Homeland Security confirmations top priority for senator

Confirming Tom Ridge as the nation's first Homeland Security secretary and Gordon England as deputy secretary will be the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee's first task in the 108th Congress, the panel's chairwoman said Thursday.

The Senate this week received President Bush's nominations for Ridge, who now heads the White House Office of Homeland Security, and England, the current Navy secretary, to head the new Homeland Security Department. "I hope to move very quickly on that," Maine Republican Susan Collins said during an interview with National Journal Group reporters.

Noting that the transfer of 22 existing federal agencies into the new department will be the most complicated government reorganization in more than 50 years, Collins said her committee would have "chief oversight responsibility" for the department's management and implementation.

"The committee's going to continue to play a close role in the oversight of the department to make sure it's proceeding according to the statutory deadlines for transferring the new agencies ... and also to deal with what I think will be inevitable turf battles that will occur as the agencies are merged into the massive new department," Collins said.

But Collins said Governmental Affairs would share jurisdiction over the department with other committees that would oversee its various component agencies. She emphasized, for example, that the department's inclusion of the Immigration and Naturalization Service would not suddenly give her committee jurisdiction over all immigration laws. "Those are clearly going to stay with Judiciary," she said.

Governmental Affairs also will focus heavily on the department's Security Advanced Research Projects Agency and other science and technology components. "They are priorities because I believe part of the answer in securing our homeland lies in technologies," she said, citing port security as a key example.

"I view the vulnerabilities of our ports to be the greatest challenge that we now face," Collins said, noting that only "2 or 3 percent" of the millions of shipping containers that enter U.S. ports each year are inspected. "Obviously, securing seaports is a far more difficult task than securing an airport when you can control the perimeter."

Other top homeland security priorities for Collins' committee include cybersecurity and allocating about $4 billion to improve emergency response at the state and local levels.

Collins and two other moderate Senate Republicans-Olympia Snowe of Maine and Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island-reached a compromise Friday afternoon with Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn., and other GOP leaders to modify several controversial provisions in the new homeland security law.

Those provisions, which deal with liability protection for pharmaceutical companies, the criteria for a university-based research center, and potential Homeland Security Department contractors that have relocated offshore, are likely to be modified as part of an omnibus spending measure next week, Collins said.

The changes are necessary "to fix what I consider to be special-interest provisions that were added at the last moment with no debate," she said.