White House Homeland Security Page Updated

The White House made a change to their Homeland Security page, adding a link to the recently released “Surface Transportation Security Priority Assessment”. This report was prepared by the Transportation Sub-IPC, a sub-committee of the National Security Staff’s Transborder Security Interagency Policy Committee (IPC). According to the Executive Summary: “The study identified a set of 10 issue areas to examine, obtained input from surface transportation sector stakeholders, and analyzed the responses to reach a consensus set of priorities and recommendations.” As with most high-level policy guidance documents, this assessment is long on generalities and short on specifics. It looks at 10 issue areas and produced 20 recommendations. The level of generality is probably exemplified by the 8th Recommendation:

“Reemphasize National Infrastructure Protection Plan (NIPP) framework priorities with the Sector-Specific Agencies (SSA); surface transportation owners/operators; and State, local, tribal, and territorial (SLTT) partners in order to focus development and implementation of a relevant and representative model that enhances security of the Transportation Systems Sector partners.”

While much of the program outlined in this document can be implemented by the Obama Administration without additional Congressional input, there will have to be some legislative work done to provide the necessary authority and funding to execute the general proposals outlined in this document. Unfortunately, the methodology outlined in the document for producing these proposals did not seem to include any legislative input. It will be interesting to see if there is any concrete action taken by the Administration to make any progress on implementing these recommendations.