Mr. Secretary, I am pleased to welcome you for your second appearance before the Subcommittee on Homeland Security.  When you were here last year, you had only been at your position for two weeks.  You testified on behalf of an appropriations request that you had no hand in creating and you didn’t have the benefit of knowing the intricacies of all of the Department’s programs and operations.  We went easy on you.

 

            Now, Mr. Secretary, you have a year under your belt.  You are presenting an appropriations request put together under your leadership and after a year of significant events.  You initiated a major restructuring of the Department.  Hurricanes Katrina and Rita tested our nation’s preparedness and response capabilities—and, to be perfectly candid, we failed.  We also saw Minutemen lining our borders in a homegrown effort to stem the flow of undocumented aliens.  And there have been press reports of drug related paramilitary activity along the southern border.  It has been a busy year for homeland security.

 

            Mr. Secretary, we have many questions.  We are not going to let you off as easy as we did last year. 

 

            Let me say that I believe you have displayed strong leadership over the past year.  I commend you on changes you have made within the Department as well as those you have initiated with other federal agencies, our state, local and private partners and our international allies.  I believe you are on the right track when you say you want to achieve “control of our borders within five years”.  I also believe you are paying careful attention to our nation’s preparedness, something you are tasked with doing. 

 

            Nonetheless, while I am pleased to see the President included an increase for DHS in his fiscal year 2007 appropriations request, I am concerned with its real impact and the priorities it reflects.  First, the request purports to provide $35.7 billion in discretionary appropriations—an increase of $2.1 billion or 6 percent from the current year.  But the truth of the matter is—if you exclude new user fees and compare apples to apples, DHS gets only a one percent increase in fiscal year 2007.  That’s a significant disparity that amounts to a marginal increase for the Department.

 

I am also concerned with the budget’s emphasis on only two areas—borders/immigration security and nuclear detection.  While these are homeland security priorities, the increases come at the expense of everything else—resulting in reduced funding for first responders, transit security, research and development, and little new money for essential work of Federal Air Marshals and the US Secret Service.  I see little balance in the fiscal year 2007 appropriations request. 

 

            You have been a vocal proponent of providing homeland security funds based on risk, and much progress has been made in this regard for first responders.  However, I question if and how risk analysis guided other important funding decisions.  For instance, there is only $13.2 million in the request for rail inspectors yet the last two significant international terrorist attacks involved rail—in Madrid and London.  Additionally, despite the continued threats to the aviation environment, TSA is held virtually flat. The same can be said for the Coast Guard.  I would like to know what sort of risk and threat analyses supports your decisions to put all of the Department’s resources into border security and nuclear detection.

 

            I am also concerned about the absence of what I would call a strategic management plan for the Secure Border Initiative.  In total, you are requesting an increase of $1.3 billion for this effort but no where do I see a planned strategy linked to measurable improvements on our borders.  If you have a strategic plan, I haven’t seen it and that concerns me.

 

            Mr. Secretary, finally, I note Hurricane Katrina.  During a briefing provided to the Subcommittee, Admiral Allen described Hurricane Katrina as an “act of terrorism without criminality”.  I believe that is a very accurate assessment.  Today, the Select Bipartisan Committee on Hurricane Katrina is releasing its findings, which I am certain will spur many discussions.  Mr. Secretary, no matter what the details of the report show, we all witnessed it—there was failure at all levels of government. Mr. Secretary, the Department of Homeland Security opened its doors three years ago in response to the September 11^th terrorist attacks.  Three years later, we appear no better prepared.  Despite creation of a National Preparedness Goal and the National Response Plan, we are not where we need to be as a nation.  We cannot afford to get bogged down in bureaucratic inertia.  It has never been a question of “if” our nation will face another disaster or attack.  It has always been a matter of “when”.

 

We have been saying for three years that great progress has been made and that our country is safer today than it was before September 11^th.  I continue to believe that to be true.  However, Katrina was our first big test since September 11^th.  It was a tangible event to measure our progress against.  I hope you take the lessons learned from Hurricane Katrina and move our nation forward.   I will be looking to you for results, Mr. Secretary.  More work remains.  Failure is not an option.