Government Executive - Authors - Chris Schneidmiller

Air Force Begins Reinstating Suspended Personnel at Nuclear Launch Site

Chris Schneidmiller, Global Security Newswire — Tue, 28 May 2013 15:41:53 -0400

The U.S. Air Force as of last week had reinstated four of 19 personnel who were removed from duty at a nuclear missile installation in North Dakota following recent doubts over their ability to properly do their jobs.

“We had 19 crew members at Minot Air Base who were not on full-up missile cruise status and were in a retraining program,” Air Force Chief of Staff. Gen. Mark Welsh said to reporters on Friday. “Four of those 19 as of today were reinstated. The others are progressing very well in the retraining program. They just haven't completed it yet.”

The personnel were required to undergo new training after the 91st Missile Wing at Minot was essentially given a “D” in a March inspection for its capacity to operate and launch Minuteman 3 missiles. While the officers were reported to have demonstrated low regard for security procedures and directives from their superiors, the Air Force said the missiles themselves remained safe and ready for use.

Previous reports have cited the number of impacted officers at 17.

Lead officers at Minot are “very happy” with the training to date, Welsh said. “They're very happy with the effort that the crews who are in the retraining process have put into this.”

The base manages one-third of the 450 intercontinental ballistic missiles that make up one leg of the U.S. nuclear triad. The Air Force also is charged with operating long-range nuclear bombers, while the Navy deploys submarines loaded with ballistic missiles.

Management of the Air Force nuclear mission has been a worry for years, highlighted by the unintended 2006 export of nuclear missile fuses to Taiwan and the accidental flight a year later of six nuclear-armed cruise missiles over several states.

The Bush administration responded to the incidents in 2008 by firing the service’s top military and civilian leaders and establishing the Global Strike Command to manage the bomber wings and nuclear missile squadrons.

“During Global Strike Command's command-wide exercise last week, they actually did no-notice inspections on all of our missile units, again, including the one at Minot, and just to look at them all one more time, when no one was inspecting them to arrive,” Welsh noted. “And those inspections all went very well.”

Welsh and soon-to-retire Air Force Secretary Michael Donley spent much of their briefing on the state of the service focused on the effect of funding reductions mandated by the 2011 Budget Control Act.

“We've been consuming Air Force readiness for several years, and we'll continue to focus the resources that we do have available to meet combatant commander requirements, but with the steep and late FY13 budget reductions brought on by sequestration, the readiness hole that we have been trying to dig out of just got deeper, and we are facing a readiness crisis from which it will take many months to recover,” Donley stated.

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Air Force Nuke Command Could Furlough 2,900 Civilians Under Sequester

Chris Schneidmiller, Global Security Newswire — Mon, 25 Feb 2013 16:08:59 -0500

The U.S. Air Force branch that manages the nation’s nuclear bombers and Intercontinental ballistic missiles, or ICBMs, will be forced to furlough about 2,900 civilian staffers if large federal budget reductions take hold on Friday.

Congressional Republicans and the White House remain at loggerheads over options for avoiding $85 billion in across-the-board spending curbs for the remainder of this budget year.

All branches of the armed forces and Defense Department would be required to limit civilian workers to an average of four days of paid work per week for nearly six months starting on April 25 if the so-called “sequester” remains in place, according to an Air Force press release issued on Friday.

“Furloughs, like other spending cuts, degrade our mission readiness by delaying or deferring important work. This includes fixing our aircraft and vehicles, staffing our hospitals, handling contracting and financial management, and providing functional expertise at our headquarters,” Lt. Gen. James Kowalski, Global Strike Command head, said in prepared comments. “This affects our mission, our communities, and importantly the families of our civilian airmen who have accepted the responsibility of serving our nation.”

The 23,000-person command headquartered at Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana oversees 76 B-52H Stratofortress bombers and 20 B-2 aircraft designed to carry nuclear bombs, along with 450 intercontinental ballistic missiles fielded in Montana, North Dakota and Wyoming. It has previously warned of reductions of flying hours and other operational impacts of the looming budget reductions.

A 20-percent drop in fiscal 2013 funding for the command is projected under sequestration in line with broader Air Force planning, spokeswoman Michele Tasista told Global Security Newswire earlier this month. Updated information was not immediately available on Monday.

Overall, the Air Force branch could face a 20-percent drop in flying hours, Kowalski stated in early February.

Crews of B-52 bombers could see as little as 10 hours of flying time per month after April 1 under sequestration. That would be down from the existing average monthly flight time of 18 hours.

“A 20 percent reduction in annual flying hours, implemented over the remaining six months of the fiscal year, will significantly degrade conventional readiness and limit the quantity and quality of aircrew, maintenance and munitions training,” Tasista stated by e-mail.

She added: “ICBMs are the least expensive component of our nation's nuclear deterrent force. Since they are in direct support of U.S. Strategic Command and the president we will not take actions resulting in a near-term impact to their mission. We are evaluating the long term impacts of reductions in installation and weapon system sustainment. However, we will ensure our ICBM force remains safe, secure and effective.”

Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and other leaders at the Pentagon and military branches have vocally and repeatedly warned against allowing the budget cuts to take effect.

The Pentagon said on Thursday that close to 13,000 National Guard troops trained to deal with weapons of mass destruction incidents could see training operations and drills postponed or eliminated due to funding cutbacks.

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Budget slashing hits U.S. ability to deal with global dangers, Panetta says

Chris Schneidmiller, Global Security Newswire — Wed, 06 Feb 2013 17:15:05 -0500

Defense Secretary Leon Panetta warned on Wednesday that looming massive federal budget cutbacks would undermine the nations’ capacity to deal militarily with North Korea and other hot spots around the world.

“This is not a game. This is reality,” Panetta said just days before his departure from the Pentagon.

Congress and President Obama have until March 1 to find $1.2 trillion in deficit reductions and avoid across-the-board spending cuts under so-called “sequestration.” Should they fail, the process set by the 2011 Budget Control Act would force the Defense Department to slash spending by $46 billion for the last six months of this fiscal year, Panetta said.

The Pentagon also faces a $35 billion shortfall because Congress has yet to approve a final budget for the fiscal year that ends on Sept. 30.

All of that comes on top of $487 million in budget reductions made mandatory over 10 years under the legislation, Panetta noted.

Defense officials have already cautioned that sequestration could impact plans for a new long-range bomber and other strategic operations.

The department’s response this year alone would include furloughing up to 800,000 civilian staffers for nearly a month, reductions in naval operations around the world, curbing Air Force flying times and weapons upkeep, and lowered assistance to troops not involved in a current military conflict, Panetta told an audience at Georgetown University.

A new Air Force document indicates the service alone would have to take various steps to deal with $12.4 billion in sequestration cuts and another $1.8 billion hit linked to the budget situation. These could include cutting operational hours at some missile warning radar bases and pushing back procurement of two missile defense satellites.

“These steps would seriously damage the fragile American economy, and they would degrade our ability to respond to crisis precisely at a time of rising instability across the globe, North Africa, to the Straits of Hormuz, from Syria to North Korea," according to the DOD head.

As Panetta spoke, North Korea was believed to be readying for its third nuclear test and threatening to take even more aggressive measures against its enemies. The Syrian civil war continues to spike worries about security or use of the nation’s chemical weapons, while some Iranian officials have discussed blocking the Straits of Hormuz in response to international sanctions targeting the nation’s contested nuclear work.

“North Korea, Iran. We need to have a power presence in those areas because that’s where the greatest potential for conflict lies,” Panetta said.

President Obama on Tuesday called on Congress to prepare a plan of spending cuts and tax changes that would give at least temporary reprieve from the sequester deadline. Republicans quickly pushed back against any tax boosts.

“Even if Congress acts again temporarily to prevent the effects of this crisis … if they only kick the can down the road, it continues a long shadow of doubt about whether the fundamental problems we face can really be resolved,” Panetta said.

Panetta is preparing to step down as Pentagon chief. His exact exit date remains unclear, as there is significant GOP opposition to his designated successor, former Republican Senator Chuck Hagel.

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NNSA selects new firm to manage two nuclear arms sites

Chris Schneidmiller, Global Security Newswire — Tue, 08 Jan 2013 16:36:37 -0500

The National Nuclear Security Administration on Tuesday announced that it had selected a new contractor to manage two key nuclear arms facilities, one of which was the site of a high-profile security breach in 2012.

Consolidated Nuclear Security on May 1 will take over operations at the Y-12 National Security Complex in Tennessee and the Pantex Plant in Texas. It will also lead development and construction of the Y-12 Uranium Processing Facility and has the option of heading tritium work at the Savannah River Site in South Carolina.

The new contract is set for five years with an option for another five years, according to an NNSA press release. It would provide $3.27 billion in savings over the decade, the agency said.

“Our nuclear production capabilities are critical to our national security, and this contract puts NNSA in a position to improve mission delivery by generating significant savings that will be reinvested to improve safety, security, quality, and infrastructure,” Thomas D’Agostino, who will step down as NNSA chief next week, said in prepared comments. “This award will have a lasting impact on NNSA for years to come. It is the culmination of years of hard work focused on continuously improving the way we operate, saving taxpayer dollars, and aligning ourselves for the future.”

The release did not provide details of how the savings would be produced. The amount of the contract was also not immediately made public.

D’Agostino and other top agency officials were scheduled to discuss the contract later on Tuesday.

Consolidated Nuclear Security was formed by contractors Bechtel National, Lockheed Martin, ATK Launch Systems and SOC.

In Tennessee, it will take over management from B&W Y-12, a combination of Bechtel and Babcock & Wilcox that came under fire last summer after three peace activists were able to break into the site and make their way to a secure area that houses weapon-grade uranium.

B&W Y-12 was required to demonstrate why it should remain the site manager; it took on security responsibilities after the subcontracting guard firm was dismissed following the intrusion. The press release made no mention of the status of the security contract.

Y-12 hosts a number of nuclear arms and nonproliferation operations, including refurbishing warheads, processing highly enriched uranium for submarine reactors, and ensuring the security of materials from weapons that have been retired or disassembled.

The Pantex Plant conducts assembly and dismantlement of nuclear weapons. It is presently managed by B&W Pantex, a conglomerate that also involves Bechtel and Babcock & Wilcox.

The two companies decided against working together to secure the new contracts in a process that began in 2010, the Knoxville News Sentinel reported on Tuesday.

Tuesday’s announcement comes amid persistent criticism of the National Nuclear Security Administration’s troubles with sticking to cost and schedule projections for major projects in overseein the nation's nuclear arms complex. In one setback, the semiautonomous Energy Department office acknowledged last fall that the current design for the Uranium Processing Facility was too small.

The nuclear agency said the new contract would “strengthen NNSA’s ability to move toward a fully integrated and interdependent enterprise which will enhance mission performance, reduce costs, strengthen partnerships and improve stakeholder confidence.”

It placed four demands on the new contractor:

“Improving performance in the completion of national security missions for nuclear production operations;
Transitioning and merging operations at geographically dispersed centers of excellence for: nuclear weapon assembly/disassembly, enriched uranium, high-explosive production and tritium supply management under a single contract;
Reducing the cost of performing work; and
Requiring actions that support operation as an integrated DOE/NNSA enterprise.”

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Lawmakers press improvements to Project Bioshield

Chris Schneidmiller — Wed, 07 Jun 2006 00:00:00 -0400

Reps. Mike Rogers, R-Mich., and Anna Eshoo, D-Calif., on Tuesday submitted the House Biodefense and Pandemic Vaccine and Drug Development Act of 2006. Senator Richard Burr, R-N.C., filed a largely identical bill in April, following a failed initiative last year.

Sponsors hope the legislation would fill gaps in the 2-year-old Bioshield program, which critics say has failed to spur industry to develop new vaccines and countermeasures. Lawmakers propose to create a single point of contact within the Health and Human Services Department to work with pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies on determining the priorities for biosecurity funding and research.

The bills would also allow government financing to companies during the extended period of drug development and study known within the industry as the "valley of death." Those two to five years in which firms now receive no federal financial support, and cannot be sure their product will be purchased, reduce the incentive to create treatments for an inevitable terrorist attack, speakers said at a meeting Tuesday.

Rogers and representatives from academia and industry painted a dire picture of a nation unprepared for a natural pandemic or the use of biological weapons by terrorists or an enemy state.

"It's not a question of if that happens but when that happens," said former Congressman Jim Greenwood, president and CEO of the Biotechnology Industry Organization. Adversaries of the United States have "both the will and the ability to launch these bioterror attacks," he said.

Weapons spreading infectious agents have the potential to cause hundreds of thousands to millions of deaths, said Tom Inglesby, deputy director for the University of Pittsburgh Center for Biosecurity. Destabilization caused by such a crisis could undermine the economy, a sense of community and even basic services such as electricity, he said.

Advances in science are creating the potential for stronger agents capable of inflicting greater damage, while access grows to the technology and expertise needed to produce those weapons, Inglesby said. Those developments are outstripping efforts meant to save those exposed to agents such as smallpox, plague or Ebola. "It is truly a race, and right now the defense is losing to the offense," he said.

The 2004 Project Bioshield Act designated $5.6 billion for development of weapons of mass destruction countermeasures. The program to date has funded production of only a few drugs. The largest order, for 75 million doses of anthrax vaccine, is two years behind schedule.

It costs on average $800 million to produce a single drug. Industry experts have said there is little incentive under Project Bioshield for large pharmaceutical companies to spend huge amounts of money and time -- up to 15 years from conception to production -- on a treatment that is likely only to be used during a crisis. Pharmaceutical firms prefer to manufacture drugs that are used regularly.

Smaller firms are less able to push a drug through extended periods in which they receive no government funding, and tire of bureaucratic hurdles along the way, critics say.

"Bioshield was a great start, it was a good start, it was a well-intended start to get us to where we are defended in the United States against bioterrorism," Rogers said. "But what we found is there were a series of problems, problems that we're going to fix today."

The House and Senate bills would allow HHS for the first time to offer milestone payments to companies as work progresses, and to fund development of drug manufacturing capacities.

As proposed in the Senate last year, the agency would be allowed to enter into exclusive contracts with a specific company for a particular drug. The House legislation, however, encourages HHS to pursue multiple bids in an effort to offset criticism that the single-provider provision would increase the cost of drugs.

The legislation again calls for a "Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority" within HHS to lead federal biodefense investment. Representatives from the federal government, pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries, academia and other areas would sit on a board within the office to help identify priorities. It is hoped that such involvement would also promote countermeasure research and development by those entities.

Supporters of the legislation hope it will prod more companies into developing weapons of mass destruction countermeasures and speed work once it is under way. Burr's legislation last year faced criticism for exempting the new HHS office from the Freedom of Information Act and other sunshine rules. Those exemptions remain in this year's proposals.

While there is a need to withhold some information, broad secrecy would make it difficult for the public to determine the value of the biodefense work being conducted and could create suspicions by other nations on the intent of the effort, said Alan Pearson, director of the Biological and Chemical Weapons Control Program at the Center for Arms Control and Nonproliferation.

"The danger is that you cold withhold a lot of information about your ongoing biodefense activities, information that we feel should be released to the public for safety reasons," he said Wednesday.

There are no liability provisions in either 2006 bill. Democrats objected to a component of last year's Senate bill that required the HHS secretary to approve liability lawsuits against manufacturers of treatments used during a declared biological public health emergency.

One biodefense industry representative said the legislation would "markedly help" promote production of new drugs. He said, however, that more needs to be done to improve HHS' partnership with industry. The agency has failed to seek contracts for "obvious" biological threats -- such as a new smallpox vaccine that would fully replace existing stocks -- and has made "unilateral" modifications to contracts after work is under way by the contractor, he said. "The agency hasn't behaved like a partner in many cases," he said.

A department spokesman did not respond to a request for comment Wednesday.

Rogers and other speakers Tuesday called on Congress to act on the bills this year.

"We think this is incredibly important," he said. "This is one of the most important things we're going to do in the near term to make sure in American research and development and know-how to build that biodefense system around this great country of ours so that this doesn't come to a town near you."

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Justice unit trains first responders at former Army base

Chris Schneidmiller — Thu, 07 Oct 2004 00:00:00 -0400

Tucked away on the site of the former Fort McClellan, the center from the outside looks like a standard government office building. The wide, white hallways of its interior would not be out of a place in a high school.

That's perhaps fitting as participants here are students, learning how to aid the victims of a potential terrorist attack without becoming casualties themselves.

On one morning in September, 143 first responders from around the country walked the hallways lined with pictures of emergency personnel in action and a sign indicating the present terrorist threat level. They listened to classroom lectures and practiced scenarios involving chemical, biological or radiological materials. Before they went home, many would actually come into close contact with live sarin and VX nerve agents.

"I think that's going to be pretty exciting," said Kelvin Bolden, a security officer at Singing River Hospital in Pascagoula, Miss. "Are we prepared for it? We'll know in the morning."

Bombings at the World Trade Center in 1993 and Oklahoma City in 1995 made it clear a decade ago that terrorism would occur within the United States, while the 1995 sarin attack in the Tokyo subway showed that terrorists could obtain poisonous agents.

Retired U.S. Army Col. Walt Phillips believed nonmilitary first responders would benefit from a facility akin to the U.S. Army's Chemical School, which teaches soldiers to overcome attacks using nuclear, radiological, chemical or biological weapons. Once Fort McClellan was ordered closed in 1995, Phillips successfully pressed for Chemical School facilities to be used to train civilians.

The Center for Domestic Preparedness was established in November 1997 as an agency within the Justice Department. Its job was to "prepare relevant federal, state and local officials, including law enforcement, firefighters, emergency medical personnel, and other key agencies such as public works and emergency management agencies to prepare for and respond to chemical, biological or other terrorist acts."

A group of police officers, primarily from nearby Birmingham, attended the center's initial course on June 1, 1998. About 2,500 first responders were trained annually for the next few years at the facility, which also offered a limited mobile training program.

The attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and the anthrax mailings that quickly followed heightened the sense that U.S. emergency personnel needed more training against terrorist incidents, particularly those involving unconventional weapons.

The center quadrupled its on-site training to 10,000 each year, strengthened its mobile training program and intensified its instruction on terrorism prevention. It was transferred to the fledgling Homeland Security Department in March 2003.

In fiscal 2004 the center had upwards of 550 employees, most of them government contractors, and a $55 million budget. It operates six core on-site courses and has two large trailers for mobile training visits to communities, all offered free of charge to state and local first responders.

"My hope is that they'll take away a general understanding of a WMD terrorism incident," said CDP Director Marion Cain. "How to respond to it and [that] their equipment and the techniques they've learned will work, and will protect them from these terrible weapons."

Danger - in the practice sense, at least - is literally around every corner in the center's training rooms. It's also hidden amongst the leaves of a potted plant.

Even the standard practice of entering a room could be deadly, as Henderson, Ky., search and rescue coordinator Fredrick Behnke III found out.

One room offered a bounty of unpleasant surprises for teams searching the office of a fictional victim of a WMD attack. There was flammable liquid in a container above the ceiling, blood in a HAZMAT container and a suspect device underneath the desk.

"We walked in, the first person flipped the light on, could have started an explosion," Behnke said. "You learn, 'Oh yeah, don't do that.'"

Behnke was attending the four-day WMD Technical Emergency Response Training (TERT) course, the basic program for first responders and the one with perhaps the widest range of participants.

Alongside Behnke were Bolden, the Mississippi hospital guard, and Danica Rast, a public safety dispatcher from Reno, Nev. The three and their fellow trainees learned about unconventional weaponry, terrorism threats and WMD attack scene management in classrooms, then put that education to work in 20 hours of hands-on training.

Participants learned to suit up in protective gear, which would be crucial later in training when they confronted live chemical agents, and to assemble a decontamination triage line for "victims" of a WMD attack. They also were taught to recognize weaponry and chemical agents.

"They wanted to put on the suits, drag mannequins, pick up pieces of equipment and learn how to use it," said Terry Quarles, acting assistant director of the Chemical, Ordnance, Biological, Radiological (COBRA) Training Facility.

Beyond the nuts and bolts, the students said they learned to work together with people from different disciplines and regions, and saw how this education could apply to most any public safety position.

Rast's job as a dispatcher keeps her in her workspace at all times. However, she said now she knows that a call regarding multiple people becoming sick at one location could mean an attack using a biological or chemical weapon. She'll know to ask callers about suspicious smells or materials in the area. Information gleaned from those questions could help prepare the emergency medical personnel and firefighters that Rast sends to the call, and keep them safe if it is an attack.

"I think the more knowledge you have in anything you do is a good thing," Rast said.

Rast and her colleagues spent four days at the center. The core training programs run from two to five days and target personnel with varying areas of expertise.

Trainees in the WMD Incident Command Training Course, who come in with a firm knowledge of incident commands, spend three days learning to organize the response to a WMD event. They finish training with an eight-hour exercise working on a tabletop model of a city in which 150 people have been infected with some sort of agent.

Participants in the three-day WMD Hazardous Material Technician Training Course have nine rooms to hone their HAZMAT skills in a WMD incident. Much of the space is filled with smoke, as music and alarms blare, all with the purpose of offsetting the training and experience they entered the center with.

In a mock mailroom that has been infected with a suspicious powder, the trainees must extricate mannequins that are "victims" of the attack. There are no survivors in a room made to look like a judge's chambers, but the students must draw samples of a fake chemical agent for testing.

"Everyone in this site is dead. I had to kill them all" so the students would not try to save the victims rather than accomplishing their assigned task, said Pat Garrett, HAZMAT assistant course manager, said of his students.

Students in three courses don't go home until they've gotten up close and personal with sarin and VX. Or as personal as one can get while completely covered in protective gear.

The COBRA facility sits at a distance from the main training building, behind two guard stations and a fence topped with barbed wire.

The security keeps uninvited people out of the center, while constant computerized air monitoring and an industrial ventilation and filter system prevents any chemical agent from escaping.

Participants even wear a loaned set of clothes at the facility, to ensure nothing questionable sticks to their street wear when they leave.

A HAZMAT class was suiting up for their tour on a Wednesday. If the three students of the TERT course seemed a bit worried, members of this group were quietly eager.

"This is going to be challenging," said Rufus Washington, a state trooper and training coordinator for the Alabama Department of Public Safety. "It's going to take some teamwork and some organization."

The scenario calls teams to an incident in which conventional explosives are set off in a gymnasium during a basketball game. Meanwhile, a chemical agent had been placed into the air system from a row of rooms in the basement area. Broken into three teams, the responders will have to rescue survivors of the explosion, preserve a crime scene in one room with several deceased mannequins and sample and monitor live chemical agents in another space.

While other groups are shown exactly where the VX and sarin are placed, the highly trained HAZMAT personnel will have to find it on their own.

In the wake of real incidents involving anthrax and ricin, hands-on training of this sort could be crucial on the job, students and trainers said.

"They leave here very confident that they can do this," said Bruce Mitchell, COBRA team leader. "This is real. It's something they need to know about."

There are 11 million first responders and other personnel in the United States who need training in terrorism response, according to the center, meaning its work will never be finished.

Not, however, for lack of trying.

Roughly 60 percent of the CDP participants are certified trainers in their home jurisdictions. They go home with books, compact discs and heads full of new knowledge to pass on.

Through on-site, mobile and extension programs, the center at last count had trained 199,579 responders since its inception.

Meanwhile, new initiatives are being planned. The Homeland Security Office of Domestic Preparedness is developing training procedures for personnel in private industries that could be at risk for an attack, such as chemical plants.

The center is also collaborating with the Agriculture Department on pilot courses training agricultural first responders to detect and manage biological attacks on U.S. crops and livestock. If the pilot courses are successful, the program could be added to the core CDP program.

The center's employees and their students can only hope all this work goes to waste.

"Of course, we hope we never have to use it," Washington said. "But if we do, the education and knowledge will be very important."

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CDC restructures to better battle bioterror

Chris Schneidmiller — Wed, 26 May 2004 00:00:00 -0400

The agency will now focus its attention and funding on two "overarching health protection goals": preparedness against infectious, environmental and terrorist threats, and the prevention of disease, injury and disability, according to a CDC press release.

Most CDC offices will also operate within four coordinating units to allow personnel working in similar health fields to more easily collaborate, CDC spokesman Tom Skinner said Friday.

Planned changes were developed under the yearlong Futures Initiative, and should be in place when the agency begins its next fiscal year in October, Skinner said.

"The Futures Initiative is all about allowing the CDC to leverage its resources to be even more effective than we are now to responding to public health threats, whether they're caused by infectious, environmental or terroristic threats or chronic health conditions," Skinner said.

The agency has 8,000 full-time employees around the country in divisions working to research and prevent health problems. It began increasing its ability to respond to bioterrorism in 1998, and led the response to the 2001 anthrax attacks that killed five people, according to the General Accounting Office.

A 2003 GAO report (GAO-04-152) found that while the agency provided strong support to local health departments during the attacks, CDC officials acknowledged they were not prepared to coordinate the work of federal health personnel and had trouble managing information coming in from other public health agencies.

The agency subsequently created an Office of Terrorism Preparedness and Emergency Response, developed an emergency operations center and took other steps to better respond to bioterror, the report states.

Some public health experts have also charged the agency with playing down the importance of the smallpox immunization program and with failing to work well with local and state organizations.

Former Health and Human Services Department official Jerome Hauer questioned whether the CDC change would improve the agency's bioterrorism efforts. Large organizations sometimes change for the sake of change, but to minimal effect, he said.

"I think we have to see what happens on this," said Hauer, now director of the Response to Emergencies and Disasters Institute at George Washington University. "Only time will tell."

Details on how the CDC will allocate programming, funding and personnel to meet its priorities will be determined in the months leading to the new fiscal year, Skinner said.

The agency has requested $1.1 billion for terrorism response in fiscal 2005. Most of the money - $829 million - would be used for grants to help state and local agencies increase their ability to respond to biological incidents. Remaining money would fund CDC response capability increases, security, anthrax vaccine research and a surveillance initiative aimed at shrinking the time it takes for public health agencies to detect a biological problem.

The new organizational model will support the agency's efforts to meet its goals, Skinner said. "It's a matter of bringing people together to more effectively work on a common cause," he said.

Each of the four coordinating centers will include several agencies:

The Coordinating Center for Infectious Diseases will house the National Center for Infectious Diseases, the National Immunization Program and the National Center for STD, TB and HIV Prevention.
The Coordinating Center for Health Promotion will house the National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion and the National Center for Birth Defects and Developmental Disabilities.
The Coordinating Center for Environmental Health, Injury Prevention and Occupational Health will be home to the National Center for Environmental Health, the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, the National Center for Injury Prevention and Control and the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health.
The Coordinating Center for Health Information and Services will include the National Center for Health Statistics, a new National Center for Health Marketing and a new Center for Public Health Informatics.

The Office of Terrorism Preparedness and Emergency Response and the Office of Global Health will operate independently of the coordinating centers.

Each coordinating center will have a director who will report directly to Director Julie Gerberding, rather than having the head of each office do so. That will allow Gerberding to spend more time planning national and international health strategies, said Charles Schable, new head of Terrorism Preparedness and Emergency Response.

"Will it make the CDC react more promptly [to health emergencies]? I don't think so because we react pretty darn promptly," Schable said. "We don't need a management structure to respond," he added.

Schable's 150-person office will continue its work coordinating work by CDC departments and other federal, state and local agencies against bioterror, officials said.

"My office will coordinate a response, coordinate funds that will go to these various centers," Schable said.

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