Top GOP aides try to ease concerns over security bill

Senior Senate Republican aides have been trying to answer questions surrounding the creation of a new Homeland Security Department the past few days to keep momentum moving for Senate passage this week of a bill to create the department, but several key questions remain.

Under the bill now before the Senate, for instance, the department is designed for change in the future, but there is no review clause for the act, according to Bill Outhier, Republican chief counsel for the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee. Congress will conduct oversight and hearings on the act and "amend it as we go along," he said.

Republican staffers have likened the bill to the 1947 act that created the Defense Department. According to Outhier, that act has been amended more than 40 times in its 55 years.

Staffers acknowledged that it likely would be years before the department is functioning, despite urgent calls by some to complete action on the bill now to address terrorist threats. They also conditioned their predictions of the future success of the department on it receiving sufficient funding and getting beyond the logistics of being established.

Peter Levine, Republican general counsel for the Senate Armed Services Committee, is somewhat skeptical about the impact the department might have on security technology research and development. Speaking at a District of Columbia Bar event on Friday, Levine said the Defense Department welcomes the new department's science and technology directorate, which aims to boost research on homeland security technologies.

But he added that Defense has been funding such research for years and is not threatened by the new department's foray into the area because no one has proposed to take any money from Defense to give to Homeland Security. The question is whether the new department will have any money of its own to spend, he said. The bill would authorize $500 million for a new Homeland Security Advanced Research Projects Agency.

Levine also questioned whether the tech clearinghouse proposed for the department would have any new technologies to evaluate and whether it would have the expertise to do so.

Richard Hertling, the minority staff director for Governmental Affairs, addressed privacy concerns by stressing the importance the bill places on encouraging businesses to share information with the new department. He said a controversial Freedom of Information Act provision is "not quite an exemption but an exclusion" from FOIA for businesses that share information with the government that is considered important to homeland security.

Outhier, meanwhile, said at a Thursday event that proponents of the bill tried not to turn government into "Big Brother."

Another dogfight to come involves committee jurisdiction over the new department. On Thursday, the Republican Conference Committee voted to back the creation of a new Homeland Security Committee and an appropriations subcommittee. Under the current congressional structure, 88 House and Senate committees and subcommittees would have jurisdiction, congressional sources said.