[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 151 (2005), Part 9]
[Senate]
[Pages 12116-12118]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                     FUNDING FOR HOMELAND SECURITY

  Mr. GREGG. Mr. President, I rise to speak a little bit about the 
Department of Homeland Security. I have the good fortune to chair their 
appropriations committee, and we will be marking up the appropriations 
bill relative to that agency next week, hopefully, if we can straighten 
out the proper allocations for funding within the budget, which I 
expect to happen today under the leadership of Chairman Cochran.
  The Homeland Security Department is a big one because, of course, 
this goes to the essence of how we protect ourselves as a nation, how 
we make sure that we are ready should we be attacked, and how we, 
hopefully, make it possible for us to avoid such an attack. 
Regrettably, the Department of Homeland Security has been thrown 
together and has had some problems as it has tried to shake out in the 
post-9/11 world.
  In fact, the problems have been so extreme that almost a day does not 
go by that we do not see an inspector general report or a GAO report 
outlining some function of that agency which simply is not working 
correctly. Today, there was a report where the inspector general found 
that there were no backup computer systems within the Department for 
some of the critical agencies that are involved, but that is only one 
of literally a stack of GAO and inspector general reports which 
probably is 2 or 3 feet high.
  There is a lot to do in this agency. Certainly, I congratulate the 
President on bringing aboard Secretary Chertoff. I know he is a hard-
driving and committed individual, and I know he is going to try to put 
together programs which will get that agency focused and functioning in 
a manner in which the American people expect.
  As we look at the agency, however, I do think we have to be driven by 
a certain theory or theme, a set of policies. The first is that we 
address threat first and that we start with the highest threats as 
being the first threats which we should focus on. Of course, the 
highest threats are weapons of mass destruction coming into the country 
or being developed in the country which would be used against American 
citizens.
  Those weapons involve things such as chemical or biological weapons 
or potentially some sort of nuclear device. So we must prepare 
ourselves and focus that Department on making sure that it is ready to 
deal with those types of threats.
  Some of the responsibility for making ourselves adequately prepared 
in the area, especially biologics, falls outside the Department and 
falls with the CDC or HHS--the Health and Human Services Department--
which have responsibility for developing vaccines. NIH, for example, 
National Institutes of Health, has the responsibility for making sure 
that we are on course to bring on line adequate responses should we be 
attacked with a biological weapon such as anthrax, a plague or 
botulism.
  The Department still has a huge role in this area, and it obviously 
has a role in the nuclear area of detection and making sure that we are 
ready to try to anticipate and stop a weapon of that sort. Below that 
level of addressing the weapons of mass destruction issues, we have to 
look at the other areas of threat and how we as a government are 
structured to handle it.
  There was a report today that the President of the United States, in 
a meeting with the leadership of the House at least, and maybe the 
Senate, said that he thought we should be focusing on border security 
as a priority in the area of maintaining our security as a nation. I 
think that is absolutely true. Most Americans today wonder why there 
are still literally tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of 
people coming across our borders, entering this country illegally.
  A lot of other Americans wonder why today there is so much happening 
in the area of people coming into the country without us knowing what 
their purposes are or what their potential threat is as individuals. 
There is concern about our capacity to screen folks who are coming into 
this Nation who may have as one of their purposes to do us harm. We 
need to strengthen our ability to stay on top of this situation.
  There is significant concern about what is happening within our ports 
and whether we are putting in place systems which adequately review and 
give us the capacity to address what might be in a container in one of 
the hundreds of thousands of containers that come into this country on 
a daily basis. So this is an area of high priority. If this report is 
correct, it is very good that the President has decided to put 
significant focus on the issue of border security beyond what was 
obviously energy that was being put into that effort to begin with 
anyway.
  There is no question there has been significant effort in this area, 
but it needs a lot more effort, and that brings me to what we are 
planning to do with the appropriations bill. I want to lay out a bit of 
a precursor to that bill so people will know what is coming and can 
anticipate it.
  Basically, what we intend to do is reorient, to the extent we can, 
funds within the moneys we have available to us for the Department of 
Homeland Security to focus on border security because we consider 
that--or I happen to consider--after we go below the weapons of mass 
destruction issue, to be the most significant area of need from the 
standpoint of protecting our national security and making sure that we 
are able to manage our national security.
  Unfortunately, the proposal that came up to us from the 
administration prior to this recent discussion which occurred at the 
White House yesterday or the day before did not put the type of 
resources or focus on that Department that was necessary within the 
context of the entire Homeland Security Department. As a result, in 
order to accomplish that within the dollars we have--and the dollars 
are going to be fairly significant because the chairman of the 
Appropriations Committee, I believe, has stated not publicly yet but 
has at least implied that he intends to fund aggressively this activity 
of the Federal Government because he understands the importance of the 
security of our Nation. He used to be chairman of this subcommittee and 
certainly knows its needs. So he is going to give us an allocation 
which is fairly significant. Within that allocation we do intend to 
reform and restructure so that we are putting more money into homeland 
security.

[[Page 12117]]

  That is going to mean that other accounts we might want to have 
funded at a higher level are not going to be funded at quite so high a 
level. We are going to set priorities. My view of how we fund the issue 
of protecting our national security is that we address the issue of 
threat, pick the highest threat, and fund responses to that threat. 
After the issue of weapons of mass destruction, the highest threat is 
our failure to manage our borders; thus, we are going to put more money 
into that. That means we will have to take money from accounts which 
are not necessarily going to make those folks happy in those accounts, 
but it is necessary if we are going to adequately fund this area.
  It is a two-step effort, really. First, we have to put on the border 
the necessary capability to have a reasonable review of who is coming 
into the country and what is coming into the country. Today, we do not 
have that capacity. Within that effort we need to have not only people, 
but we need to have infrastructure in the form of technology capability 
and in the form of physical plant capability.
  Secondly, we have to have a program in place as a nation which does 
not create an incentive for people to come into the country illegally. 
That gets into this whole question of guest worker. My Appropriations 
Committee may not have that jurisdiction. We would love to have that 
jurisdiction. We have it marginally, but that is an authorizing 
exercise, and maybe it will be debated on this bill. But, in any event, 
we are going to focus on that first part where we do have jurisdiction, 
which is we are going to significantly tool up our physical and 
personnel capabilities and our technology capabilities in order to try 
to address border security at the first level, which is a question of 
having the people and the resources on the borders, in the ports, in 
order to effectively manage our borders.
  This is not an overnight event. This has been attempted before and it 
has been singularly unsuccessful. When I had responsibility for 
Immigration and Border Patrol in the prior committee that was moved 
over from the Justice Department when they had the Justice Department 
responsibility moved over to Homeland Security, we were in the midst of 
trying to gear up the number of Border Patrol agents and we made a 
commitment to add literally thousands of Border Patrol agents over a 
series of years. Unfortunately, the Border Patrol first was not able to 
recruit the people at the price we were willing to pay them because the 
people were required to be bilingual and actually had talents that in 
the marketplace could command more than we were willing to pay them, 
and second, we did not have the training facilities, so we ended up 
never reaching the increase in numbers of Border Patrol we need in 
order to effectively address the border.
  We are going to try again. The Border Patrol told us the number they 
think they can train up in a year. We are going to give them more 
training capacity so in later years we can train more people. We are 
going to put in pay scales--we already have--that will make it a more 
attractive job. And we are going to start to hire people who can do the 
job effectively at fairly significant numbers.
  On top of that, we have to do other things. There is within the 
Department of Homeland Security a program called US-VISIT, about which 
I have serious misgivings. It is a massive computer undertaking. I have 
seen these before in other agencies and my sense is this computer 
initiative is not going well and is not evolving the software and 
hardware capabilities necessary. We are going to try to focus on that 
and hopefully turn that corner so that program will in the end be an 
asset, so we will know who is coming in the country.
  There is other work we need to do. We need to increase the number of 
detention beds. We need to increase the number of people who are doing 
the prosecution of detainees. We need to increase the capability, the 
physical plant capacity of the Border Patrol and the Immigration and 
Customs officers. We need a lot of physical plant and people and 
technology and we are going to take from other accounts to try to 
accomplish that as we move this Homeland Security bill forward.
  I am putting people on notice that this is the direction we are 
going. It is my opinion as we move this bill across the floor there 
should be and will be a lot of interest in this area because securing 
our borders is, as the President has stated at least indirectly, 
through hearsay as presented by the leadership of the House, a priority 
on which it is time we focused like a laser beam and took some action.
  Mr. SESSIONS. Will the Senator yield for a question?
  Mr. GREGG. I am happy to yield to the Senator from Alabama for a 
question, or I will yield the floor.
  Mr. SESSIONS. I am very pleased the Senator from New Hampshire, Mr. 
Gregg, is chairing this important committee. He has had a large number 
of years of intense interest in improving homeland security.
  I am not sure he is aware, but yesterday there was a hearing in the 
Judiciary Committee on the Joint Terrorism Subcommittee and the 
Immigration Subcommittee. It dealt with people coming into the country 
illegally, people who were other than Mexicans, on the Mexican border. 
The story, as described by a reporter in a newspaper article of early 
May, said that a group--for example, in this case 20 from Brazil--came 
across the border, looked for the Immigration Border Patrol people, and 
immediately went up to them and turned themselves in to them. They were 
taken into some form of custody, placed in some form of transportation, 
transported further into the country, and then released on their own 
recognizance. Of the 8,908 notices to appear that the immigration court 
in Harlington issued to non-Mexicans, 8,767 of them never showed up 
when they were supposed to come to court.
  First, I would note there are a lot of people other than our Mexican 
neighbors who are coming across that border. Second, there were some 
plans to expedite removal to these other countries, which is somewhat 
difficult. Maybe one-fifth of these are being handled in the more 
expedited and effective way. But I wanted to share that with the 
Senator. I ask if he thought the committee would be responsive to 
requests from the Administration to fund those expedited programs, 
because what we are doing now is not effective at all.
  Mr. GREGG. The Senator from Alabama has pointed to one of the many 
anecdotal but glaringly difficult instances that should cause us all 
concern. We are hearing anecdotal information that the Border Patrol is 
finding material that is clearly written in Arabic, and is clearly 
Islamic fundamentalist, at the border. People have left it there or it 
has been left behind by people coming across the border, it appears. So 
that is obviously an extreme concern.
  But your story reflects the fact that these borders are simply not 
controlled and we don't have the capacity to handle the people when we 
do catch them. That is going to take a rethinking of the effort. It is 
going to take a lot of resources. As we move forward as a Congress, we 
have to think about: Are we putting too many resources in other 
accounts when we should be focusing on the border? I will take two 
examples.
  One is TSA, our transportation security, which we see in our 
airports. How many people can we afford there versus the border? The 
first responder funds that are going out not necessarily on the basis 
of threat but on the basis of formula, can we afford that in light of 
the fact we have a threat, which is the border, or should we take 
another look at other approaches to funding a significant increase in 
the border security effort?
  I look forward to working with the members of the Judiciary 
Committee. Our role is the money role. We look to you folks to give us 
the authorizing leadership, which I know you have in the past. You 
certainly have and certainly other members in your committee are 
leaders in this area. We look forward to any ideas or thoughts you have 
which you want to bring forward.
  I do think on this bill we should have a fairly open and substantive 
debate as to how we are going to move forward

[[Page 12118]]

on the issue of border security. Clearly the White House is committed 
to this. It is going to take resources.
  Mr. SESSIONS. I thank the Senator, also the Chair of the Budget 
Committee. He answered very well when he said we can't always fund the 
new things we want to do by pumping new money into them. Sometimes we 
need to ask ourselves if there is not some money being spent in a way 
that is less useful, and utilize that money where we have to utilize 
it.
  I am proud to serve with him on that Budget Committee.

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