Homeland security after the midterms

The final results of the 2006 midterm elec­tions are now all but in, and it’s clear that the Democratic party will have a 30 seat major­ity in the House and a 51–49 major­ity in the Senate. This will lead to a num­ber of key changes in the Congressional agenda for home­land secu­rity. Here are seven that are likely to be near the top:
1. Implementing the 9/​11 Commission rec­om­men­da­tions. In the aggre­gate, this idea is an over­sim­pli­fi­ca­tion, because a num­ber of the rec­om­men­da­tions are not amenable to leg­isla­tive fixes. But many of them can be addressed by leg­is­la­tion, e.g. resolv­ing emer­gency spec­trum issues and mak­ing grant allo­ca­tions com­pletely risk-​​based. On this lat­ter issue, the bar­rier to date hasn’t been a Dem-​​Rep divide; it’s been a big state vs. small state divide, and noth­ing in the cur­rent realign­ment changes that. I also think there’s a lot of work to be done on the rec­om­men­da­tion con­cern­ing how the “U.S. bor­der secu­rity sys­tem should be inte­grated into a larger net­work of screen­ing points.“
One other impor­tant rec­om­men­da­tion by the 9/​11 Commission con­cerned the cre­ation of per­ma­ment home­land secu­rity com­mit­tees. I’ve writ­ten repeat­edly about this issue over the last two years, argu­ing that while the arrange­ment in the House is more or less suf­fi­cient, the Senate did not go far enough in empow­er­ing the HSGAC. If the Democratic lead­er­ship in the Senate is con­cerned about imple­ment­ing the 9/​11 Commission rec­om­men­da­tions, the first thing that they need to do is give the HSGAC broader author­ity over trans­porta­tion secu­rity (which is at Commerce now), chem­i­cal facil­ity secu­rity (which EPW has claims some author­ity over), and bor­der secu­rity (which is now at Judiciary) at a min­i­mum. Perhaps the “gov­ern­ment affairs” part of the HSGAC should be spun off to the Senate Budget Committee as part of this realign­ment, since it’s the other Senate com­mit­tee that has a government-​​wide focus. For more on this issue, see this post from September.
2. Rail and tran­sit secu­rity. According to a story in CQ (sub­scrip­tion req’d), HSC Chairman-​​elect Bennie Thompson is already plan­ning to bring up rail and tran­sit secu­rity lan­guage that had been removed from the port secu­rity bill dur­ing the final con­fer­ence as a new piece of leg­is­la­tion early in the 110th. While there are lim­its to what can be done to counter rail and tran­sit threats, I think we are clearly not doing enough today — see this post from July for more on this topic — and move­ment on such leg­is­la­tion is war­ranted.
3. Chemical plant secu­rity. The lan­guage that was attached to FY 2007 DHS appro­pri­a­tions on chem­i­cal plant secu­rity was a sham, and made a mock­ery of the com­pre­hen­sive leg­is­la­tion that had been passed by the HSC and HSGAC on a bipar­ti­san basis ear­lier in the year. Hopefully one of the first things that the Democratic lead­er­ship in the House and the Senate will do is go back to these bills, fix a cou­ple of the small flaws in them, and get this passed and to the President’s desk. I’d be sur­prised if he would veto such a bill.

4. Border secu­rity and immi­gra­tion reform. As the President admit­ted in his press con­fer­ence yes­ter­day, the like­li­hood of pass­ing com­pre­hen­sive bor­der secu­rity and immi­gra­tion reform leg­is­la­tion has increased with the elec­tion of a Democratic Congress. I think there now will be a win­dow of time in 2007 to revisit this issue, and pass a bill along the lines of the Senate’s ver­sion of the leg­is­la­tion in 2006.
Whatever passes will likely be much less puni­tive than what would have emerged if the House Republicans had decided to actu­ally nego­ti­ate with the Senate this sum­mer rather than play­ing games with ama­teur­ish field hear­ings and insist­ing that they needed a “major­ity of the major­ity” to move for­ward. This turned out to be a strate­gic mis­cal­cu­la­tion of the first order. And con­trary to their notion that dem­a­gogu­ing this issue would help Republicans to pro­tect seats, the oppo­site was in fact true, as vocal anti-​​immigration hard­lin­ers in the House such as John Hostettler and J.D. Hayworth were booted out of office on Tuesday.
5. Revisiting lost ‘party-​​line’ votes. On a num­ber of occa­sions in 2005 and 2006, there were party-​​line votes in com­mit­tees or on the floor on con­tentious home­land secu­rity issues. Examples include votes on 100% scan­ning of inbound mar­itime cargo, 100% screen­ing of domes­tic cargo, and the rela­tion­ship between C-​​TPAT val­i­da­tion and risk tar­get­ing scores. In some cases, the Democrats lost votes on these issues by 1 or 2 votes in com­mit­tee. I’d expect each of them to be revis­ited at some point in the com­ing year, most likely in the con­text of the FY 2008 DHS appro­pri­a­tions bill and/​or a DHS autho­riza­tion bill.
6. DHS autho­riza­tion leg­is­la­tion. As men­tioned in the last sen­tence, I think we’re likely to see more progress on DHS autho­riza­tion leg­is­la­tion than we’ve seen in the last two years. This has been a sec­ondary pri­or­ity in the House to date, and not even on the agenda in the Senate.
Any autho­riza­tion bill would and should likely focus on the man­age­ment and gov­er­nance of DHS, focused on ways to strengthen its core capa­bil­i­ties. For exam­ple, an autho­riza­tion bill should have a sec­tion on DHS work­force issues, focus­ing per­haps on the cre­ation of a new multi-​​agency career track of ‘Homeland Security Officers’ who could be the robust core of the DHS work­force. (See this post from March for more on this). And it should have a sec­tion on the edu­ca­tion and pro­fes­sional devel­op­ment of that work­force. (See this post for more).
I’d also expect an autho­riza­tion bill to revisit some of the issues con­cern­ing the way that DHS han­dles clas­si­fi­ca­tion; for exam­ple, mod­i­fy­ing the rules con­cern­ing ‘Sensitive But Unclassified’ (SBU) infor­ma­tion.
7. Increased over­sight. One con­se­quence of the con­gres­sional power shift is that we’re likely to see increased con­gres­sional over­sight of the exec­u­tive branch, includ­ing DHS. I actu­ally think that DHS has been sub­ject to a fairly solid amount of over­sight to date; I often can barely keep up with all of the GAO reports, DHS IG reports, con­gres­sional inves­ti­ga­tions (e.g. the post-​​Katrina reports), and media inves­ti­ga­tions of DHS. But there has been some­thing miss­ing from these mul­ti­ple streams of inves­ti­ga­tions — the will­ing­ness to use sub­poena power to com­pel answers when there has been tru­cu­lence at DHS and else­where in the fed­eral gov­ern­ment, as was the case dur­ing the Senate’s inves­ti­ga­tion of the response to Hurricane Katrina.
This list is only a start­ing point; there are a num­ber of other home­land secu­rity issues that might also pop up on the Congressional radar screen in the 110th Congress. I hope (and feel ini­tially con­fi­dent) that this work will be dri­ven by a respon­si­ble assess­ment of threat and vul­ner­a­bil­ity, weighed against broader soci­etal and eco­nomic impacts, and be con­stantly focused on improv­ing our pro­tec­tion and pre­pared­ness of the nation against the seri­ous threats that we still face.
– Christian Beckner (cross-​​posted from Homeland Security Watch)

November 9th, 2006 | Homeland Security | Comments Off Both comments and pings are currently closed.