August 30, 2002
WASHINGTON - Senate Governmental Affairs Committee
Chairman Joe Lieberman, D-Conn., noting widespread agreement
between Democrats and Republicans for the overall mission and
powers of a new Department of Homeland Security, is urging his
colleagues to support legislation creating the agency.
The legislation, S.2452, will be among the first orders
of business when the Senate reconvenes September 3rd.
In a letter to his Senate colleagues, Lieberman said that
only with an intelligent organizational design, a unified chain
of command, and an accountable leader capable of getting results
can government’s personnel and resources be effectively
coordinated to prevent, prepare for and respond to terrorist
attacks.
“The end product of this careful Senate process is very
similar to the Administration’s proposal as it was unveiled in
June, and to the legislation passed by the House last month,”
Lieberman said. “The
overall mission and powers of the new agency in our proposal and
the Administration’s are virtually the same.”
Despite this consensus, Lieberman acknowledged areas of
disagreement but said most were “divisive provisions that are
frankly peripheral to the core mission at hand... The
Administration has blurred the focus of its bill, and risked
dragging this common cause into a quicksand of unnecessary
controversy.
“It would be a tragedy,” Lieberman continued, “for
us to scorch the substantial tract of common ground on which all
our proposals have been built, and in the process, fail to
create the strong and accountable Department of Homeland
Security the American people deserve.”
Following is text of the letter:
August 29, 2002
Dear Colleague:
I write to urge your active support for the homeland
security legislation endorsed in July by the Senate Governmental
Affairs Committee—legislation that would create a strong,
coherent, and accountable Department of Homeland Security to
protect
America
against the threat of terrorism.
It is no exaggeration to say that today, our federal
government’s domestic defenses are dispersed, disjointed, and
dysfunctional. They are structured as relics of the Cold War,
not designed to combat the asymmetrical and unconventional
threat of contemporary terrorism, which has so suddenly and
tragically reached our soil. We were unprepared on September 11th,
and despite new investment and better coordination since then,
despite the hard work of the Congress, the President, his
Homeland Security Advisor, and State and local officials,
significant vulnerabilities remain.
We will continue to be ill-equipped to defend against our
terrorist enemies until we consolidate the dozens of disparate
federal agencies and offices responsible for homeland defense
into a single department with a unified chain of command.
That is the purpose of our legislation. Like the
Administration’s proposal and the House legislation passed
last month, our legislation would create one Federal department
with the power, personnel, and resources to work with states,
cities, counties, other Federal agencies, Native-American
tribes, and the private sector to do this immensely complicated
job.
We have built upon the original legislation creating a
Department of Homeland Security proposed last October by Senator
Specter, myself, and a bipartisan group of House members—which
drew its inspiration from the recommendations of the U.S.
Commission on National Security/21st Century chaired
by former Senators Hart and Rudman. That legislation has been
refined based on the expert advice gleaned from 18
post-September 11th Governmental Affairs Committee
hearings on the subject and numerous hearings by other
committees; merged in May with legislation proposed by
Senator Bob Graham and others; reported out of Committee in May;
further developed through extensive discussions with colleagues,
including committee chairs and ranking members; and—since
President Bush embraced the idea of such a Department this
June—honed through ongoing conversations with the White House.
The legislation that will be debated on the Senate floor
in September was endorsed by the Governmental Affairs Committee
on July 25 by a bipartisan vote of 12-5, incorporating many
suggestions offered by fellow committee members and by numerous
Senate committees.
A Common
Vision
The end product of this careful Senate process is very
similar to the Administration’s proposal as it was unveiled in
June, and to the legislation passed by the House last month. The
overall mission and powers of the new agency in our proposal and
the Administration’s are virtually the same. The federal
agencies and offices we seek to consolidate into the new
Department are virtually the same. The divisions we would create
focused on emergency preparedness and response, border and
transportation security, and critical infrastructure protection
are very similar. Both our approaches would have FEMA and the
Coast Guard play central roles. And both proposed models would
develop important new science and technology capabilities within
the new Department.
Both the Committee-endorsed bill and the
Administration would, for the first time in American history,
create one department to secure our borders, ports, airports,
railways, roads, and critical infrastructure; one department to
coordinate communications with State and local governments,
private industry, and directly with the American people; one
department to help equip and train first responders; one
department to spark the development of a new wave of science and
technology to protect us from attack.
We know that reorganizing our homeland security efforts
is not, in and of itself, the answer to the challenges we face.
But we know that the current disorganization will guarantee
failure. Only by starting with an intelligent organizational
design, a unified chain of command, and an accountable leader
capable of getting results can our personnel and resources be
effectively coordinated, with an overarching vision and as few
gaps or overlaps as possible.
The Committee-approved Homeland Security bill makes major
progress in meeting the following goals:
Requires
a Homeland Security Strategy for the Nation
•
to be implemented
across all parts of government
Requires
a Comprehensive Assessment of Threats and Vulnerabilities
•
we need to
understand much better the worst threats and the best ways to
respond; the legislation mandates that focus
Requires
Close and Ongoing White House Coordination
•
many agencies
involved in the fight against terrorism, including intelligence,
diplomatic, and law enforcement agencies, will remain outside
the new Department; the legislation strengthens the existing
White House Office to better assure coordination
Bolsters
Emergency Preparedness and Response
•
all layers and
levels of government need to be working together to anticipate
and prepare for the worst; the new department will develop and
implement a comprehensive response plan in conjunction with
local authorities
Builds
Strong Bonds between Federal, State and Local Government
•
State and local
officials are the front lines of the fight against terrorism;
the new department will reach out to those public servants with
better training, new tools, and a coordinated prevention and
protection strategy
Includes
Consensus Provisions to Reform Government
•
contains bipartisan
civil service reform that provides significant new management
flexibility in hiring employees and shaping the workforce
Brings
Key Border and National Entry Agencies Together
•
creates the means
to ensure their effective coordination for the first time,
keeping dangerous people and goods out without restricting the
flow of legal immigration and commerce
Facilitates
More Effective Homeland Security Intelligence Coordination
•
creates the first
focal point for swiftly receiving and analyzing all threats
against the
U.S.
homeland
Promotes
Dramatic New Research and Technology Development Opportunities
•
the development and
deployment of advanced technologies will be crucial to our
homeland security; the legislation leverages government research
capabilities and focuses academic, non-profit, and other private
sector innovation on the challenge
Points
of Disagreement
Despite our substantial agreement on the overwhelming
need for a new Department of Homeland Security, there are a few
significant differences among all three homeland security
proposals before the American people today (House, Senate
Governmental Affairs Committee, and White House).
These differences can be divided into five substantive
areas: management flexibility (both union and civil service),
reorganization authority, appropriations flexibility and
transition funding, intelligence analysis, and the statutory
creation of a White House Office for Combating Terrorism.
Regarding the first three issues, we have given the
Administration all the power it needs to create and run an
effective, performance-driven department—but have been careful
not to weigh down this urgent piece of legislation with
distracting, divisive provisions that are frankly peripheral to
the core mission at hand, which is to consolidate the right
agencies into a unified and accountable mission-oriented
cabinet-level department. In
my view, the Administration has blurred the focus of its bill,
and risked dragging this common cause into a quicksand of
unnecessary controversy by tacking on significant but vague new
executive powers that are uncalled for and in some cases
unprecedented. And
when it comes to our differences on intelligence and the
creation of a National Office for Combating Terrorism, I
strongly believe our legislation presents a more thorough
solution to the problems currently preventing our domestic
defenses against terrorism from being as effective as they can
possibly be.
As we take time to work through these disagreements, we
must keep them in perspective.
It would be a tragedy for us to scorch the substantial
tract of common ground on which all our proposals have been
built, and in the process fail to create the strong and
accountable Department of Homeland Security the American people
deserve.
1.
Management Flexibility
The Department our legislation envisions will be a
modern, performance-driven federal agency—one that the
Secretary and the President will have extensive authority to
manage. The
Committee-endorsed bill contains flexible provisions on
personnel management, including an important bipartisan civil
service reform package. Taken
together, these provisions strengthen the Secretary’s and
President’s hands in managing the new Department without
jeopardizing key worker protections.
The Administration has taken issue with our approach,
claiming that our legislation will restrict its ability to
manage the new Department efficiently and effectively.
That is just wrong. Moreover,
I am disappointed by the Administration’s inordinate focus on
this bright red herring, which threatens to distract us from our
shared goal of creating a unified and accountable Department of
Homeland Security.
Civil Service. Nothing
in our proposed bill lessens the powers under current law that
the President and Secretary have to reward excellence, remove
poorly performing employees, offer recruitment bonuses, and use
many other performance-oriented management tools.
To the contrary, in an effort to give the Department and
other agencies additional flexibility in the management of
personnel, our legislation adopts significant, government-wide
civil service reforms, contained in provisions proposed by
Senators Voinovich and Akaka.
To support research and development, we also authorize
the Secretary to use innovative techniques in hiring talent and
funding projects. Taken
together, this package will give the Secretary the ability to:
speed up staffing of new employees; recruit and retain
top science and technology talent; procure temporary services
outside the civil service system when there is a critical need;
reshape the workforce; reform old competitive-hiring practices;
provide more effective bonuses for exemplary performance;
promote procurement flexibility in research, development, the
prototyping of new technologies, and other procurement; and make
additional valuable changes to help the new Department attract,
maintain, and motivate the best talent.
These reforms represent a major modernization of the way
federal agencies are managed.
I have heard some opponents of our approach contend that
under our legislation, an incompetent, irresponsible, or even
intoxicated employee could not be removed from duty.
That’s nonsense. Under
current law, such an employee can be removed from duty immediately,
without hesitation or red tape.
And the employee can be taken immediately off the payroll
if the Secretary determines that he or she might endanger
national security.
What we have not done in our bill is accept what I
consider to be a divisive distraction and detour contained in
the President’s proposal: providing the Administration the
unprecedented and unchecked power to waive any and all civil
service protections, essentially rewriting the law wherever and
whenever it sees fit. The
Committee-endorsed bill undertakes the hard task of defining the
details of major civil service reforms in a bipartisan manner,
building on advice from a wide range of experts; the
Administration bill by contrast avoids these details and simply
gives itself the authority to wipe out the application of the
civil service system to the new Department.
The President claims that he deserves
“flexibility”—and that our legislation denies him
flexibility by “handcuffing” him and the Secretary from
exercising their rightful authority.
But the President’s pleas for flexibility are in fact a
request for broad and unchecked authority.
Congress has a duty to the American people to make laws.
If we left it up to the Administration to rewrite the
civil service law, we would be abdicating that responsibility.
Let us remember that a key purpose of the civil service
system is to provide a check on the politicization to which
government agencies are susceptible in any administration.
The civil service laws not only assert, in principle,
that personnel decisions should be based on considerations of
merit, not politics or cronyism or prejudice, but also provide
procedures and remedies so that these principles are not honored
in the breach. Think
for a moment what it could mean to lose the public
accountability assured by the civil service system.
Talented senior managers who have dedicated their careers
to public service could be fired without cause and replaced with
patronage appointees; potential whistleblowers at all levels of
the organization would know they have little or no real
protection against retaliation; employees’ union
representatives could be stripped of much of their ability to
protect the rank and file against abusive or self-protective
political appointees; veterans and minorities could see their
statutory rights ignored, or worse, with insufficient remedy.
A recent article in The New Republic discussed the
dangers of a politicized Department that could result under the
kind of “flexibility” the Administration seeks:
““The
Customs Service, for instance, could impede--through selective
inspection--the imports of certain companies that contribute to
one or the other political party. The Federal Emergency
Management Agency could steer its public assistance grants to
local governments and nonprofits the administration deems
politically sympathetic and away from those it does not.
Finally, there’s the National Infrastructure Protection Center
(NIPC). Currently housed in the FBI but slated to be shifted to
the DoHS, NIPC is responsible for assessing and informing the
government and the private sector about the threat terrorism
poses to certain institutions (like banks, communications
networks, and transportation systems). As part of this task, the
NIPC routinely requests potentially sensitive information from
private-sector firms such as those in the financial-services
industry, which has a NIPC partnership for information exchange.
Such information could easily be used for nefarious political
purposes. And even if it weren’t, the mere fact that the
information was being requested and handled largely by political
appointees might cause some firms--already averse to coughing up
information--to stop cooperating with NIPC’s exchange
partnership altogether.”
These abuses may not occur, but with the authority to
waive all civil service protections, the temptation would be
strong. That is why
the Committee elected to undertake a harder job of coming up
with the details for the key reforms for this new entity to work
well, rather than just giving the Administration authority to
eliminate the entire system, including its strengths, wholesale.
Management experts agree that the success of a complex
merger comparable to the creation of this new Department depends
upon keeping the workforce motivated and upon reinforcing—not
undermining—its sense of stability.
The Administration’s proposal for unprecedented,
unspecified powers will do just the opposite.
We recognize that, as the Secretary begins building the
new Department, the Congress may need to consider changes to the
law to give him or her even more authority.
That is why our legislation requires the Secretary to
return to Congress in six-month intervals during the
reorganization process and propose changes, including changes to
the civil service system that may make his or her job easier.
There will be time to make necessary reforms if need be;
today, it is unwise to attach such an inappropriate rider to
this legislation.
Collective bargaining.
On the issue of union rights, our legislation takes a
similar approach—one that needs to be put in some historical
context. During the
Cold War, Presidents acquired the authority to take away, by
executive order, the collective bargaining rights of particular
agencies or subdivisions if and when the President concluded
that union rights and national security were at odds.
Now, among the approximately 170,000 employees that will
make up the new Department—almost all of whom will be
transferred from existing federal agencies and offices and will
continue doing those jobs—there are some 43,000 employees
(e.g., in the Customs Service, the INS, the Coast Guard, and
FEMA) who are represented by unions.
No President has seen fit to remove the collective
bargaining rights of these employees.
The question before us is:
should these employees risk losing their collective
bargaining rights only because they are being transferred to
this new Department? That
is their fear. Remember
that the union rights of these workers are very limited in the
first place because federal employees are forbidden to strike.
The Committee bill allows the President and Secretary to
remove collective bargaining rights when appropriate.
But the Committee bill also provides these employees—on
whom the success of the new Department will rise or fall—a
reasonable reassurance that their existing basic protections
will not be unfairly and unreasonably undermined only because
they go to work for the Department of Homeland Security.
The Committee’s legislation says the following: when
these employees move into the new Department, they will keep
their existing collective bargaining rights—unless their job
changes, and there is a national security rationale for taking
those rights away. In
that event, the Secretary can have collective bargaining rights
removed from employees on a case-by-case basis, as long as he
can show that these rights are a risk to national security.
In opposing this approach, the Administration is implying
that union membership is somehow incompatible with an
employee’s effective, efficient, and loyal service to his or
her country protecting our security.
The
New York City
firefighters and police officers
who lost their lives on September 11th were members
of unions. Did that
make them any less dedicated?
Any less willing to answer their country’s call, and
risk or sacrifice their lives?
I have not yet heard a single satisfactory argument
supporting the contention that the union rights of these
employees who may work as Customs inspectors or Border Patrol
inspectors are incompatible with their ability to serve their
country as best as they possibly can.
2. Reorganization
Authority
All three proposals currently under consideration will
make us safer by bringing various agencies responsible for
homeland security into a single organizational framework and
under a single chain of command.
The importance of having dozens of disparate agencies and
programs under one leader with focused policy priorities is not
to be underestimated; this will be a great leap forward for
America’s domestic defenses.
Nevertheless, once these agencies and programs are
consolidated, further reorganization of offices and functions at
the Departmental level may well be needed to integrate incoming
offices and to gain additional coordination, efficiency, and
effectiveness.
The Committee-endorsed legislation allows for such
intra-departmental reorganization by authorizing the Secretary
to reorganize unilaterally to the extent consistent with
applicable law. Where
a change in law is required, the legislation tells the Secretary
to recommend legislation to Congress enabling further
reorganization, and requires such legislation to be submitted
for consideration at six-month intervals or earlier.
Under the President’s proposal, the Secretary would
have unchecked and undue reorganization powers—including the
ability to dissolve or reshape agencies or offices created in
law with major ongoing missions without Congressional approval.
This, in essence, is carte blanche for the
executive to ignore and rewrite, by fiat, the statutes that
created the constituent agencies and offices in the first place.
The only limits the President’s proposal places on
reorganization power would be that the Secretary could not
abolish the Secret Service or the Coast Guard; in any and all
other cases, the Secretary would simply have to give Congress 90
days notice before in effect eliminating existing statutes.
Mere notice is not sufficient; Congress must exercise
active oversight and decision-making authority.
It’s also important to note that the Committee-endorsed
bill actually specifies a massive reorganization of the one
agency that everyone agrees is most in need of reform, the INS.
In June, Senators Byrd and Stevens wrote to me urging
that the Committee reject the Administration’s reorganization
proposal. They
wrote, “Congress should not authorize the Executive Branch to
establish, consolidate, alter, or discontinue agencies of
government that are established in statute. This is Congress’
responsibility.” Our legislation maintains this constitutional
separation of powers.
3. Appropriations
Flexibility and Transition Funding
As my colleagues know, the power of the
purse—appropriating taxpayers’ money on their behalf—is a
core Constitutionally-assigned responsibility of Congress.
Article I, Section 9 states unambiguously:
“No Money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in
Consequence of Appropriations made by Law.”
The Administration’s proposal seeks to except the new
Department from these traditional arrangements regarding the use
of appropriated funds, and in doing so, sets a bad precedent.
The Administration seeks the authority to take up to 5
percent of funds appropriated to each agency slated for transfer
to the Department and use these funds for any purpose under the
legislation. This
would allow the Administration authority to cancel some $2
billion in ongoing programs at existing agencies at its
discretion and to spend that funding on anything it chooses
anywhere in this new Department.
Allowing a percentage of the Department of Homeland
Security’s budget to escape Congressional oversight raises
major Constitutional problems and is an unacceptable end run
around the appropriations process that is one of Congress’s
most critical responsibilities.
Our legislation preserves the customary role of Congress
in ensuring that such funds are used effectively, efficiently,
and according to the will of the people.
In their June letter, Senators Byrd and Stevens urged
that the Committee not include the Administration’s proposed
transfer authority in our bill.
They wrote: “The
proposal by the President provides the new Secretary with
extraordinary powers, powers that could potentially tip the
delicate balance of Constitutional powers between the
Legislative and Executive branches of government.
These are powers that the Secretary of Defense and the
Secretary of State do not currently have, nor should they have.
The Framers carefully crafted that balance, and it has
served the nation well for more than 200 years.”
I agree.
The Administration has argued that such flexibility is
needed, in part, to provide necessary start-up funding for the
new Department. Our
legislation, however, provides a mechanism for the Secretary to
obtain that funding through the appropriate appropriations
process. We require
the Administration promptly to submit a transition budget, so
that this Congress can exercise its responsibility to
appropriate the necessary funds in this legislative session.
The Administration has sought to justify its request for
power to transfer appropriations by stating, in the analysis
accompanying the Administration’s proposed legislation,
“Appropriations transfer provisions are enacted annually in a
number of appropriations acts.”
That is true; annual appropriations bills sometimes build
in such flexibility, but typically in smaller amounts and with
closer Congressional scrutiny.
In any event, this is an argument against, not for, the
broad additional flexibility the Administration seeks in its
proposal. The right
way for the Administration to seek this authority is to request
it as part of its annual appropriations, not as a permanent
“slush fund” authority in the enabling legislation.
4. Intelligence
It is self-evident that our government cannot adequately
protect our country from terrorism if it fails to detect
terrorist attacks before they occur.
That is why we owe it to the American people to examine
the substantially different approach between the Committee
endorsed legislation and the Administration’s proposal.
The Committee-endorsed legislation creates an independent
Directorate for Intelligence to fuse in a single place and
analyze law enforcement and other information from all relevant
sources—including foreign intelligence analysis from the
Director of Central Intelligence’s
Counterterrorism
Center
,
other agencies of the United States Government, State and local
agencies, and private sector entities. The
new Department will not just receive intelligence collected from
other agencies; it will collect a significant amount of new
information in-house—from Customs, INS, the Coast Guard, and
other agencies that will be part of the new Department.
In the post-September 11th
world, this information is now crucial, which will make the new
Department a key information resource.
All of this will be centrally managed, then integrated
with what’s gathered from the FBI, CIA, and other outside
sources. Simply put,
the Directorate’s mission will be to do everything possible to
“connect the dots” to prevent attacks before they occur;
enhance border security; protect our critical infrastructure;
and better inform our emergency preparedness and response as
well as our research and development activities.
These provisions were developed through extensive
discussions with Intelligence Committee Chairman Graham, Vice
Chairman Shelby, former Intelligence Chairman Specter, and Armed
Services Chairman Levin, as well as Senators Akaka and Durbin.
In our legislation, the Secretary is provided routine
access to reports, assessments, analytical information, and
other information—including unevaluated intelligence—
relating to the capabilities, intentions, and activities of
terrorists and terrorist organizations, unless otherwise
directed by the President. The
Secretary will work with the Director of Central Intelligence to
protect sources and methods, and with the Attorney General to
protect sensitive law enforcement information.
The legislation also reaffirms the role of the Director
of Central Intelligence’s
Counterterrorism
Center
, which will continue to have primary responsibility for the
analysis of foreign intelligence relating to international
terrorism and providing that analysis to the Directorate for
Intelligence, which can also conduct its own supplemental
analysis of foreign intelligence.
This model differs from the Administration’s proposal
in several critical respects.
The Administration’s proposal would embed the homeland
security intelligence functions within the division of the new
Department also responsible for critical infrastructure, whereas
the Committee-endorsed legislation establishes separate
directorates and undersecretaries, for intelligence analysis and
for critical infrastructure protection.
The reason behind our approach is simple:
intelligence analysis will be crucial to everything
this department does, and to State and local authorities—not
just to federal infrastructure protection efforts.
We can imagine many threats to American lives that
don’t involve critical infrastructure protection at all:
a plot to detonate a bomb in a shopping mall, for
instance, or to unleash a biological agent on a city from above.
By tying the intelligence functions to critical
infrastructure, the Administration’s approach places
insufficient emphasis on the importance of this analysis in
preventing attacks, enhancing border security, and assisting in
other phases of the homeland security fight.
It also misses the opportunity to establish an
independent directorate to provide analysis to policy-makers, to
law enforcement, and to other agencies. Moreover, the
Administration’s proposal does not account for the fact that
intelligence analysis and critical infrastructure protection are
both very demanding jobs—each of which, in sheer complexity,
requires the attention of a separate undersecretary.
The Administration’s proposal also unnecessarily
restricts the Secretary’s access to unevaluated intelligence.
As long as sources and methods are protected—and the
Committee-endorsed legislation ensures that they will be—there
is no reason to restrict the Secretary in statute from also
receiving the unanalyzed information that comprises reports,
analysis, and assessments, if and when the Secretary needs it.
The Secretary should be able to determine what
information he or she requires in order to protect the American
people and receive it routinely from the intelligence community
and other agencies, unless otherwise directed by the President.
The Secretary can also establish cooperative agreements
with agencies as necessary to manage information flows.
And, he or she must have the authority—as the President
provides—to receive additional information from agencies.
Given the historic difficulties within the Intelligence
Community with sharing information, I believe that creating
statutory barriers to the Department’s access to information
is unwise and counterproductive.
5. The
National Office for Combating Terrorism
A final area of disagreement between the Committee’s
and the Administration’s proposal is contained in Titles II
and III of our legislation, which would build on the current
Office for Homeland Security by creating within the White House
a statutory National Office for Combating Terrorism.
The Senate-confirmed Director of this office would work
with the Secretary of Homeland Security to develop the
government’s overarching anti-terrorism strategy.
Our legislation calls for the creation of such an office
on the strong recommendation of Senator Bob Graham and others.
The war against terrorism goes beyond the new Department
of Homeland Security. It
involves diplomatic, intelligence, treasury, law enforcement,
public health, transportation, and military agencies—including
many functions that cannot be folded into the new Department, no
matter how we structure it.
We believe that without creating such an office, the
government’s anti-terrorism strategy will inevitably be
incomplete and uncoordinated.
As Former Assistant Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter,
testifying before the Governmental Affairs Committee, said,
“The announcement of an intention to create a cabinet-level
Department of Homeland Security should in no way obscure the
paramount need for a strong White House hand over all
aspects of homeland security....The nation’s capabilities for
homeland security, even optimally coordinated, are simply not
adequate to cope with 21st century terrorism. What is
needed is far less a coordinator of what exists than an
architect of the capabilities we need to build.”
Conclusion
Building a Department of Homeland Security to help
protect
America
from terrorism is one of the biggest challenges our government
will face in the 21st century. As we resolve the
differences I have mentioned and others, I know we will prove to
the American people that we are capable of rising to this
challenge together. We must not allow our urgent common mission
to be derailed by a few disagreements. Our nation needs a strong
and accountable new Department that will protect its people from
the threat of terrorism today, tomorrow, and into the future.
Sincerely,
Joseph
I. Lieberman