired by Senators Warren Rudman and Gary Hart, came to the general conclusion that ``America remains dangerously unprepared to prevent and respond to a catastrophic terrorist attack on U.S. soil.'' The report further warned that ``America's own ill-prepared response could hurt its people to a much greater extent than any single attack by a terrorist. . . . But the risk of self- inflicted harm to America's liberties and way of life is greatest during and immediately following a national trauma.'' Les Gelb goes on to say: Although progress continues to be made to the newly formed Department of Homeland Security and other federal, state, and local institutions, America remains dangerously unprepared for another catastrophic terrorist attack. In March 2003, the Council on Foreign Relations established an Independent Task Force on Emergency Responders to follow up on the specific recommendations of the Task Force on Homeland Security and to examine the status of preparedness and the adequacy of funding for emergency responders in the United States. The Task Force on Emergency Responders subsequently established an Emergency Responders Action Group, consisting of representatives of emergency responder professional associations, jurisdictional associations representing state and local officials, and congressional and budgetary experts, to provide expertise and advice to the Task Force. The Task Force performed its analysis in partnership with the Concord Coalition and the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, two of the Nation's leading budget analysis organizations. This represents the first realistic effort to develop a budget range of the costs necessary to protect the homeland [of the United States]. The preliminary analysis conducted by the Task Force suggests that the United States may be spending only one- third of what is required to adequately provide for America's emergency responders. Of its most important recommendations, I would like to highlight the following-- Again, I am quoting Les Gelb-- Congress should require that the Department of Homeland Security work with state and local agencies and officials and emergency responder professional associations to establish clearly defined standards and guidelines for emergency preparedness. Congress should work to establish a system for distributing funds based less on politics and more on threat. To do this, the federal government should consider such factors as population, population density, vulnerability assessment, and presence of critical infrastructure within each state. State governments should be required to use the same criteria for distributing funds within each state. It goes on with these various recommendations. I will come back to those in a minute. Let me also say, this is not an amendment where I just came up with a number. The number in the amendment I am offering is from the recommendation of this report. It is a large number. I have never offered, in all my years here, an amendment of this size. This amendment is nearly $15 billion in 1 year. That is in addition to the roughly $5 billion that is in this bill. This amendment is a little less than $15 billion. But those are the numbers recommended by this report. It is not a number I came up with or Senator Stabenow came up with or my staff came up with. This is the recommendation of serious people who spent time looking at this problem, who have given us their best judgment of what we need to be doing, and saying we are coming woefully short of what needs to be done to keep this Nation prepared. Let me share with you who these people are because it was not just some nameless or faceless group of individuals who prepared this report. Charles Boyd is currently Chief Executive Officer and President of Business Executives for National Security. Before retiring from the U.S. Air Force, General Boyd served as Deputy Commander in Chief of the U.S. European Command. Richard Clarke is Senior Adviser to the Council on Foreign Relations. Mr. Clarke served under the last three Presidents of the United States in a senior White House position. Admiral William Crowe previously served as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under President Ronald Reagan. Margaret Hamburg is Vice President for Biological Weapons at the Nuclear Threat Initiative. Before coming to NTI, Dr. Hamburg was Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation at the Department of Health and Human Services. James Kallstrom is senior executive vice president at MBNA American Bank. Prior to that, he was on a leave of absence and served as the Director of the Office of Public Security for the State of New York. Joshua Lederberg is a Nobel laureate. He currently serves as the president emeritus and Sackler Foundation Scholar at Rockefeller University. Donald Marron is chairman of UBS America. He previously served for 20 years as chairman and chief executive officer for the Paine Webber Group. James Metzl, I mentioned already. He served on the National Security Council at the White House, in the Department of State, and as Deputy Staff Director of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Philip Odeen is former chairman of TRW. Previously he was president of BDM International, and a vice chairman at Coopers & Lybrand. Norman Ornstein is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and senior counselor to the Continuity of Government Commission. Dennis Reimer is director of the National Memorial Institute for the Prevention of Terrorism in Oklahoma City. Prior to that, he served in the U.S. Army in a variety of joint and combined assignments, retiring after 37 years as the Chief of Staff of the United States Army. Warren Rudman, we all know, is our former colleague. George Shultz is the Thomas W. and Susan B. Ford distinguished Fellow at the Hoover Institution. He has served as Secretary of State, Secretary of the Treasury, Secretary of Labor, and Director of the Office of Management and Budget and, of course, is a member of this task force. Ann-Marie Slaughter is dean of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University. Harold Varmus is president and chief executive officer of the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. He previously served as the Director of the National Institutes of Health. John Vessey is a former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, as well as Vice Chief of Staff of the United States Army. William Webster previously was Director of the Central Intelligence Agency from 1987 to 1991, and Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation from 1978 to 1987. Steven Weinberg is the Director of the Theory Group of the University of Texas, who is a Nobel laureate in physics and a recipient of the National Medal of Science. Mary Jo White formerly served as U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York from 1993 to 2002. Madam President, these are the people who said we need to do what I am recommending, not some people--with all due respect--you might not meet or ever know who come up with a number. Can you possibly imagine a more serious group of people who have looked at the threat to the United States, and who have given us a report only a few weeks ago? And here we are debating what needs to be done in homeland security. With great respect to those who are charged with living within the caps that are provided, they are saying to us, in this report--and I will quote from it--you need to do a lot more. America is vulnerable. America is in danger. What more serious group could we listen to? Can you imagine if this group came to us--or a similar group--and said that our military was underfunded, that we didn't have the resources to deal with the threats in Iraq and North Korea and elsewhere around the globe? How long would we wait before responding to that recommendation? Yet here we are with a similar group of people--former Chairmen of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Directors of the CIA and the FBI, major figures in our society--recommending that we do more to protect our country, and we are not doing it. I am stunned by it. I know we have caps in these budgets. But we just passed, in the last 28 months--if you collectively add them up--almost $3 trillion in tax cuts. And a sizable piece of those tax cuts have gone to some of the most affluent Americans. This Congress, if it wanted to, could find resources by paring back--not by blowing through the caps, but by paring back--on some of the tax cuts we have given to the most affluent Americans. I represent a lot of affluent Americans in the State of Connecticut. I do not think I could find one of them who would not be willing to stand here and tell you: Roll back my tax cut if it means we can provide the resources to make America secure. I do not know of a single wealthy citizen who believes that their tax cut is more important than keeping America secure. What an indictment it will be. And we are told--in this report that you heard from Les Gelb--it is not a matter of if this happens but when it happens. When it happens, are we going to be prepared? Have we done the things necessary to keep our country strong? Here we are getting a clear message from those people who spent the time looking at this saying we ought to do more. I apologize for offering an amendment of $15 billion, but that is what it takes. We have offered amendments for $15 million, $60 million, and $100 million here and there for firefighters, reports, and studies and to put more guards on the border. I said: Why not have an amendment that encompasses what this report recommends? That is what Senator Stabenow and I said. Let's put it on the line. Instead of nickel and diming this, let's say whether or not we in this body think the recommendations of these distinguished Americans deserve our support and in the waning days before we take a month off in August to go out and have a nice vacation for ourselves, whether or not we have the intestinal fortitude to step up and do what needs to be done to put this country on a more sound and secure footing. That is the vote I will be asking our colleagues to make shortly on this issue. There will be a point of order and a motion to waive, and we can get confused. Let there be no doubt about what the vote is. The vote is not a point of order. The vote is whether or not we are going to have the resources to do what needs to be done, according to this report. Let me share some of its conclusions. I see my colleague from Michigan. I want to give her the opportunity to be heard as well. But I want my colleagues to understand what we are going to be rejecting, having seen what has happened over the last several days. We will reject this, I presume. I would love to be proven wrong, but I suspect I will not. Just so the record is clear, I will ask unanimous consent that this report be printed in the Record. I will exclude the appendices and other materials. So every American who may not get a copy of this report, it can be pulled up on their Web site and they can read the report. I am not making it up. If you are interested in knowing what is in this report, you can read about it in tomorrow's Congressional Record. I ask unanimous consent that the body of the report be printed in the Record.

Mr. DODD. Mr. President, before my good friend from Alaska leaves, and he is my good friend, the point I am making--I supported this. The needed resources there make sense. I am not suggesting in any way that the resources we are spending there somehow ought to be subtracted. I was making the point that, while we were doing the right thing, obviously, as part of our security--and no one knows these issues better than the chairman of the appropriations subcommittee and his colleague, Dan Inouye, when they go into matters of what we need for our national security system. I respect them. My point here is, we are being told, as we have been told by others, we need to do more at home if we are going to meet the security needs of the American people. Just as we are doing that, we merely pointed out, my colleague from Michigan and I, what we are spending on a weekly basis for reconstruction in Iraq and trying to get Afghanistan on its feet. We accept the notion that is going to be critical. Our point simply was, can you imagine someone coming in saying: ``We are not doing enough; we need more to get the job done over there but, I'm sorry, we can't afford to do what our men and women in the Armed Forces need; there are budget caps and we just don't have the resources''? That argument wouldn't find five supporters here. The point Senator Stabenow and I are trying to make is we have men and women in uniform here as well. They are called firefighters, police, emergency medical personnel, hospital attendants and doctors and physicians and scientists. They are coming to us, in this report, and saying we have some real problems here at home. We are vulnerable. We are vulnerable. What we are saying is, can we not find the resources? We have identified a source, which this Congress, if it has the will to do it, can come up and meet the challenge.

Mr. DODD. I am happy to yield to my colleague.

Mr. DODD. Madam President, I am offering this amendment on behalf of myself, my colleague from Michigan, Senator Stabenow, and my colleague from Connecticut, Senator Lieberman. The purpose of the amendment is very simply to take the report that has been discussed here, which was prepared over the last number of days by the Council on Foreign Relations, and identify and lay out in significant detail the priorities and the urgency in dealing with emergency responders. It is entitled ``Emergency Responders Drastically Underfunded, Dangerously Unprepared.'' It is the report of an independent task force sponsored by the Council on Foreign Relations and chaired by Warren Rudman and Richard Clarke, senior adviser, and Jamie Metzl, project director. The purpose of the amendment reads: To fund urgent priorities for our Nation's firefighters, law enforcement personnel, and emergency medical personnel, and all Americans by reducing the 2003 tax breaks for individuals with annual incomes in excess of $1 million. That is the purpose. Just so my colleagues understand, the language of the purpose does not mandate anything. The amendment would be subject to a point of order which I am confident my colleague from Mississippi would make, and there would be no vote on the amendment. I am setting out in the purpose what I would like to see occur. Other than that, of course, the language of the amendment does specify some additional add-ons to meet the concerns raised by this task force on emergency responders. Over the last day or so, we have had a series of amendments that have been offered to try to increase the funding in a number of areas. I ask unanimous consent that this list be printed in the Record.

Mr. DODD. Madam President, I send an amendment to the desk.

Mr. DODD. I move to lay that motion on the table. The motion to lay on the table was agreed to.

Mr. DODD. Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that the reading of the amendment be dispensed with.

Mr. DODD. A motion to waive is a debatable motion.

Mr. DODD. Let me read some of the executive summary. I am quoting directly. The tragic events of September 11, 2001 brought home to the American people the magnitude of the danger posed by terrorism on U.S. soil. Now in the aftermath of the September 11th attacks, the United States must assume-- Remember who I told you wrote this report now-- that terrorists will strike again, possibly using chemical, biological, radiological, or even nuclear materials. The unthinkable has become the thinkable. But although in some respects the American public is now better prepared to address aspects of the terrorist threat than it was two years ago, the United States remains dangerously ill-prepared to handle a catastrophic attack on American soil. On average fire departments across the country have only enough radios to equip half the firefighters on a shift and breathing apparatus for only one-third of our firefighters. Only 10 percent of the departments in the United States have the personnel and equipment to respond to a building collapse. Police departments and cities across the country do not have protective gear to safely secure a site following an attack with weapons of mass destruction. Public health labs in most states lack basic equipment and expertise to adequately respond to a chemical, biological attack, and 75 percent of state laboratories report being overwhelmed by testing requests. Most cities do not have necessary equipment to determine what kind of hazardous materials emergency responders may be facing. If the nation does not take immediate steps to better identify and address the urgent needs of emergency responders, the next terrorist incident could have an even more devastating impact than the September 11th attacks. According to data provided to the Task Force by emergency responder professional associations and leading emergency response officials from around the country, America will fall approximately $98.4 billion short of meeting critical emergency responder needs over the next five years if current funding levels are maintained. That is my amendment. I can only put up a 1-year appropriation. We have roughly 5 in the bill before us. I put up an additional 15. That is 20. That gets you close to 98, if we did it each year over the next 5 years. The amendment is not made up out of whole cloth. It comes from the recommendations of this task force I have cited. Currently the Federal budget to fund emergency responders is about $28 billion over five years. It goes on, and I will not bore my colleagues. They can read it for themselves. It goes through what States may or may not be spending. The fact is, we know almost every State is facing huge deficits. The deficit of the State of California is $38 billion alone. My State is about $1.5 billion. In Michigan, it is around $4 billion. So you have roughly $100 billion in deficits. We read the other day that colleges and universities are going to raise tuition to make up for the shortfalls. The idea that States will allocate more money in light of their own fiscal difficulties is unrealistic. Candidly, the report says, over the next number of years, we cannot rely on States to fill in the gap. They are not going to be able to do it. By the way, I want to repeat a point. I think it was tremendously worthwhile that Pete Peterson, the leader of the Concord Coalition and also the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, two of the Nation's leading budget analyst organizations, worked on these numbers. They say in the report that they are not claiming perfection, and there is a need to do a far better assessment of overall needs. But they also quickly say: You can't wait until you get all the assessments and perfection. You have to be on a dual track. I am almost quoting the report here, that you need to do a better assessment, but simultaneously we have to get the resources out to support the efforts being made to make us more secure. We have had very strong organizations looking at what needs to be done. The additional funds that we are talking about in this amendment and some we have already voted on would allow for additional resources to support homeland security. We would extend the emergency 911 system nationally to foster effective emergency data, to significantly enhance urban search and rescue capabilities of major cities and the Federal Emergency Management Agency in cases where buildings or large structures collapse and trap individuals; to foster interoperable communications systems for emergency responders across the country. This is a major area. I do not know of a single colleague that has not heard from their police and fire departments about the inability to communicate with each other. On the interoperability of the telecommunications systems, there is a real gap across the country and a tremendous demand. Some have estimated the cost to be $400 or $500 million--and that may be low--to get the ability of our first responders to be able to talk to one another. That is a major item. Again, citing from the report, to enhance public health preparedness by strengthening laboratories' disease tracking communications by training public health officials; to strengthen emergency operations centers for local police, public safety coordination; to provide protective gear and weapons of mass destruction remediation equipment to firefighters; to support an extensive series of national exercises that would allow responders to continually learn and improve on effective response techniques; to enhance emergency agricultural and veterinarian capabilities for effective response to national food supply attacks; to develop surge capacity in the Nation's hospitals and to help them better prepare for weapons of mass destruction attacks; to enhance capacity for emergency medical technicians, paramedics, and others to respond to mass casualty events. This is just a list of the things they are talking about that they think are necessary. They point out the importance of coordinating. I will not read all of that. I will put it in the record so Members who want to read the report for themselves can get a better feel for what is necessary. I mentioned already some of the tremendous shortcomings that occur. Again I quote from the report: It is impossible to overestimate the need to prepare for this threat. One way of understanding America's urgent need to prepare is to ask the question: If we knew that there was going to be a terrorist attack sometime in the next 5 years, but did not know what type of attack it would be, who would carry it out, or where in the United States it would occur, what actions would we now take and how would we allocate our human and financial resources to prepare? The American people must assume this is the situation this Nation currently faces. So we can anticipate an attack in the next 5 years. We don't know where or when, but it is going to come. What better warning could you have? What is history going to say about us? You had a report. You were told by highly competent individuals what a shortcoming you face. This is only $15 billion. We are spending $5 billion every month in Iraq and Afghanistan--$1 billion a week in Iraq and $1 billion a month in Afghanistan. That is $15 billion in 3 months to try to deal with the threats there. I am asking for $15 billion for a whole year to make us more secure. I certainly understand the reasons why we have to do what we do in Iraq and Afghanistan. I am not suggesting that is a bad idea. Don't misunderstand me. But if it is good enough to keep us secure by doing that there, and there is a report telling us we are not doing enough at home, can't we at least do what we do in those two countries on a 3- month basis in this country for a year to make us more secure? Frankly, I don't understand why we are debating this. I would have thought we would have been told this is what we have to do, based on the best analysis of what needs to be done here. If we knew we were going to face a terrorist attack and we didn't know what type it would be, who would carry it out, where it would occur, what actions would we take now? I suspect that I would be overwhelmed by people who would want to be here to support an amendment to add these numbers. As I said, we have not defined the national standards of preparedness. This report points it out--the essential capabilities of every jurisdiction, considering size, who would have immediate access to it, and so forth. This report clearly says you cannot wait for those reports to be done. I will quote again from the report. I think there is stunning language here: The United States must rapidly develop a sophisticated requirement methodology to determine the country's most critical needs and allow for the setting of priorities and readiness training and procurement. The United States does not, however, have the luxury of waiting until an overreaching process is created to fund urgently needed enhancements to current capabilities. In the nearly 2 years since the September 11 attacks, Congress has dangerously delayed the appropriation of funds for emergency responders, Federal agencies have been slow getting funds to State and local jurisdictions, and States have hampered the efficient dissemination of much needed Federal funds to the local level. The overall effectiveness of Federal funding has been further diluted by a lack of process to determine the most critical needs of the emergency responder community in order to achieve the greatest return on investment. A dual-track approach is therefore required while developing a reliable systematic requirements methodology, and streamlining the appropriations process must be a priority. The United States must make its most educated guess based on incomplete information about what emergency funds are needed immediately. So it says that Congress has dangerously delayed the appropriations process. This is not a report prepared by a group of Democrats. I don't think George Shultz and the others in this group--you can go back to advisers who would associate themselves with some partisan report but this is hardly partisan. It is a cold analysis of where we are and what kind of trouble we are in. It is about what kind of trouble we are in. Either we understand this and respond to it, or we will suffer the consequences of a historical judgment that will indict us for not having done what needed to be done in these days. I will have more to say about this. I know some of my colleagues want to be heard as well. I don't fault my good friend from Mississippi, who has the unenviable task of chairing a subcommittee that has to grapple with these issues. I don't fault him in this. He is faced with the budget constraints we have adopted. I thank him for his commitment to these issues. As I say, with a great deal of reluctance I have offered this amendment. It is a large amount--$15 billion--but I thought that instead of trying to go through 25 different amendments of little pieces here and there, we would lay out on the table this report and its recommendations and suggest how we might do it. It is painful, obviously, to roll back something you have already adopted. But imagine what they would say about us historically--that we didn't want to roll back a tax cut--not all of it but just for those in the most affluent group of our citizens, and ask them to take a little less for a while in order to let us fund homeland security. Can you imagine what history may say 50 or 100 years from now, after we have gone through a series of events, that Congress had a report that warned otherwise in 2003 but they just could not find a way to do it, and we didn't fund it properly, so our people faced a great threat? I don't understand how we would allow ourselves the vulnerability of that kind of historical judgment. So that is why I have put language in here to suggest how this could be done. Yes, $3 trillion is a lot of money. It is a thousand billion dollars. One thousand billion dollars is a trillion dollars. A thousand million dollars is a billion dollars. I am asking for $15 billion out of a thousand billion, or the three thousand billion, in order to try to get this right. You cannot convince me ever that there is not enough room in that tax cut, those amounts, to find something here to make homeland security better for the people of our Nation. They deserve nothing less. They will be horrified to find out, if events occur, that we didn't do what we should have and could have done. I reserve the remainder of my time.

Mr. DODD. Pursuant to section 904 of the Congressional Budget Act of 1974, I move to waive the applicable sections of that act for purposes of the pending bill and I ask for the yeas and nays.

Mr. DODD. This is the Warren Rudman report. He chaired it. The senior adviser was Richard Clarke, who served for three American President's, and Jamie Metzl, along with a task force. I have read all of the names. I will put them in the Record.

Mr. DODD

Mr. DODD. Mr. President, I thank the chairman and ranking member as well as Senator Stevens for working with me on my amendment that was approved unanimously last night by this body. This amendment had two parts: first, it would allow the Coast Guard Research and Development Center to maintain the funding level necessary to keep it functioning at current capacity; and second, it would mandate a comprehensive review of the Coast Guard's system for developing new technologies to meet the fleet's needs. This legislation is critically important because without it, the Coast Guard R&D Center's exceptional scientists, researchers, and other employees, who work under the excellent leadership of CPT Francis Dutch, would not receive paychecks for the work they do in 2004. Basic operations and maintenance would be left unfunded and might cease in the coming fiscal year. The work that is done at this facility is first rate. With a minimal $13 million budget for operations and maintenance, our Coast Guard tracks down cutting-edge technologies to support its various missions for maritime safety, search and rescue operations, drug interdiction, and even new homeland security missions. I am pleased that Senators Stevens, Cochran, and Byrd have supported my amendment which also calls for a study to explore the Coast Guard's ability to gain access to the most advanced technology necessary to perform its mission effectively. The GAO and several independent policy institutes are joining a growing chorus of experts suggesting that more needs to be done to protect our Nation's ports. Among some of their findings is that the Coast Guard may currently be inadequately prepared to keep pace with its expanding missions. This is a significant conclusion given that our ports are principal access points for the Nation's commercial shipping and import/export traffic. My amendment will mandate indepth study of the Coast Guard's processes for developing new technologies and will require recommendations to address shortfalls in the Coast Guard's current science and technology apparatus. It is critical that an independent policy institute provide such comprehensive analysis to improve the Coast Guard's approach to innovative research and development. With this information, we can assure that the Coast Guard remains on the cutting edge of crucial technology development and make certain it takes a proactive approach to addressing our nation's many port security challenges. I ask unanimous consent that two letters be printed into the Record at this time.

Mr. DODD

Mr. DODD. Mr. President, I rise today to applaud my colleagues for passing the Pediatric Research Equity Act of 2003, and to thank all of those who have worked so hard on this issue. This legislation represents a truly bipartisan compromise, and I deeply appreciate the commitment to this issue shown by Senators DeWine, Clinton, Gregg, and Kennedy. I also acknowledge the invaluable role played by the American Academy of Pediatrics and the Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation. Quite simply, this legislation will make our children safer. It will ensure that they have access to prescription drugs that have been properly evaluated for their use. It will remove the guesswork often done by pediatricians about what drugs are appropriate for a child, and in what dosages. And it will accomplish all of this by codifying into statutory language a tool that has already been shown to be effective: the Pediatric Rule. The Pediatric Rule went into effect in April of 1999 and was intended to work in conjunction with a voluntary incentives program that Congress passed in 1997 and was reauthorized last year. Both the incentives program and the rule were put into place to address an unmet need that had potentially serious consequences to the health of children. Children are not just small versions of adults when it comes to drugs. Some drugs that are completely safe for adults may be very harmful to children. In addition, some needed drugs are not available in a formulation that a child can take, such as a liquid or chewable tablet. Finally, the appropriate dosage for a child cannot be determined simply by extrapolating from adults. Yet, until the rule and the incentives program were enacted, this is exactly what pediatricians were forced to do. Roughly 75 percent of all prescription drugs on the market today have never been properly tested for safe use by children. As a result, children have suffered needlessly. For example, new tests on the epilepsy drug Neurontin have shown that higher dosages than expected are needed for children under 5. For years, pediatricians simply believed that Neurontin was a drug that was ineffective for children. In 1997, Congress enacted legislation, introduced by Senator DeWine and myself, to provide drug companies with an economic incentive to test their products to ensure their safety in children. This was followed by enactment of the Pediatric Rule in 1999, which worked with the incentive by giving the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) the authority to require that drugs and biologics important to children be tested and formulated for their use. Working as complements to each other, the rule and the incentive provided tremendous results. Between April 1999 and March 2002, research was completed on the safety and effectiveness in children of roughly 100 days. These medicines were for the treatment of, among other things, HIV/AIDS, diabetes, asthma pain and arthritis. In addition, studies of hundreds more drugs are in the pipeline. But continued success of this magnitude is dependent on the existence of both the rule and the incentive program. FDA has stated that approximately half of the completed studies were due to the authority provided by the Pediatric Rule. Unfortunately, in October of last year, the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia ruled that FDA does not have the authority to enforce the rule. This decision represented a step backwards for children's health. We can hardly afford to do without the rule when we still do not have necessary information for kids for a majority of the medicines on the market. The legislation that we passed today will give the FDA clear authority to require that drugs be tested and formulated for children. Companies should continue to have access to voluntary incentives, but the rule must be in place to ensure that as many products as possible are studied for use in children. For example, the rule captures a class of products, specifically biologics, for which market exclusivity incentives do not apply. There are a number of biologic products used to treat cancer in children for which information about their specific use--safety and efficacy--in kids would be vital. Only the rule would apply here. The rule can also be applied as needed during the life of a drug as more information is required. For example, if a new use of a drug is discovered and safety or dosing information for that new use is needed. Exclusivity can only be applied once, even if an important new use for a product is found. Also, because the incentives are voluntary, for any number of reasons a manufacturer may choose not to conduct the necessary testing. Without the rule there is no way to guarantee that a drug that may be critically important to children's health is tested. I would be remiss if I did not mention one provision in this legislation with which I disagree. As a result of this provision, the authority that we clearly provide to FDA with this bill will sunset in 2007. While I believe that FDA has the authority to enforce the rule even without this legislation, that has clearly been called into question given the District Court ruling. Therefore, it is imperative that we unequivocally and permanently provide the FDA with statutory authority to require pediatric testing. Unfortunately, as it now stands that critical authority will expire in 2007 unless reauthorized. It is my view that such a reauthorization should not be necessary. We take it for granted that studies will be done to assure that the drugs that adults use are safe and effective. Why should the assumption be any different for children? FDA should always have the authority to make sure that the drugs that kids use have been tested for their use. This is not something that Congress should have to reauthorize every 5 years. Kids should not have to come back to Congress every 5 years to fight for the basic right to safe drugs. Despite my concern with the sunset provision, I strongly support this bill. The voluntary program has been a huge success, but its limitations can be addressed by passage of this legislation. Simply put, taking any tool off the table that promotes pediatric testing is at odds with our overarching goal of ensuring that medicines are safe and available for our children. That is why we must protect the rule and ensure that our efforts for kids will not be diminished. The Pediatric Research Equity Act of 2003 will do exactly that. I sincerely hope that the House will pass this bill as soon as possible, preferably without any changes so that we can send it to the President to be signed into law without delay.

Mr. DODD

Mr. DODD. Mr. President, I thank our colleague from Maryland for her leadership on this issue and the tremendous support she has provided in the Appropriations Committee for trying to fund this program. I appreciate very much her typical graciousness in referring to the fact that Senator Mike DeWine of Ohio and I, back in 1999, authored the Fire Act. We introduced the legislation almost 4 years ago. We thank, as well, Senator Warner and Senator Levin. When we had the authorization bill, we were trying to get an opportunity to bring this matter to the floor and we were not given any time to bring up the Fire Act. We were trying to make the case 2 years before September 11, 2001, of the importance of the volunteer combination paid departments, the 33,000 departments across the United States, the needs they had out there. It was as a result of the efforts of Senator Warner and Senator Levin that included the Fire Act in the Department of Defense authorization bill in the year 2000 which allowed us to get the first authorizations approved that led to the appropriations that came thereafter. To give an idea of the pent-up demand existing across the country among fire departments, well over $3 billion worth of requests came in under the grant program. We allocated something like $100 million the very first year of this program. Some questioned whether there would be any real interest by these departments across the country in applying for grants that would allow them great flexibility in improving their ability to respond to the myriad of problems departments have. As a result of the success of that first year and the tremendous demand, the Appropriations Committee, under the leadership of Senator Byrd and Senator Stevens, Senator Murkowski, obviously, Senator Cochran and others, over the years has added money to the program. Although we are offering an amendment to add money, it would be negligent not to recognize the contribution that has already been made to increase the funding for this program over the last several years. The point the Senator from Maryland and I are trying to make today is that this demand is still growing. We are not suggesting we ought to have a program in a dollar-for-dollar match as in the so-called COPS Program that provided assistance by the Federal Government to local police agencies, local police departments. This is a far more modest program. But the same principle behind the COPS Program is behind this idea. No longer can we just assume local departments can sustain themselves by raising mill rates or, as the Senator from Maryland properly points out, particularly in rural America, with volunteer fire departments relying on bingo sales, cake sales, and potluck dinners to raise the dollars to provide the equipment and training to deal with the very sophisticated set of problems they face. The old idea of the fire department racing out to deal with a residential home fire still is a job they must perform but today fire departments are being asked to deal with highly sophisticated materials on the highways. Usually the fire department is the first responder to these situations long before anyone else gets there. It is the local fire department that we herald and celebrate in speeches and rhetoric around the country during days of community celebration. These departments no longer can rely strictly on local funding to provide the sophisticated support they need to respond to the demands they are being asked to meet. The Senator from Maryland and I--and we hope others, as well--will join in what we think is a relatively modest request to get the funding level up to last year's funding level. Last year it was $900 million. We realize there are a lot of pressures on the budget and a lot of other demands. However, if we are going to be serious about providing the tools necessary for these young men and women who serve in our fire departments across the country to meet their challenges, we are going to have to do better than we are doing with this bill. We would not ask our military people to go into battle less well equipped, less well provided for under the circumstances they face today. I don't think we could ask anything less of the men and women in uniform in our fire departments. For those reasons, we have proposed this amendment. While this was not a number we conjured up, according to the needs assessment study recently released by the U.S. Fire Administration and the National Fire Protection Association, understaffing contributes to an enormous problem. For example, the U.S. Fire Administration and the National Fire Protection Association have found that only 11 percent of our Nation's fire departments have the personnel and equipment they need to respond to a building collapse involving 50 or more occupants. The U.S. Fire Administration and the Fire Protection Association also found there were routine problems that threatened the health and safety of our first responders. In small and medium-sized cities, firefighters are too often compelled to respond to emergencies without sufficient manpower to protect those on the ground. More often than not, firefighters in too many of our communities respond to fires with fewer than four firefighters per truck. That is considered to be a minimum to ensure the firefighters' safety. As I said before, we would not send our troops into battle without the equipment they need. We should not be sending firefighters to do battle against natural disasters, fires, acts of terrorists, without the tools they need, as well. So the Rudman study as well, just released by the Council on Foreign Relations, makes the case. The Senator from Maryland has pointed this out very clearly. There are great gaps in terms of these departments' ability to respond to the sophisticated demands we are asking of them today. For all the reasons we have enumerated, we are requesting that this body respond by supporting this amendment to increase the appropriations level for these grant programs across the country. I said yesterday, in supporting the Byrd amendment, the amendment offered by the distinguished Senator from West Virginia to have a larger increase overall, which I regret we did not approve--and I say this with all the knowledge of what the implications may be, but I think we have to be honest with the American public. I wish I could stand here and say: Look, we have done everything that needs to be done and you don't ever have to worry about another 9/11 happening in America. Regretfully, that is just false. That is a false statement. Because the fact is, in the world we live in today, we are going to face these problems again. All of us know that. There is not a single Member of this body who does not recognize and accept that as a reality. That is a fact. That is the ugly kind of world we are living in today, until we ultimately come up with better answers. We are spending $1 billion a week, $5 billion a month if you add Afghanistan and Iraq--$5 billion a month to deal with the problems of the conflicts in those particular countries. What the Senator from Maryland and I are asking for is $150 million, which gets spent in a couple of days--less than that now, I guess--in these two countries, in Afghanistan and Iraq, in order to make our fire departments better prepared. I understand what we need to do in Iraq and Afghanistan. We will save that debate for another time and discussion. We have already been through a bit of it already. But we are going to face these problems, and we ought to be doing everything we can within reason. Obviously-- and I feel strongly about this--we ought to be doing a lot more than what the Mikulski-Dodd amendment is calling for. This is truly a modest request. In fact, we may be highly criticized one day for not doing more when we knew better. It is not as if we are ignorant about the problem we potentially face. The question is, Knowing that, what did we do? We will be judged by history and we will be judged by our constituents as to whether or not we had the wisdom and willingness to make the necessary judgment calls on these matters. We are told over and over again there is not enough money to do this. I politely suggest to those who make that claim that there are resources by merely tailoring back on some of the largesse we provided for some of the most affluent of our fellow citizens who, by the way, would be the first to say: We don't need it. We would much rather see the resources spent on something like this rather than be provided an unneeded tax break for those of us who are well insulated against the economic hardships that millions of others are facing through unemployment. So don't give the argument we can't afford to do it. We can't afford to do it because we provide too much of a tax break to those who need it the least. But don't tell that to a firefighter who is a one-man or two-man operation, where having a couple of more people with them could make the difference in saving their lives. Don't say that to a family out there who may be the victim of some attack one day, that we didn't have the resources to provide the necessary support they needed in order to respond to these situations. I regret we even have to offer an amendment. My hope is that those who supported the authorization of this bill--and we have had overwhelming support for it in the years past--will come to the floor at the appropriate time and cast a ballot, not just for this Mikulski- Dodd amendment, or not for those who support it, but cast a ballot for those who one day will say thank you for providing resources for our local departments. That is who you are really casting the vote for, not for a colleague who offers the amendment but for those who are counting on us to do a better job in protecting them. I urge the adoption of the amendment. I ask unanimous consent that Senator Biden and Senator Lieberman be added as cosponsors of the amendment.

Mr. DODD. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that Senators Byrd, Levin, and Clinton be added as cosponsors.

Mr. DODD

Mr. DODD. Mr. President, I appreciate the indulgence of the Members. I thank the distinguished Senator from Mississippi for giving me an opportunity to spend a few minutes before making a motion on the amendment offered by the distinguished Senator from West Virginia, Mr. Byrd, to give me a chance to express my views on this amendment and to begin by thanking my seatmate and colleague of these many years for offering this amendment. Once again, his eloquence and his leadership and his vision are giving this body an opportunity to do something right for the American people. We have all felt the sense of anxiety in this country since the startling events of September 11, 2001. There have certainly been no limits to the number of speeches given to the importance of making our Nation more secure, taking steps to see to it that our airports, our harbors, our borders, receive the kind of support and backing needed to keep this Nation as secure as we possibly can be, with the full understanding that as a nation, an open society, a nation where freedom and liberties are extended to all, this is not an easy path to walk--to be an open, free nation and simultaneously to be more secure. How we balance those interests requires a great deal of thought, a great deal of work. The Senator is offering a reflection of what has been suggested by the Council on Foreign Relations in the report analyzing where we are today, 2 years after the events of September 11. To quote the authors of that report, we are ``still dangerously unprepared, underfunded for a catastrophic terrorist attack.'' I think we ought to take their words to heart and we ought to do what we can to see to it that first responders--our fire departments, our police departments--are going to receive the kind of backing and support they ought to be getting from the Federal Government. What the distinguished Senator from West Virginia is offering is a modest proposal. The money is not significant, I know that. But when you consider the gap that exists--the Council on Foreign Relations suggests that we are underfunding first responders by more than $98 billion. That is a huge amount of money. But if you go even further, reading the report, the number actually is twice that amount when you consider what needs to be done at other levels of government as well, to maximize our protection. Unfortunately, we are coming way short of that number. So while we talk about this issue and identify the various problems that exist, this 62-page report, released on Monday, points out that we have a lot more work to do. Senator Byrd has offered us an opportunity to close some of that gap. That is all, it is just some of this gap that will be closed by his amendment. I am disturbed that we are not going to be doing more. I fully support what the Senator from West Virginia is offering, but I think the American public would expect more. I suspect most did not have an opportunity to read this report or even hear news reports about it. But as certainly as I am standing here today, there are going to be events that will come. I wish I didn't have to say that, but I think all of us know that to be the case. From what we are witnessing in Iraq today, what we have seen in Liberia, what we have seen in various targets around the globe, none of us should operate under the illusion that we are going to be immune from any future attacks because of what we have done since 9/11. There are those gathered in places around the globe, as I share these words this afternoon, who are planning to attack this country, whether abroad or at home. They are planning it. Be certain of it. They are going to look for the opportunities to do us great harm and great damage. Any conclusion other than that would be foolhardy. They are doing it, and the question is, What are we doing to see to it that we are maximizing the protection of the people we have been charged to represent? The painful conclusion is that we are not doing enough yet. Obviously, we cannot do this all at once, but we have a report telling us that after 2 years we are still woefully short of meeting those obligations. We have an opportunity. We have to make choices here. They are not comfortable choices, but we need to make these choices. The time will come when a judgment will be made, and the question will be asked of us: What did you do, when you knew better? You were being told over and over again that you hadn't done enough yet. What did you do on that day in July, prior to your August break, when you were given an opportunity by the Byrd amendment to invest more resources to make these first responders better prepared? Where were you? How did you cast your vote? Because the memories of 9/11, even after just 2 years, seem to be fading, it would be a catastrophic and tragic mistake, in my view, not to heed the counsel and advice of my colleague from West Virginia and step up and do what is right here and provide backing. I hope for unanimous support for this amendment. I cannot think of a more important or meaningful message we can send that we are prepared to take whatever steps are necessary to maximize the protections of our people within constitutional limitations. My fear is the less we do along the lines suggested by the Senator from West Virginia, the more likely we are to take steps to limit the freedoms of average Americans. That seems to be the direction we are heading, to restrain or prevent individuals from doing certain things or examining or investigating individual people, rather than to strengthen the first responders and provide more harbor protection, to see to it our harbors and ports are going to be better protected. Senator Byrd is offering us an opportunity, in a modest way, to answer that question that history will ask of us at some point. When you knew you were likely to be attacked again, when you knew you were likely to be victimized by terrorists, on that day in July when you were asked to make a choice to do more, to step to the plate, how did you cast your ballot? How did you represent your constituents when confronted with that choice? Senator Byrd is providing that opportunity to us this afternoon, and I hope our colleagues will join me in supporting this amendment to take a modest step, and that is all this is, to answer the deep concerns that have been expressed by our former colleague, Warren Rudman, and other individuals who prepared this report for the Council on Foreign Relations. This report is a serious document. These are serious conclusions reached by serious individuals who have done their homework. This is not a political document. It is a document that lays out, chapter and verse, where the shortcomings are and what needs to be done by this National Government to try to close these gaps. Senator Byrd is offering us that chance to do it. I thank him profoundly for this suggestion that he has made to us. I am going to have several amendments myself later on in this debate to deal with fire departments across the country to increase, if we can, the resources to see to it they can have the tools necessary to respond to the challenges they will see. This amendment is more comprehensive, the amendment being offered by Senator Byrd. We will have other suggestions to make as well. But this is the first opportunity for us to say that our memories have not faded. While others may focus on other events as they captivate the attention of the media, we remember what happened on 9/11. While there is no certainty we can stop it from happening again, we want to take the steps necessary to see to it that we make it that much harder for those who would do us harm to achieve their goals. For those reasons, I strongly endorse this amendment and urge my colleagues to do likewise by casting a vote in favor of the Byrd amendment.