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Guest Commentary July 27, 2002
A Homeland Security Department Will Bring Chaos
The Honorable Marcy Kaptur
Real homeland security means economic security for our workers and our families here at home. It means good jobs. It means pensions they can depend on and it means health benefits that are there for all.
It is really interesting that the administration has put this glossy report together on this new department, which would be the third largest bureaucracy in the government of the United States, over 170,000 people, and how do we know how many billions of dollars and still counting.
Basically, this is political cover over an operational problem. We know that the CIA and the FBI did not do their job completely. We knew Osama bin Laden was the number one enemy. We did not know where he was.
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Right after 9-11, what did the FBI and the CIA do? They start advertising in The Washington Post for people who could speak Arabic and Pashtun because we were not properly staffed inside the departments and agencies that should have been functioning. So now we will create another department. Does that mean they will have people who can translate? Will we have people who can do the job? Will they get the computers so they can communicate?
The FBI and CIA are not in the Homeland Security Agency where we have the problem. They are not even part of the solution. What we will get from a new department, when we most need coordination in this country at every level, we will get chaos. ...
We set up the Department of Energy. Are we energy self-sufficient today? No, we are not. We set up the Department of Education. Are our kids reading scores going up? No, they are not.
So now at a time when we need really refined targeted efforts across this world to deal with the problem that we have not faced before, we are setting up the Department, and will it have the staffing that is necessary. Just on one agency that they will try to roll in here APHIS, the Animal, Plant Health Inspection Service from the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The problem is we do not have enough inspectors at the border. Are you going to give us more money for inspectors or are you just going to ship the box over to another department? The problem is not a new department. The problem is making the agencies that exist function.
I am proud of the people in New York City. We could have had 50,000 die. We had 3,000 dead. They did their job. We saved 47,000 lives in this country. Our local law enforcement people, they need training at the local level. They do not need a new Federal Department to do that. They need training moneys to go down to the locality. We do not need to cut the law enforcement budget, [which is] what this administration is doing in terms of cops on the beat.
In terms of FEMA, I do not want to put FEMA in this Department. FEMA works. It took us 10 years to fix FEMA up. So why do we want to stick it in this big agency of 170,000 people and we cannot even get direct communication to the top?
We fought World War II, [and] we did not need this Department. We defeated the Communists and the Soviet Union. We did not need this Department to do it. We fought the Persian Gulf War. Why do we need this now?
This is political cover for operational problems the administration does not want to solve.
Marcy Kaptur, a Democrat, represents the 9th Congressional District of Ohio in the U.S. House of Representatives. The above commentary has been adapted from a speech Rep. Kaptur delivered on the floor of the House, July 25, 2002. To contact her, Click Here.
The above column has been distributed by PoliticsOL.com.
