Congressional Hearings – Week of 03-19-12

The House is back from a week on the home front and the Senate is done with their transportation bill, but there still isn’t much on the hearing schedule that looks to be of much interest to the chemical- and cyber-security communities; just one previously postponed budget hearing and two threat hearings.

Budget

Secretary Napolitano will get her chance to defend the President’s FY 2013 budget request for DHS one more time; this appearance on Wednesday will be before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. This is her fourth appearance this year on this topic so I don’t expect much in the way of surprises in her testimony.

What might be interesting is to see what questions, if any, get asked about the CFATS problems at ISCD. Both Ranking Member Collins (R,ME) and Chairman Lieberman (I,CT) have a long history of interest in chemical facility security issues {as does, to a lesser extent, Sen. Levin (D,MI)} so any of the three might take this opportunity (ahead of an as of yet to be announced oversight hearing) to ask the Secretary about the problems within this very small part of her Department. I would be surprised if the answers would provide any major new insights.

Threat Hearings

There will be two House Homeland Security hearings this week on terrorist threats to the United States. The first will be a field hearing by the Counterterrorism and Intelligence Subcommittee on Monday with an interesting slant. The second will be a full Committee hearing on Wednesday on the potential terror threat from Iran and Hezbollah.

The interesting slant on threats deals with the closings of 30 petroleum refineries in the Northeast over the last decade. While the folks at Greenpeace and their allied organizations would probably argue that the closing of a refinery in the densely populated Northeast is a net counterterrorism gain (reducing the targets), Chairman Meehan (R,PA) would seem to disagree. According to the Homeland Security Committee web site:

“This hearing will help us understand the homeland security consequences of refinery closures, both in terms of threats to critical infrastructure and our dependence on imports from unstable parts of the world.”

I would suppose that the argument is that, with less production capacity in this high-population area, any successful terrorist attack on a refinery would have large economic consequences beyond the ‘mere’ cost of off-site casualties and mangled metal. This would appear to be especially true if the attack were fomented by a State actor like Iran.

This petrochemical refinery threat isn’t specifically mentioned in the write up about the second hearing, but I would bet that Meehan will bring it up in his questioning of the panel of witnesses. Interestingly enough the only current government employee on the list of witnesses comes from the NYPD. Of course Chairman King has been a strong and vocal supporter of the counter-terrorism intelligence activities of the NYPD so the inclusion of the Director of Intelligence Analysis for the NYPD should not come as a surprise.

The other three witnesses now work in the private sector but used to work in the intelligence arena of a variety of Federal agencies. I suppose that current intelligence types from those agencies would prefer to testify behind closed doors about current intelligence matters, which leaves the question about how much real actionable information can be presented in an open forum like this. The quick and easy response is ‘not much’.

Congressional Hearings – Week of 3-5-12

The Senate is joining the budget hearing schedule in force this week, but the big news is the CFATS hearing before a subcommittee of the House Homeland Security Committee.

CFATS Problems

The Cybersecurity, Infrastructure Protection and Security Technologies Subcommittee of the House Homeland Security Committee will be holding a hearing tomorrow on the CFATS program problems. It looks like Chairman Lungren is serious about this hearing as there will be two panels testifying. The first panel will be the management team including Under Secretary Beers, Director Anderson, and Deputy Director Wulf. The second panel will be a tad bit more interesting; Bill Almond from SOCMA, Timothy Scott from Dow Chemical, and David Wright from the American Federation of Government Employees Local 918.

I would have preferred to hear some of the lower level management and some of the inspection force testify, but a union rep will probably have to do at this point.

It will be interesting to see what questions are asked. Hopefully the congress critters will be a tad bit more prepared and knowledgeable in this hearing, not like the fiasco in the February hearing before the Energy and Economy subcommittee.

Budget Hearings

Secretary Napolitano will make two Senate appearances on March 8^th to discuss the DHS budget request; one before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee and the other before the Homeland Security Subcommittee of the Senate Appropriations Committee. Nothing new expected in either hearing.

Admiral Papp will be making two Congressional appearances to discuss the Coast Guard’s budget request for FY 2013; one before the Homeland Security Subcommittee of the House Appropriations Committee tomorrow and one before the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation. The later hearing will be shared with the NOAA Administrator so that will certainly be a shallow hearing on the Coast Guard budget.

More DHS Budget Request Information

Yesterday, in the lead up to Secretary Napolitano’s appearance before two separate House budget hearings today, the Department of Homeland Security published a 3134 page budget justification document. A quick review (boy I’m glad I took a speed reading course in High School) provides some budget numbers for two important (for readers of this blog anyway) programs and a lot of interesting details about the work of DHS that are not normally readily available to the public.

NOTE: All page numbers are Adobe Reader® page numbers.

Budget Numbers

This document provides program level budget numbers not normally seen in this stage of the budget process. Of particular interest to members of the chemical security and cybersecurity communities it provides numbers for the Infrastructure Security Compliance Program (ISCD) and the Control Systems Security Program (ICS-CERT).

ISCD (pages 2096 and 2103) has no changes to the manpower positions included in the budget request from the FY 2012 budget authorization, but it does have a decrease in funding from $93.348 Million to $74.544 Million. No explanation is given in how the program savings will be achieved.

The ICS-CERT funding request (page 2118), on the other hand, shows an increase in the full-time equivalent manpower positions from the FY 2012 authorized levels from 9 to 12. There is also a very slight funding increase from $28.297 Million to $28.929 Million for the program. Presumably this covers the increased manpower costs.

Misleading Metrics

The document leads off with a number of measures of the effectiveness of the various programs covered in the DHS budget. Of special interest is the one metric mentioned for the CFATS program. On page 13 it notes that ISCD had a FY 2011 target of having 10% of the CFATS facilities “in compliance with the Chemical Facility Anti-terrorism Standards” but only 9.1% achieved that standard. It also noted that they are shooting for 20% compliance in FY2012 and 35% compliance in FY 2013.

No details are given about what constitutes ‘in compliance’ but it certainly cannot be having an authorized site security plan since only four facilities (about 0.1% of the CFATS facilities) have achieved even that standard and all of those were authorized since October 1^st. I certainly hope that Secretary Napolitano is questioned about this detail today. I also wonder how many of the other metrics are this misleading.

BTW: The reason that ISCD missed the FY 2011 target was missed was “attributable to scheduled authorization inspections in September 2011 being postponed due to Hurricane Irene”. I don’t recall that being one of the problems mentioned in the ISCD report about program deficiencies.

TSA Surface Security Programs

We don’t typically hear much about the TSA surface security programs as the agencies main focus (in terms of both manpower and money spent) is passenger air travel security. This document does list an number of interesting projects that TSA has worked on over the last year. Not much is provided in the way of detail so I will only list the projects here with the page reference.

• TSA Surface Transportation Rule Making, page 1445;

• Toxic Inhalation Hazard (TIH) Transportation Risk Reduction, page 1450;

• TIH Dispersion Modeling, page 1451; and

• TIH Tank Car Vulnerability, page 1451

The actual test results for the last three items will almost certainly be classified, but they should make their way into the regulatory process over the next decade or so; based upon TSA’s past rulemaking record.

DHS FY 2013 Budget Request Released

Today the Administration released their budget request for FY 2013. This is a high-level document (the DHS portion is only six pages long) describing spending in broad categories. It certainly doesn’t mention CFATS or MTSA or ICS-CERT. But it does provide a broad overview of how the Administration wants to spend our hard earned tax dollars.

The table below shows the discretionary spending numbers from the DHS budget that will primarily affect chemical and cyber security issues. The FY 2012 numbers are estimates for the spending for this year.

Discretionary Spending (in Millions of $)       FY 2011   FY 2012    FY 2013

Discretionary budget authority                         41,885      39,649       39,462

National Protection and Programs Directorate   1,165        1,214         1,217

Transportation Security Administration             5,384        5,425         5,106

United States Coast Guard                                  8,622        8,656         8,319

Of the three the only one that would not see a budget cut under the Obama plan would be NPPD. This is the Directorate that contains both the CFATS and ICS-CERT programs. This does not mean however that either of those programs will necessarily receive an increase in funding. Likewise the TSA funding decrease would not necessarily mean a decrease in the funding for their freight rail security program, nor would the decrease in Coast Guard funding mean that the MTSA program would receive a decrease in funding.

More details about the DHS budget will almost certainly come out in the two budget hearings on Wednesday.