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Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Chairman Ted Kennedy, D-Mass., and Public Health Subcommittee ranking member Bill Frist, R- Tenn., unveiled their long-awaited bioterrorism bill today, surrounded by a broad bipartisan group of senators and claiming Bush administration support for the $3.2 billion authorizing measure.

"The leadership is behind the bill, the appropriators are behind the bill, and we believe we can find the money," said Kennedy, who originally pushed for a much higher total.

Frist said, "Just about everyone we could possibly find has been at the table," adding that "our job is to put out the figure that will take us from an underprepared state to a prepared state in the event we come under a biological attack in the next year or two."

An aide to Frist said that Republicans would "very much like" to stay within the $686 billion discretionary spending cap for fiscal 2002 and the $40 billion in supplemental appropriations already approved.

Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson, testifying before the House Energy and Commerce Committee, stopped just short of endorsing the measure. "The programs are very much in line with what the administration wants. The question is, do we need to do the full $3.2 billion all at once, or over several years?" he said.

The measure, which would subsume the requests previously proposed by the Bush administration and House and Senate appropriators, is a five-year authorization, but with specific amounts only for the first year, 2002.

Roughly $1.5 billion would go to improve state and local bioterrorism preparedness, including $400 million to help hospitals increase their planning and capacity. An additional $400 million would go to efforts to further safeguard the nation's food supply, increasingly mentioned as an area of concern by experts and others.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention would get roughly half a billion dollars, both to strengthen its own operations and to help establish a national network of public health laboratories. The remaining billion or so dollars would track the administration's request to purchase more drugs for the nation's pharmaceutical stockpile and speed up production of enough smallpox vaccine to immunize the entire nation if necessary.

The senators would not say exactly how or when they expect the measure to move, but that it is a priority for both Democratic and Republican leaders.