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Release Date: 02/06/06 00:00:00
For Immediate Release
Office of the Press Secretary
Contact 202-282-8010
Washington, D.C.
February 6, 2006
Secretary Chertoff: Good afternoon, everybody. The moment you've been waiting for, I'm here to talk about the '07 budget request and highlight some of the areas of funding that reflect our priorities in the short and the long term.
Let me begin by giving you a little bit of an overview. This is a strong budget for the Department of Homeland Security, and it reflects the commitment of the President and the administration to our mission. It reflects a 6 percent increase in funding over the current fiscal year, a 36 percent increase in DHS gross discretionary funding since 2003, and triple the amount of non-defense homeland security spending government-wide since 2001.
The budget focuses on strengthening our initiatives in protecting our borders, increasing our preparedness, expanding our intelligence gathering and sharing, and improving maritime and transportation security.
The proposed budget also supports structural changes we've made as part of our second stage review of the Department, including creation of a new Preparedness Directorate and new offices of Policy, Intelligence and Analysis and Operations.
The budget strongly supports our underlying philosophy of risk management, which will ensure that this funding is used to build critical homeland security capabilities, addressing the most significant risks, and providing the best possible protection for the American people.
And of course the budget builds upon significant progress we've made over the last year, and let me just review some of the highlights of what we have achieved in fiscal year 2005.
First, as I've indicated, we have undertaken a significant reorganization of the Department, as a follow-on to our second stage review; a reorganization that gave us for the first time a focused preparedness capability, a flatter organization, but one which is functionally organized so that the missions are properly aligned with those responsible for carrying them out.
We also launched our Secure Border Initiative, the first integrated plan designed to look at the system of our border enforcement from beginning to end, focusing not only on apprehensions, but upon what we do to detain people and what we do to return them back their place of origin. And in connection with that we announced our migration over the course of fiscal year 2006 from a catch-and-release policy for non-Mexicans to a catch-and-return policy.
Last year we were also pleased to announce that U.S.-VISIT, the biometric entry system, was rolled out at all ports of entry. We awarded approximately $3 billion to state and local governments in grants. The United States Coast Guard distinguished itself by executing over 33,000 rescues in hurricanes Katrina and Rita, and FEMA was able to distribute $5.7 billion in aid. Operation Community Shield, conducted by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, carried out 1,600 gang arrests. And CIS, Citizen and Immigration Services, cut the immigration processing backlog by 2.8 million.
Finally, TSA began to move to a much more risk-based threat managed approach, cutting some of the requirements that kept off things like nail scissors from airplanes, but focusing on things like, for example, behavioral pattern recognition, more intensive training for looking for explosive devices and detonators, and other programs designed to make sure that our TSA screeners are operating on a state-of-the-art risk-focused basis and carrying out their assignments.
That's where we've been. Now let me talk about where we want to go as laid out in this 2007 budget, particularly in five cross-cutting areas: increasing preparedness and strengthening FEMA; enhancing our border security; strengthening our transportation and cargo security; boosting intelligence and operations; and improving our Department resource management.
First, let's talk about preparedness. We are focused in this upcoming fiscal year on increasing our catastrophic preparedness across all levels of government and across the private sector. To that end, the proposed budget requests $50 million for a National Preparedness Integration Program, a new initiative to identify and develop risk-based preparedness plans, improve emergency communication and collaboration, and increase public awareness.
Part of this effort, as you know, is our ongoing tasking to go out and deal with the 75 largest urban areas in the 50 states, reviewing their evacuation and emergency plans, and looking to raise everybody's level of preparedness across the board.
Another element of our preparedness reflected in the budget is an increase of $10 million for chemical security efforts -- classifying chemical facilities based on risk, establishing security standards, and ensuring that strong safeguards are in place, while protecting sensitive information from public disclosure.
The proposed budget also looks for a 10 percent increase in FEMA's budget over the 2006 fiscal year, including $44.7 million to strengthen support functions. FEMA's core budget has grown 40 percent from fiscal year 2004 to the fiscal year 2007 proposed budget.
We also look to add resources such as -- in critical areas such as procurement information technology and planning, to FEMA's budget. And as I've indicated, next week we will begin to talk about some of the fundamental changes in the way DHS and FEMA operate as part of our re-engineering in the wake of lessons learned from Hurricane Katrina.
Border security is another area the budget focuses a great deal of attention on. Our approach, as outlined in our Secure Border Initiative, is to control the border through an integrated strategic vision that looks to more people, better technology, and more infrastructure, as well as a more robust interior enforcement program. To that end, the proposed budget looks to adding $458.9 million for 1,500 new Border Patrol agents. That would reflect a 42 percent increase, since the number we had on September 11th.
The budget also looks to $100 million for border technology, $30 million to continue the construction of the San Diego Border Infrastructure System, or San Diego fence; over $400 million to add 6,700 additional detention beds, bringing the total beds that we would have at the end of the fiscal year to 27,500; $135 million to expand our employment verification program, which is a critical element in moving interior enforcement to the next level of robustness; $41.7 million in direct money for worksite enforcement; and $60 million for fugitive operations, addition 18 additional fugitive operations teams for a total of 70 teams seeking to hunt down those people who are in the country illegally and are fugitives from the immigration justice system.
Finally, our border security budget includes almost $400 million for U.S.-VISIT, including $60 million to integrate IDENT and IAFIS, moving to that 10-print system that we have been talking about.
Transportation security and cargo security are other areas we are very focused on in the budget. We've got $4.7 billion in our request for aviation security, including almost $700 million to deploy and maintain explosive detection systems. One thing I should point out is this is separate and apart from money we have allocated in the proposed budget under science and technology for research into next generation explosive technology. The budget also looks to add $30.3 million for enhanced cargo radiography screening at ports of entry; $139 million for our Container Security Initiative and $55 million for our joint partnership with the private sector in cargo security; $157 million for radiation portal monitor acquisition; and $934 million for the Coast Guard Deepwater program, which is a major overhaul of the Coast Guard's assets.
As well, we're going to be adding $4.8 million for a maritime security response team, which is a state-of-the-art SWAT-type team for the Coast Guard to deploy in a maritime threat environment.
Finally, let me point out that we are adding $45.7 million in our request for the analysis and operations account, which includes additional money for our intelligence and analysis capability, and we are adding additional monies to allow us to manage our resources more carefully and with more discipline. That includes $12.6 million to improve financial management; $41.8 million to continue to implement MAX HR, which is our new 21st century system for managing relations with our colleagues in the Department; and $27 million additional to improve our procurement operations across the Department.
Now money, of course, is only part of the story, and as I speak to various groups and to Congress in the next week, we'll be talking about some of the strategies that we want to employ, using these enhanced resources to continue to improve our security across the entire range of threats, whether they be terrorist threats or natural disasters, strategies that we're going to be using to improve ourselves during this next fiscal year.
But money is important, and the additional funds, the increase in the budget reflected in the President's proposed budget this year, demonstrates a continued commitment to improving the baseline of homeland security for all Americans.
I look forward to working with Congress to ensure that our funding priorities are met, so that we can all work together to continue to protect the homeland and the American people.
And now I'm going to call on our CFO, Andy Maner, to give you a little bit more specificity, and then we'll take some questions.
Andy.
Mr. Maner: Thank you, sir. I'll just go very quickly through a couple of slides. The Secretary hit on much of it, but let me just enhance some of the other areas.
Obviously our budget bill starts with the accomplishments in '05 and '06 that the Secretary mentioned. But the high level overview of the budget is a $42.7 billion budget, 6 percent growth over '06. That's about -- $27.8 billion of it is for homeland security missions, and that's about a 9 percent increase over the previous years.
To understand our budget, you have to remember the supplemental funding that we've received in '05 and '06. Quickly, that's hurricane relief from the hurricanes two years ago; $800 million for the global war on terror and tsunami relief, which included significant resources for CBP, ICE, Coast Guard and FLETC; two Katrina supplementals at the end of the year. In FY 2006, a supplemental gave $1 billion of loan authority for the Community Disaster Loan Program to give critical funds to first responders in the Gulf region. And then the third Katrina supplemental, it included money for Coast Guard, Secret Service, FEMA, Preparedness, ICE, CBP and about $50 million for avian flu preparedness for the Department.
Quickly, the '07 themes that the Secretary mentioned: Preparedness and FEMA; border security; interior enforcement and reforming our immigration process; maritime security and better transportation systems; enhanced information sharing; and strengthening the DHS Department.
Going quickly down preparedness: $50 million for the national preparedness integration program the Secretary mentioned; $10 million in new money for chemical site security; FEMA enhancements -- the FEMA budget is up $360 million over the '06 budget -- that includes program dollars, as well as additional FTE at headquarters in their Preparedness, Mitigation, Response and Recovery divisions; additional FTE for management of the National Response Plan; $5 million to upgrade their Emergency Alert System, and $15.7 million for ADFT to strengthen FEMA's financial management and procurement operations.
On the grant side, $2.8 billion for grants, training and exercises. Within that, UASI is at $838 million, which is an $81 million increase over last year. Our TIP program -- Targeted Infrastructure Protection program -- is requested at $600 million, or $213 million over last year. And our state homeland security grant program requested at $633 million, or $88 million over last year. Within there, there are $60.5 million for the United States Coast Guard to assume the National Capital Region mission from CBP. That is the protection of the National Capital Region airspace. Within our Domestic Nuclear Detection Office, a total budget of $536 million, which is a $218 million increase, for not only acquisition of equipment, but also additional advanced R&D, and $18 million for Radiological and Nuclear Attribution and Forensics initiative. In addition, there are additional monies for the Chief Medical Officer.
Strengthening border security -- the Secretary talked about most of these -- 1,500 more Border Patrol agents; $100 million for SBI technology; $30 million for the fence; $400 million for additional beds; $50 million for additional infrastructure vehicle barriers; $135 million to expand the SAVE program within CIS, which is now called EEV, Electronic Employment Verification; and $112 million of both mandatory fees and additional dollars for CIS' business transformation program; additional agents within ICE for worksite enforcement and fugitive ops; and the additional monies for CSI and CTPAT, the Secretary mentioned.
On the transportation front, improving maritime security; $4.7 million for aviation security within TSA; $700 million for deployment and maintenance of EDS and ETD equipment; $175 million for checkpoint technology; $157 million for advanced next generation radiation portal monitors, which is about $32 million more than 2006; $934 million for the Coast Guard, which includes a fourth national security cutter, fast response cutter, additional marine patrol aircraft, and completion of our critical HH65 reengineering.
Information sharing with our partners -- $45.7 million increase for intelligence and analysis in our operations -- that's about 18 percent up from the previous year; $36 million for transforming our infrastructure within our IT, bringing together one infrastructure within the Department, which includes email, data center, those type of things; $12.6 million on the DHS for financial management -- that's for our internal controls audit, and our financial audit; $41 million for MAX HR; $27 million department-wide for additional procurement operations people; $8.1 million for the policy office; and $18 million for continuing the restructured Emerge program.
So that's an overview of our budget, and we'll open it up for questions.
Question: Hi, Mr. Secretary. A two-parter for you. It appears that money to help states and locals develop evacuation plans, a certain emergency management preparedness grant, has been cut by about $15 million. I'm wondering if that's accurate, why that would be, against the backdrop of Katrina. And then secondly, the way you've described some of the preparedness goals in FEMA seem to be more of a look ahead, as opposed to direct aid or assistance for Gulf Coast projects that are ongoing. Can you talk about why that is, why there's not direct aid for ongoing missions in the Gulf Coast in this budget that would go beyond the sups and the $18 billion sup that's been talked about?
Secretary Chertoff: Let me separate out a couple things. I'm not sure where you -- how you come up with the idea that we're cutting money for evacuation plans. In fact, quite the contrary; we're putting $50 million into our national preparedness effort for the first time under our preparedness directorate, and the idea is -- and we are currently underway with this project. We are baselining what is the current state of preparedness with respect to evacuation and emergency plans at the 75 largest urban areas in the 50 states. We are underway with that process now. We will be going back, having received the self-assessments, to work with each of these jurisdictions, validate those assessments, determine where the capabilities need to be raised. And we actually have increased money for the targeted capabilities grants which can be used to raise those capabilities in accordance with the grant guidance that we are currently developing.
So I think there will actually be not only direct money to assist in improving these plans, but actually direct government assistance, in term of our preparedness directorate, which will be working with states and localities to improve the general baseline of their evacuation and emergency plans.
Second, this budget really talks about what we are doing within the Department itself, in terms of strengthening our ability to move forward in the face of preparing both for natural disasters and for manmade disasters or terrorist attacks. A separate stream of funding -- and you mentioned the $18 million supplemental -- has been raised as money to be directed to the Gulf states for purposes of their recovery. That is separate and apart from this budget. As I know you know, typically a lot of our funding in the wake of a specific disaster comes through the Disaster Relief Fund. Billions of dollars have already funneled through that fund for purposes of Gulf recovery. I think we've had indications that we're looking to approximately $18 billion more in the future coming to deal with that function.
So the whole issue of disaster recovery and what goes to the Gulf I think is an issue separate and apart from this budget, which focuses upon the Department's own retooling of itself for increased preparedness and to re-engineer FEMA.
Question: I wanted to ask about two items here. Regarding the proposed chemical security office, and the proposed expansion of the employment verification pilot program, is it the intent of the Department to implement regulations to make chemical security mandatory for the industry, and also to make the employment verification program mandatory in some way?
Secretary Chertoff: Well, as we've said, we are in the process of working with Congress now on legislation that would give us some authority to regulate in the area of chemical plants. And our philosophy is to take a tiered approach, not to over-regulate or do so with a heavy hand, but to look at the risk priority based on the nature of the chemical and the location of the chemical plant, and look to develop a methodology that capitalizes upon what the industry has already done, but makes sure that there aren't outliers in the industry who aren't raising their level of security to an appropriate baseline.
Obviously Congress has not passed that legislation yet, but assuming that Congress does, and we very much hope that we can work with Congress to get a good piece of legislation out, we need to have the funding available to do the kinds of assessments we need to do to appropriately implement that kind of plan.
With respect to the employer verification, this is an extension of what I think we've called Basic Pilot. And there's no question that we are looking to this expanded program of employer verification as one of the elements in our more robust worksite enforcement strategy.
There have got to be two parts to this strategy. Part one is to give employers the tools they need to verify that their workers are in fact here lawfully. If we don't give employers those tools, it's hard to then expect them to live up to the legal requirements if they can't really find a way to follow the law. But if we do give them tools to follow the law and tools to verify, then it's fair to hold them accountable, and strictly accountable, when they don't carry out that verification.
So we are looking at worksite enforcement as a two-part strategy. One part is giving employers increased ability to verify their status of their workers, but the second part is to hold them increasingly accountable, and be tougher about what we expect them to do, and be tougher with the sanctions that we apply to them if they don't do what's expected of them.
Question: Just a question on the small item in the Office of Policy, Planning and International Affairs. You're creating a committee on foreign-owned investment in the United States. Can you tell me a little bit about that? And I assume it's different than the Treasury Department's Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States.
Mr. Maner: The short answer is that that committee exists today within IP, our Infrastructure Protection group. It's transferring into the Office of Policy in 2007. So those functions don't overlap with the Treasury function, but that will now be in the policy office as a transfer.
Question: Since 2001, the Department has tried to raise airport security fees on tickets. This year you've proposed it again. And I'm wondering, each year airlines and their congressional allies have always beaten back this proposal. I'm wondering, what do you see as a change in the situation this year?
Secretary Chertoff: Well, one thing that's changed, I think, is TSA has gotten better at what it does. Wait times are down, I think efficiency is up. We are beginning to migrate towards the next generation of sophistication in doing what it is that TSA does. That means looking at behavioral pattern recognition as a way of screening, in addition to what we've previously done, moving away from spending a lot of time looking for nail scissors and training our screeners to be more sophisticated in their ability to identify, for example, detonators that may be disassembled into a number of different components.
So as TSA adds more value and more efficiency, I think it's fair to go back to Congress' original vision when they enacted the law setting up TSA, which is that passengers, as those who benefit from the TSA screening process and increased security, would bear a fair share of the cost.
What we did this year was look at the current system, look at the fact that there were criticisms that were, I think, reasonable about the fact that people who travel from rural areas and rural airports who have to transfer are disadvantaged relative to those who leave from big cities that are hub cities. We've equalized the way the fee applies so it's now value neutral between people who leave from hub cities and people who leave from small towns. We hope that answers one of the criticisms that was leveed.
The bottom line, though, is, it's a fair idea. The amount of money we're talking about remains just about what it takes to buy a newspaper and a soda at the airport. And this is consistent with Congress' original vision, which was to have passengers bear their fair share of the benefit, the security benefit which they and the airlines receive from TSA and its security measures.
Question: Mr. Secretary, can you describe the funding and planning for possible avian flu outbreak? And especially with regard to the information technology resources the Department has got already or plans to deploy to help states and local officials cope with this possibility?
Secretary Chertoff: I'm not sure that avian flu is, in particular, an issue of information technology resources. Obviously information technology is critical across the board to everything that we do. As you know, there was money in a supplemental recently passed, I think approximately $47 million, for purposes of avian flu planning. We are currently in the process, having issued -- the administration having issued a strategy on avian flu -- we're currently in the process of working up detailed implementation plans, both across the board and within each department, designed to get ourselves in an appropriate state of preparedness for avian flu.
As you point out, a significant part of the preparedness has to lie with states and localities. We can stockpile vaccines, we can take steps to enhance the incentives for producing vaccines once a vaccine can be isolated based on a particular type of flu. But at the end of the day, distribution issues, issues involving medical surge capability, a lot of that responsibility is going to rest with the states and localities. We've been working with HHS going around the country with Secretary Leavitt and other senior members of the Department of Health and Human Services, essentially raising consciousness among our homeland security and public health partners in the various states about the need to make sure their plans are well developed and synchronized with ours, and we intend to continue that effort very vigorously over the months to come.
Question: I had a question about the National Capital Region air defense program. I noticed that the program has moved over to the Coast Guard, and I was wondering if you could explain why that's the case, and also talk about whether there's a concern that the Coast Guard may already be overstretched, in terms of doing both the homeland security and the rescue and relief missions.
Secretary Chertoff: Well, let me answer the second question first. In making the determination that we were going to transfer this responsibility from the AMO Customs and Border Protection at the Coast Guard, we did so with an explicit understanding that we would add the resources necessary to allow Coast Guard to carry out this additional mission, without degrading any of its resources that are currently applied to a whole host of very critical missions, ranging from narcotics interdiction to rescues to security against terrorist events.
So this budget, in fact, explicitly reflects the need to make sure that Coast Guard is adequately resourced for this additional mission.
The genesis of this change emerges from our study of what the current posture of DHS and the Department of Defense is with respect to National Capital Region defense. Initially, Customs and Border Protection really stepped into the breach to pick up this mission, with respect to a certain category of air assets that it was able to deploy to help the Department of Defense with its mission of air coverage. One of the issues that arose is making sure that with respect to the very delicate and fast-paced judgments that have to be made when you have an air encounter in the National Capital Region, making sure that we had a very clear command and control of all the assets in the air. And since the Department of Defense really carries the major role and responsibility, in terms of air defense, we determined that it would probably be easier to establish that unified command and control using the Coast Guard, which has a long history of integrating its command and control systems with the Department of Defense, because they do so when we're at a time of war and things of that sort.
So I want to take an opportunity to thank Customs and Border Protection for having assumed this additional mission of the air coverage in the National Capital Region. They've got plenty to do on the border and in other parts of the country, and I think we are now better aligned to make sure that our command and control over the Capital Region airspace is properly as seamless.
Question: I wanted to follow up on the airline fee issue. Last year when Congress did not increase those fees, TSA wound up with less funding because of that. If Congress again does not increase these fees, how much money might we be talking about and where might that money come out of your budget?
Secretary Chertoff: Well, I'm not going to speculate about what happens if we don't get approval for the fee. What I would say is, TSA has had to make do with less resources; I think they've done a terrific job of stretching those resources. But at the end of the day, if we get to the point that TSA is not adequately resourced, the consequences will be felt in longer lines, less efficient screening, and less security. And I can't believe that that is a benefit to the airline industries or the passengers. The principal beneficiaries of TSA are the passengers, who get to fly with a sense of security and safety, and I think these days people expect a level of screening for security in much the same way that they expect that the airplanes are properly checked by maintenance before they take off on a flight.
So given the fact that the benefit accrues to the passengers and the airlines, it seems fair to have the passengers bear their fair share of this fee, which is a very, very small amount of money when you compare it to the cost of flying or even the cost of even wiling an hour at the airport in the airport stores.
So I think that we're going to -- there's a good case to be made here. We have addressed, I think, what was avowed criticism about an inequity in the way we applied the fee between rural areas and urban areas. And having corrected that, I'm hopeful we can get this fee adjustment and fee equity enacted.
One more question.
Question: I have a specific question in the area of Customs and Border Protection. Over the past three years, Congress has appropriated $9.5 million to hire 72 personnel for textile trans-shipment enforcement, and I was wondering if you had hired the personnel, and if you had requested any additional funding in this area.
Mr. Maner: The 2007 budget does not contemplate additional personnel in the textile arena, but per previous authorizations and close contact with Congress, we have and are hiring up to that amount currently. And I don't have the update, but we provide very significant updates from time to time on this textile hiring. It remains a priority, and we intend to get up to the level that Congress set for us.
Secretary Chertoff: Thank you very much.
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This page was last reviewed/modified on 02/06/06 00:00:00.