C&EN: TODAY'S HEADLINES - LANDMARK BILL TO BE SIGNED BY BUSH

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Declaring it “landmark in its scope,” President George W. Bush this week is expected to sign into law a bill creating a new Cabinet-level department to detect, prevent, and respond to future terrorist attacks. He then will name a secretary for the Department of Homeland Security, most likely former Pennsylvania governor Thomas J. Ridge. Since October 2001, Ridge has directed the White House Office of Homeland Security.

The legislation—approved overwhelmingly by the Senate last week and by the House the previous week—puts into motion the most sweeping overhaul of the federal government since 1947. Sixty days after the President signs the bill, government officials will begin to bring together 170,000 employees from 22 federal agencies to form a domestic security department with an initial budget of $37.5 billion. It will be the second largest Cabinet department, after the Pentagon.

Agencies are expected to move to the new department in clusters over a year’s time. The consolidation—a process that can take years, as it did with the Energy Department in the late 1970s—means melding different communications, personnel, payroll, and pension systems. As Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman (D-Conn.) explains, the “different cultures in these different agencies are going to have to be blended together.” Lieberman was the first to champion a domestic security department after Sept. 11, 2001.

Science and technology components of the new department are being drawn from the civilian biodefense research programs of the Department of Health & Human Services, parts of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, the Pentagon’s National Bioweapons Defense Analysis Center, and the Agriculture Department’s Plum Island Animal Disease Center. The department will also house a Homeland Security Research Projects Agency, modeled after the Pentagon’s successful advanced research projects agency, DARPA.

In addition to those constituents, the bill creates a Homeland Security Institute—a key recommendation of a National Research Council study titled “Making the Nation Safer: The Role of Science & Technology.” And it also establishes a technology clearinghouse and a science and technology advisory committee. An undersecretary for science and technology will oversee these various activities in the new department.
After working out a compromise on civil service and employee union rules, the House passed its version of the homeland security bill on Oct. 13. That bill, however, contained seven provisions that Republicans inserted at the last moment and that Senate Democrats labeled “special interest” provisions and vowed to remove.

One of the most controversial provisions—which sets criteria for establishing a research center at a U.S. university—favors Texas A&M University. Another would protect makers of vaccines and vaccine additives from lawsuits. A less contentious one allows department officials to hold closed-door meetings with industry advisers.

Lieberman and Senate Majority Leader Thomas A. Daschle’s (D-S.D.) amendment to strip the seven provisions from the bill failed, despite the support of Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.). Wavering moderate Republicans agreed to vote down the amendment after Senate Minority Leader Trent Lott (R-Miss.) and House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) assured them that language removing the controversial items would be put in the first appropriations bills of the next Congress.

Once the Senate defeated the Lieberman-Daschle amendment, it voted 90 to 9 to establish the Department of Homeland Security, largely along the lines that President Bush had requested in June.