Dave Obey

Mr. OBEY

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Chairman, I thank the gentleman for yielding. Perhaps we could handle it by simply saying that if after the assurances of the gentleman that no additional amendment would be offered, if one is offered, there will be no further agreements on time limits today.

Mr. OBEY. I yield to the gentleman from Kentucky.

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Chairman, will the gentleman yield?

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Chairman, I move to strike the last word. Mr. Chairman, I greatly regret the action that has just taken place. Both political parties are posing for political holy pictures on the issue of exporting jobs, and both parties have done it for quite some time. This language that was just stricken represents the second attempt over a 2-year period for a number of us on this side of the aisle to try to eliminate rewards that our government provides to corporations who, for tax purposes, decide to claim citizenship of another country, thereby adding to the tax burden of the American citizens who remain in this country. This language was meant to prevent Accenture from getting a contract from the Homeland Security Department that could be worth up to $10 billion. Now, I do not think that the American public minds spending any money that we need to appropriate to protect the homeland, but I do think they feel it is particularly absurd in this case, because this contract involves a contract to establish a process by which we track the activities of people as they cross our borders. And it is ironic that the company who will be given that juicy contract is a company that in itself has determined that it would rather locate for tax purposes in Bermuda rather than the United States. Now, what was stricken, or as a result of the language that was stricken, the prohibition on future contracts remains, as I understand it, but the countermanding of the contract to Accenture is eliminated by the action just taken. I just find that amazing. I recognize that the gentleman had the technical right to do so. We will hear that oh, Accenture pays a higher rate of taxes than the other companies that were competitive for this contract. But that is measuring only the percentage of taxes that they pay on reported income, and a large portion of that company's income is exempt under the way they have it structured. If we take a look at the filings of that company with the Federal Trade Commission, we will see by their own admission that they decided to locate in Bermuda in order to escape tax burden. Now, by definition, that means they are shoving that tax burden on the remaining taxpayers who stay in this country and do not try to engage in these clever games. This is the second year in a row that language like this has been eliminated after it was adopted on a bipartisan basis by a 2-to-1 vote in our committee. It seems to me that rather than eliminating this language, this Congress should have taken action to strengthen it across the board. Until we do, with a great many taxpayers, Uncle Sam is going to be known as Uncle Sucker.

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Chairman, I greatly respect the gentleman and understand the argument that he makes. I would simply say that this Congress has had a long time. If the Congress had not eliminated the language that we offered last year, that was stricken by a point of order, we would not be in this situation of having to look back.

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Chairman, I move to strike the requisite number of words. Mr. Chairman, I will not take the 5 minutes, but I do want to challenge something my friend, the gentleman from Kentucky (Mr. Rogers) just said. He indicated that every container in foreign ports was inspected. That, as I understand it, is far from the facts.

Mr. OBEY. Let me simply suggest that that gives me no comfort. The fact is that we have two basic problems with container inspection. The idea behind the new system that the administration is talking about is to see to it that cargo is inspected before it ever leaves the foreign port headed for this country. The problem is that of the major ports that are considered potentially dangerous, we are covering only half of those ports right now with our own inspection personnel in any effective program. And I would point out further that the personnel that we have in these ports are assigned largely on the basis of 6-month temporary duty jobs. That means that just about the time they get to understand the ports that they are working in, they go home. No foreign country is going to waste any time, invest any effort getting to set up a working relationship with people who are going to be gone in 6 months. It would be like us hiring somebody on our staffs and then firing them every 6 months and having to break in a new person. It is a pretty dumb way to do business. So while I have great misgivings about the source of money of the gentlewoman from California (Ms. Millender-McDonald) and I agree with the chairman on that point, I do believe that we need to understand there are massive problems associated with port security, and if we do not do a whole lot more than the budget resolution allows us to do, some day we are going to regret it very much.

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Chairman, reserving the right to object, let me explain to the Members what is happening here. We have been in negotiations about overall budget issues for the last day and a half trying to reach accommodation between both sides. Until agreement was reached or until it appeared that agreement would be reached, we have been unable to agree to any time limits. Now it appears there is some progress being made, and we would like to facilitate that by trying to take measures which would enable us to finish this bill today so that Members can go home before 10 o'clock tonight. So we checked to find out how many speakers were on each side, and I thought that with this 20 minutes on each side, there would be enough for every speaker who had indicated a desire to speak. So the gentleman is making a good-faith effort to limit the timetable based on discussions that he has had with us. And unless someone has real heartburn about it, I would appreciate if the gentleman's motion would be agreed to.

Mr. OBEY. I yield to the gentleman from Iowa.

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Chairman, I move to strike the requisite number of words. Mr. Chairman, I take this time to try to ask the indulgence of all Members on both sides. We had extended debate yesterday on the Interior bill, and we have a lot of amendments on this bill. We have been negotiating for 2 days trying to reach an overall understanding between the parties about how we will proceed on all of the remaining appropriation bills between now and August. We are trying to work out an arrangement which will allow those bills to proceed in an orderly civil manner with minimum of ying and yang, leaving full room for Members to offer whatever amendments they want to offer. To facilitate that, we are trying to help move this bill along. We are getting calls from Members from both sides of the aisle every 10 to 15 minutes asking when they are going to be able to go home today. I do not want to shut off any Member. Every Member has a perfect right to address whatever issue concerns them, but I would ask if we do have offers of unanimous consent to reach time limits on some of these amendments, I would appreciate it if Members would talk to the gentleman from Minnesota (Mr. Sabo) or the gentleman from Kentucky (Mr. Rogers), depending on which party, to at least talk with us so we understand what your concerns are and Members understand what the committee is trying to do because we cannot do opposite things at the same time. If we are to facilitate Members getting out of here today, we need to have reasonable limits on time. Nobody is trying to be arbitrary. The gentleman from Kentucky (Mr. Rogers) has been most cooperative, as has been the gentleman from Minnesota (Mr. Sabo). I would ask Members to please give us the benefit of the doubt. If we cannot reach reasonable time agreement, there is not a prayer that we will get out of here before 7 or 8 tonight. Knowing the way this place works, some of the very same people who object to time limits at 3:00 will be squawking at us at 7:00 because they have not been able to get out of here. I would ask Members to work with us. We are trying not to surprise people, and we would appreciate the same from other Members.

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Chairman, I offer an amendment.

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Chairman, I thank the gentleman for reserving. Mr. Chairman, I have told the House twice now that while I think this bill is an improvement over the budget presented by the President, in fact, it leaves this country seriously exposed to a whole variety of vulnerabilities from terrorist attacks. This bill attempts to try to close some of those gaps. This amendment would provide $1.4 billion more than the bill contains to address port transit and local first responder needs. It will provide a State formula grant increase of $350 million, urban area grant increase of $500 million, port security grant increase of $100 million, fire grant increase of $200 million, et cetera. I know that is a lot of money, but the fact is the Hart-Rudman Commission estimated there is a $90 billion need in order to protect our local communities, and so far we have only invested about $15 billion. We cannot buy that kind of security on the cheap. Secondly, this amendment would provide $550 million more to address aviation security. It would improve the cargo security situation. Right now, there is a huge percentage of cargo that is shipped on passenger airplanes that is not inspected for explosives. It would provide $333 million in additional funding for explosive detection systems at airports. It would increase funding for air marshals by $50 million because right now we are some 8 percent below where the President said we should be. It would provide $750 million dollars more to address border security. We have 2,000 fewer people patrolling the northern border than the PATRIOT Act indicated that we ought to have. We provide an additional $86 million for the Container Security Initiative so that we do not have to rely on part-time, short-term employees to inspect those operations; and it provides a variety of other initiatives. Now, I know that because the Committee on Rules chose not to allow this amendment to be offered that any Member of this House has an opportunity to raise a point of order which will prevent the House from even voting on this proposition. I would simply make one point in urging that Members not exercise that prerogative. We are going to be providing next week $25 billion in additional funding through the Defense bill to pay for the costs of our war in Iraq. That cost will eventually rise for a full year to over $70 billion. It seems to me, if we are going to spend that much money on an emergency basis, then we can provide $3 billion on a contingent emergency basis to try to solve some of these home security problems. By providing it on a contingency basis, what that means is that the President may eliminate any item he chooses. So if the President thinks it is unessential, he cannot spend the money and the money will not flow. I think this is an eminently reasonable amendment. If it is true that the number one priority of the House and the number one priority of the President is to defend the homeland, if that is true, then we would not see this amendment stricken on a point of order. The problem we have, and I know some people resent it when I say so, but the fact of the matter is that because the majority party has chosen to make tax cuts its number one priority, it means that we are squeezed on education; it means we are squeezed on health care; and, yes, it means that we are squeezed on homeland security. And we are prevented from meeting the security needs of the country by funding these activities. With that, Mr. Chairman, I would urge a ``yes'' vote on the amendment in the event that the gentleman from Kentucky decides not to offer the point of order. point of order

Mr. OBEY. I do, Mr. Chairman.

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Chairman, while I reluctantly concede that under the rule adopted by the House this amendment cannot be offered, so we cannot even get a vote on it, so I reluctantly concede the point of order, this is not in order under the rule, it ought to be.

Mr. OBEY

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Chairman, I remember being here during the first and second energy crisis in 1973 and again in 1977 under President Ford and then President Carter. And when we realized what a bind we were in on energy, we had a bunch of new actions taken. We took action to support new investments in technology. We supported new investments in energy conservation. We supported new investments in alternative fuels. And then slowly but surely during the Reagan years and afterwards, the Congress lost its interest, it lost its zeal, so did the administrations. And little by little those initiatives were just sort of slowly drained out of the budget, and we wound up getting in real terms back to about just where we were in terms of making those investments before we were hit by the energy crises. Unfortunately, I think that is what has happened with respect to the homeland security issues after 9/11. I remember after 9/11 going down to the White House, talking to the President with my good friend, the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Young). We presented to the President a bipartisan list of initiatives which we had been told by the President's own security people were essential to try to protect us from future attacks. And I remember that instead of being met with a willingness to sit down and listen to what people had to say, the President essentially said, ``Folks, if you appropriate one dollar more than I have asked for, I will veto the bill.'' And there was no receptiveness at all. Then in the next year, the President vetoed or pocket-vetoed about a billion and a half dollars in additional actions for homeland security. This bill pretty much continues the status quo since that time. We have, it is true, over time increased our investments in homeland security by about two-tenths of 1 percent of our gross national product, but because the majority party has concluded that their number one priority is tax breaks, there is not enough room left for any significant new initiatives on the homeland security front, and I think that is highly dangerous for the country. As the gentleman from Minnesota (Mr. Sabo) has indicated, if you compare the challenges with the resources being applied to those challenges, we are falling woefully short. I do not think the public understands that only a tiny percentage of air cargo on passenger planes is being inspected these days for explosives. I do not think they understand that this bill is 8 percent below where we were told by the President initially that we should be in terms of the number of sky marshals. I do not think the public understands how little is being done to secure our ports against dirty bombs and other weapons of mass destruction. I do not think the public understands that of the 45 major ports who ship to this country, only 20 of them have a decent customs inspection operation. I do not think the public understands that the inspectors we have in those ports are there on temporary, 6-month duty and, therefore, do not learn the territory well enough to really do their jobs as well as they otherwise could. I do not think the public understands that on the northern border the PATRIOT Act required us to have 2000 more inspectors than we have today. I do not think the public understands that only 13 percent of our fire departments are equipped to handle a full-fledged HAZMAT challenge. I do not think the public understands that we have fewer firefighters in our localities today than we had at the time of 9/11. I do not think the public understands that within the homeland security agency itself, that of the 500 career slots in that agency there are 171 vacancies. The agency itself still does not have a phone directory, and one-quarter of the slots at Homeland Security are filled by political appointees. So I think we have a long way to go in fixing these home security problems, and while I appreciate everything that the chairman has tried to do, he has not been given the resources with which to do a truly comprehensive job. Mr. Speaker, that is why I will attempt, despite the adoption of the rule, I will attempt to offer an amendment which adds about $1.5 billion for first responders, which will add $120 million for cargo security, for additional screening and canine detection; $300 million for more explosive detection equipment; $550 million more for strengthening our border and a variety of other initiatives. I think that if we can provide $25 billion in the Defense bill to defend the country, if we can provide that on an emergency basis, I think we need to do the same thing with respect to defending the homeland close to our own homes. So I would urge that, despite the fact that the rule allows a point of order to be lodged against that amendment, I would urge that no one make that point of order because this country needs investments which this bill does not permit us to make, and we will all be safer, certainly our constituents will be safer, if the amendment passes than they will if it does not.

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Chairman, let me simply say that the idea that how much money is allocated to tax cuts is totally unrelated to how much money is left for homeland security or education or health care, the idea that those things are unrelated is absurd and preposterous. The fact is that unless the deficit is totally meaningless, and I do not think it is, then if you put all of your eggs into the tax cut basket, especially if you provide so much of them to people who make over $200,000 a year, then that indeed does have an effect on what is available for port security, what is available for the northern border security, what is available for first responders, and if the gentleman does not understand that, then I think we need to set up a new grade school on Capitol Hill.

Mr. OBEY

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Chairman, would the gentleman repeat the request?

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Chairman, I ask the gentleman to withhold that request at this time. I do not want to object, but I would be constrained to at this time.

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Chairman, I move to strike the requisite number of words. Mr. Chairman, I find myself very frustrated tonight. I feel like I am in Forestry Theology 1A. I am not a forest manager. I have a district with one of the largest national forests in the eastern region of the United States, and I have firsthand dealing with how the public and the Forest Service and the various legitimate interest groups that use forests have to work with each other, and I am going to vote for this amendment. But I want to get some things off my chest, because frankly, both sides frustrate me. I am going to vote for the Udall amendment, because I think what it does is to stop a process which has in certain ways excluded the public from full participation in the public comment period. What the agency has done with public opinions expressed in a variety of ways are not going to count when final decisions are made. I have heard from conservation groups, and I have heard from their opponents, both who have objected to the way that public comment is being restricted. I think they have a point. So I am going to vote for this. But I just want to say one thing. I get very frustrated being whipsawed between the users of forests who want to use it for economic purposes and the recreational users of forests, the environmentalists on the other side. The only way that you can get rational public policy in an area like the forest is to sit down and work out compromises. Now, I have seen environmental groups who are willing to challenge every blessed timber sale that comes up. I think that is nuts. I think there is a legitimate reason to cut timber in forests. But I also see some people on the other side who have never met an environmentalist that they could tolerate, and they think the forest is there simply for economic exploitation. And I just want to say to both sides, it makes no sense to have one administration go in one direction and have another administration come in and go in another direction, depending upon what the electorate decides every 4 years. We get a yinging and a yanging in forest policy, and nobody knows what the rules are going to be more than a year ahead of time. Now, that drives everybody nuts. It should. So it seems to me that rather than both sides being engaged in a theological debate every blessed year on this issue, sooner or later, for each and every forest in the country, the interested groups need to sit down with each other and work out reasonable compromises. I am so damned sick of theology on this floor, political theology invading every issue. And that goes for both sides on this issue, in my view. So I am not criticizing Members, because regardless of what party you are in, you are caught in this whipsaw. But I have seen intractable differences on forestry matters in my own area resolve themselves in 6 weeks when people are legitimately willing to sit down, deal with each other in an honorable fashion, and recognize that each side has legitimate interests. And I think we have a right as legislators to go to groups on both sides of this issue and say, we have had it, fellows. Get together. Work it out. Nine times out of ten, the only public policy that can be sustained over a significant period of time is policy which is first worked out in the private sector so that the public representatives can ratify those agreements. Now, once in a while that cannot happen. But these days, we have polarization, polarization, and polarization on every blessed issue that comes before this House. And that is in part the fault of people who occupy this House, but it is also in part a problem related to the fact that both sides of these issues like to make a living and like to generate their public support; and so they use us to drive their points across, and they never behave like adults and try to resolve their arguments. Mr. Chairman, as I said, I am going to vote for this amendment because I think the policy that has been followed by the Bush administration has been needlessly dismissive of the public's right to participate. But for God's sake, people, tell whoever you are talking to before you give your speeches to sit down and work these things out. That is the only thing that serves the interests of the country.

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Chairman, reserving the right to object, I will not object because the majority extended a similar unanimous consent request to a Member of the minority earlier this evening, and I think it is only fair to reciprocate, but before I withdraw my objection I just would like to ask a question. I referred earlier this evening to the fact that we had reached 4 years ago an agreement in this House to a certain funding schedule for a variety of conservation programs, and then the committee had walked away from that agreement. As I understand the gentleman's amendment, it is an effort to reduce some accounts in the bill in order to add some funding to PILT; is that correct?

Mr. OBEY. I yield to the gentleman from Arizona.

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Chairman, further reserving the right to object, I happen to agree with the desire to add more money for PILT, but the problem is there are a wide variety of other programs which are not being assisted because the budget resolution and the action of the committee has effectively wiped out almost $800 million in funding for other, equally deserving programs. Federal land acquisition is being cut by $170 million. State wildlife is being cut by $11 million; forestry legacy, cut by $57 million. We are seeing historic preservation in urban parks both cut significantly and hugely in comparison to the scheduled funding. So, even though I personally would like to see more money in PILT, I feel that it is not fair to try to provide additional funding for one program while the others are continuing to be put in the closet. I will not object procedurally, but I really question the fairness of trying to restore funding for only one of the six major programs involved. Mr. Chairman, I withdraw my reservation of objection.

Mr. OBEY

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

Mr. OBEY

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Chairman, I would very much like to be able to support this bill, and I regret very much that I cannot do so. I would like to explain why that is the case. First of all, let me simply observe that I think that this bill gives vivid testimony to the strangeness of the majority party budget resolution. This bill, in fact, eliminates $700 million of the President's initiatives in areas under the jurisdiction of this subcommittee. Those are reductions in the President's initiatives that were made by the President's own party. The reason they did that is because they understood that the President's budget increases were essentially ``let's pretend'' increases; they were financed by cutting deeply into the base of existing programs such as Indian health care, which no civilized person would suggest that we cut. But nonetheless, those initiatives are now gone because of the unreality of the President's budget and the unreality of the budget resolution itself. But more importantly, my problem with this bill is that it scuttles the conservation agreement that was made 4 years ago. Then, we had a number of Members of this Congress who wanted to pass what was known as CARA. That would have created an entitlement for a whole range of environmental and land acquisition programs. A number of us thought it was not advisable to make those entitlements, but we did want to see significant increases in those funding levels. So we reached an agreement in the committee that there would be a 6-year scheduled ramp- up of funding for the programs. The committee stuck to that for 2 years. Last year they walked away from it. This year they are walking away from it again. That means that this bill funds at an $831 million level programs that were scheduled to be at the $1.6 billion level. We can argue about whether or not those programs are advisable, but I come from the old-fashioned view that if a committee makes a commitment, it has an obligation to stick to it. I stick to mine, and I expect people who make agreements with me to keep those commitments. I feel that the majority party did not keep that commitment; and so I, in protest, am intending to vote ``no.'' Let me say there are some good things in this bill, and I appreciate the fact that the chairman has tried to work out a number of issues most rationally. But I really believe that to be involved in a theological debate on land acquisition that prevents us from protecting some of the most precious and pristine areas in this country before they are overcome by development is a price that is too high to pay for running this Congress on the basis of ideology rather than evidence, and so I regretfully will be opposing the bill.

Mr. OBEY

Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, parliamentary inquiry, is it correct that the Speaker accepted Mr. Johnson's resignation?