Trying to Execute Reform
Battles over those 9/11 panel recommendations
Last fall, Harold Ford Jr., a charismatic Democratic Senate candidate from Tennessee, filmed a campaign ad in the cramped aisle of a passenger plane. "The bipartisan 9/11 commission says our airports fail on security five years after September 11," Ford said in the ad, holding a copy of the commission's report and a plastic bottle meant to evoke liquid explosives. "It's time to set aside politics [and] adopt the commission's 41 recommendations."
Ford was one of many Democratic candidates to use the pitch during the fall campaign. He lost, but his party took over Congress. And not surprisingly, last week the House passed the Implementing the 9/11 Commission Recommendations Act of 2007 as part of the Dems' blitz marking their first 100 working hours in power. But it won't be easy going from here. Although the 9/11 commissioners have praised the bill, it's been criticized for including several initiatives the 9/11 report didn't even address. There's opposition in the Senate, and the White House called it "unconstitutional." How much survives-and how much should-are still very open questions.
"Herculean." Since the commission released its report in 2004, a flurry of legislation has addressed at least some of its recommendations. A massive intelligence reform act-the result of what Republican Sen. Susan Collins calls a "herculean bipartisan effort" in late 2004-restructured the intelligence community the way the commission wanted, adding a director of national intelligence. A major port security bill and a measure giving the Department of Homeland Security power to regulate chemical plants followed this fall. Still, Lee Hamilton, the Democratic vice chair of the commission, said last week he thought "roughly half" the recommendations still needed to be addressed.
Clocking in at 279 pages, the new House bill aimed to fix that. One of the more significant measures would ensure that 90 percent of the roughly $2 billion handed out in homeland security grants each year would be divvied up according to risk calculations, instead of like political pork, a bit to each state. Another section mandates that 100 percent of sea cargo headed to the United States be scanned for explosives abroad within five years. All cargo carried on U.S. commercial flights would be scanned in just three years.
Supporters admit the bill was thrown together quickly-and critics say it shows. Although the measure creates three new grant programs-for items like better communications equipment and local intelligence centers for first responders-nowhere does it mention any specific costs or deal with how to pay for new programs. And Republican Rep. John Mica complained to U.S. News last week about a clause that gives aviation screeners collective bargaining rights, potentially restricting the ability of DHS to shift workers to busy airports during the holidays. "Nowhere in the 9/11 commission report," Mica said, "did it recommend [any of] that." Other commission recommendations are entirely unaddressed. For instance, commissioners said the maze of congressional panels overseeing pieces of DHS-79 by today's count-represents "the single largest obstacle impeding" success for the mammoth agency. The new bill doesn't deal with the problem.
All that controversy is clouding the bill's prospects. The Bush administration stopped short of a veto threat but said last week that it has "constitutional concerns" about portions of the measure-including a move to create a privacy and civil liberties board with subpoena power. As a result, the White House said, it "cannot support ... passage ... in its current form."
The Senate-where Democrats hold a 50-to-49 margin-will take up its own bill by late January. Passage is likely, but the Senate bill is expected to have "more compromises," says Stephen Flynn with the Council on Foreign Relations, "and less kinks."
Because rural members have more clout there, the Senate has rejected past efforts to allocate 90 percent of terrorism funds by risk alone. And staffers say they're more hesitant about the feasibility and multibillion-dollar costs of 100 percent sea cargo scanning; DHS is slated to test such an idea for the first time this year. Joe Lieberman, the new head of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, said last week he'd try to implement the commission's recommendations "as much as we can, as quick as we can, and as fully as we can." Given what's happened so far, that could be a tall order.
This story appears in the January 22, 2007 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.
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