House presses for DHS management, procurement overhaul

The chairman of the House Select Committee on Homeland Security indicated Tuesday that Congress would press officials at the Homeland Security Department to overhaul its management structure and improve its procurement processes.

Rep. Christopher Cox, R-Calif., said he has been in talks with Deputy Homeland Security Secretary James Loy about the possibility of organizational changes in the department to improve cyber-, nuclear and biological security. Loy said last week that such changes could come, but Cox said that "the department has not offered specific organizational recommendations."

"The two most significant civilization-ending threats that we face are nuclear and bio," Cox said.

House Judiciary Committee Chairman James Sensenbrenner, R-Wis., House Government Reform Committee Chairman Tom Davis, R-Va., and Cox plan within days to send Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge a letter calling for improvements to eliminate "red tape" that is slowing procurement of technology to defend against terrorism, Cox told reporters on the sidelines of a homeland security conference in Arlington, Va., sponsored by Bureau of National Affairs.

"There can be no worse mismatch between a mission and a process than this, because we're in a hurry," he told the audience of vendors and potential vendors to the department.

Cox said the Support Antiterrorism by Fostering Effective Technologies (SAFETY) Act of 2002, which extends liability protections to companies that do business with Homeland Security, is "well-written" and "important" but "is not being implemented."

"The SAFETY Act, by any measure, has failed to achieve its goal," he said. "Red tape," he said, is "standing the statutory process on its head" by deterring vendors from joining the effort due to the program's excessively complicated application process.

Cox also said that as early as next month, the House could pass legislation that would reform DHS system for distributing antiterrorism grants to state and local agencies.

The House panel approved such a bill in March, and Cox said that no competing measure would supplant his committee's measure in the chamber. "This is clearly the vehicle," he said.

House Speaker Dennis Hastert, R-Ill., Cox said, set a deadline of early next month for other committees to complete their work on offering revisions to the bill.

Cox said the Judiciary Committee is likely to seek a provision guaranteeing all states minimum payments based on a percentage of the overall grant budget of Homeland Security's Office for Domestic Preparedness, which administers the department's emergency-response funding. He said the percentage is likely to be less than the 0.75 percent now designated in the budget for the office's main homeland security grant program, a figure retained in a Senate bill from Governmental Affairs Committee Chairwoman Susan Collins, R-Maine.

Collins and Cox met last week to discuss the outlook for an eventual House-Senate conference on the two bills. Cox called the difficulty in obtaining such a conference a more serious potential obstacle than securing passage of the two bills in their respective chambers.

"She's pretty confident about her bill as well," he said.

The senior Democrat on Cox's panel, Rep. Jim Turner, D-Texas, last week introduced a bill seeking to plug what Turner called a gap in President Bush's Project Bioshield plan to strengthen U.S. biological defenses. Turner said the Bush administration plan would not sufficiently address the threat of future, potentially bioengineered pathogens.

Select Committee on Homeland Security Democratic spokeswoman Moira Whelan said that Turner and other Democrats are also seeking to address the problem through an amendment to the fiscal 2005 defense authorization bill.

Cox said that Turner's goals could be realized through the defense authorization process, but he did not rule out passage of a bill like the one Turner introduced last week. "I believe that there's a 'there' there, but I'm going to continue to work with him on this," Cox said.

"Our No. 1 goal," Cox added, "is to implement Bioshield. I think that this is a shared goal with him."

Cox painted U.S. antiterrorism efforts as an economic battle with al-Qaeda, which he said seeks to harm the U.S. economy. Homeland security efforts, he said, must be approached not only as an expense but also as an investment that stimulates business and can frustrate terrorists' aims by improving the U.S. economy.

"We've got to find ways to make our country more secure that also grow our economy. … Never has the private sector had a greater role in winning a war than in this one," he said.