Mr. HASTERT. Thank you Mr. Chairman. Good morning. I want to thank the vice chairman for chairing this hearing.

We are here today to examine another aspect of the U.S. efforts to combat terrorism. Our focus today is on the domestic response, which I believe is very timely given the events that occurred in the last few months.

To say that this is an issue that hits home would be an understatement. Experts disagree on the severity of the terrorist threat in the United States and some believe that it is remote. However, it has been the opinion of Congress that a terrorist attack involving a weapon of mass destruction has the potential to be so devastating that we must be fully prepared to respond.

As a member of the oversight committee, we have an important responsibility of determining whether or not the Domestic Preparedness Program will adequately prepare local fire, police, and emergency service personnel for such a terrible scenario. This examination of the Domestic Preparedness Program is part of the subcommittee review of all Federal Government terrorism-related programs.

As part of this investigation, we requested extensive information from the executive branch regarding these programs. I would like to thank those departments and agencies that have been timely with their submissions, which are currently under review by the subcommittee staff.

Thank you, Mr. Souder, and I yield back.

Mr. SOUDER. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I now yield to Mr. Barrett, the ranking minority member, for an opening statement.

Mr. BARRETT. Thank you, Mr. Souder, and good morning to our distinguished witnesses on both panels.

This is the subcommittee's third hearing on U.S. efforts to combat terrorism at home and abroad. Today we plan to examine the accomplishments and challenges of the Nunn-Lugar-Domenici Domestic Preparedness Program, which is designed to improve the Federal Government's ability to prevent and respond to terrorist attacks involving weapons of mass destruction.

Although it is a Federal program, the primary point is to improve the emergency response capabilities of local agencies that will be the first to respond on the scene. Given the size of our country, the limitations of our Federal budget, and the ill-defined nature of the threat, this is no easy task.

We've seen dramatic changes in our Government's approach to terrorism. Just this past May, the President announced an effort to ensure the critical infrastructures in our country: our system of telecommunications, banking and finance, energy, transportation, and essential Government services. The President also unveiled the new management approach to our counterterrorism efforts, creating a new National Coordinator of Security, Infrastructure Protection and Counterterrorism, responsible for interagency coordination.

Effects of these changes and others, including the proposed transfer of agency authority for domestic preparedness, will, hopefully, be among our topics of discussion today.

I understand that a great many first responders and local officials have given praise to the training and equipment that they

have received under the program. The General Accounting Office, however, has raised a number of questions about the planning and execution of our Federal effort to manage the consequences of a terrorist attack.

At the most fundamental level, GAO concludes that the effort is not guided by an overarching strategy to reach defined goals. GAO also contends that we are seeing wasteful and inefficient duplication of effort in our Domestic Preparedness Program and the beneficiaries of our local programs, local governments, are not getting the guidance they need to make use of scarce resources.

Given the stakes and importance of this program, these criticisms are cause for concern. I look forward to hearing from all of our witnesses, and I thank you again for preparing and providing your testimony.

Mr. SOUDER. Thank you, Mr. Barrett.

A large and diverse number of witnesses will testify before us today. We have asked them to address a wide variety of issues regarding both policy and implementation.

Our first panel is composed of Government auditors, outside experts, and an advocacy group who will present their insights into the program to the subcommittee.

The second panel is composed of officials from the executive branch who will discuss implementation and status of the program. On our first panel we have Mr. Richard Davis, director of National Security Analysis for the U.S. General Accounting Office, and with him is Davi D'Agostino, Assistant Director of that office. Mr. Larry Johnson is former Deputy Director of the Office of Counterterrorism, Department of State, and Mr. Frank Cilluffo is the senior analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Mr. Frederick Nesbitt is the director of government affairs at the International Association of Firefighters, who are, obviously, going to be involved in any incident anywhere in the United States. We thank you all for coming today, and in accordance with the many rules we swear-in all of our witnesses. So would you please all stand and raise your right hands?

[Witnesses sworn.]

Mr. SOUDER. Let the record show that the witnesses answered in the affirmative.

Mr. Davis, the GAO's work in this area has been very thorough and we appreciate your efforts and have enjoyed both meeting with you in the hearings and behind the scenes in your report. Will you proceed?

STATEMENTS OF RICHARD DAVIS, DIRECTOR, NATIONAL SECURITY ANALYSIS, NATIONAL SECURITY AND INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS DIVISION, U.S. GENERAL ACCOUNTING OFFICE, ACCOMPANIED BY DAVI D'AGOSTINO, ASSISTANT DIRECTOR, NATIONAL SECURITY ANALYSIS, NATIONAL SECURITY AND INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS DIVISION, U.S. GENERAL ACCOUNTING OFFICE; LARRY C. JOHNSON, BERG ASSOCIATES, FORMER DEPUTY DIRECTOR, OFFICE OF COUNTERTERRORISM, DEPARTMENT OF STATE; FRANK J. CILLUFFO, SENIOR ANALYST, CENTER FOR STRATEGIC AND INTERNATIONAL STUDIES; AND FREDERICK H. NESBITT, DIRECTOR OF GOVERNMENTAL AFFAIRS, INTERNATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF FIRE FIGHTERS

Mr. DAVIS. Yes. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. We thank you for the opportunity to be here this morning to share some of our thoughts on this very important topic that you mentioned. Sir, I would like to submit my prepared statement for the record and I will just offer some remarks in summary fashion.

Mr. SOUDER. Without objection, it will be so ordered and I will do that for all witnesses who have written testimony and would like to submit it.

Mr. DAVIS. The Nunn-Lugar-Domenici Domestic Preparedness Program is an interagency program led by the Department of Defense which provides training equipment intended to prepare selected cities to manage the consequences of a possible attack by terrorists using weapons of mass destruction. We expect to issue a report on these matters within the next few weeks.

It is worth noting that very recently, under National Security Council initiative, the Department of Defense, the Department of Justice, and other agency officials have been considering transferring lead responsibility for the Domestic Preparedness Program from the Department of Defense to the Department of Justice.

I'd like to offer comments this morning on four topics: first, program training; second, how the program was designed; third, the equipment component of the program; and last, the need for an overall strategy.

Program training. Domestic Preparedness Program training gives first responders a greater awareness of how to deal with WMD terrorist incidents. Local officials in the seven cities we visited praised the training program's content, instructors, and material, as well as DOD's willingness to modify it based on suggestions from local officials. They also credited the program with bringing local, Federal, State, and regional emergency response agencies together into a closer working relationship.

By the end of this year, DOD expects to have trained about onethird of the 120 cities it selected for the program. All training is to be complete in 2001.

The second issue is program design. In designing the program, DOD decided to select cities based on population. We have a map over there on the right-hopefully, you can see it-a map of the United States that lays out the 120 cities the DOD selected for this program. The 120 cities are the cities with the largest population based on the 1990 census.

In essence, it covers all cities in the United States at that time that had a population over 144,000. It represented 22 percent of the population at that time, and includes cities in 38 States and the District of Columbia. It excludes 12 States. Thirty of the cities, or 25 percent, are located in two States: California and Texas. Selecting the 120 cities, as DOD did, resulted in clusters. There are 14 clusters that represent 44 cities that are within 30 miles of another program city.

If you could look at the State of California, at the bottom, in one of those clusters there are about 8 different cities that are all within about 30 miles of another program city.

In Texas, in the Dallas area, there are four cities: Dallas, Fort Worth, Irving, and Arlington, also, again, are clustered within 30 miles of another program city.

On the East Coast there's another cluster in Virginia, the Tidewater area of Virginia Beach, Norfolk, Chesapeake, and Newport News.

To demonstrate a little about the clusters and some of the issues that we want to talk about in program design, I'd like to now go over to these charts and talk a little bit about it.

You can see the map of the State of California. The State of California has organized into six mutual aid regions. They've organized so that each of the regions or the areas are to help each other in times of crisis. Whether the crisis be a terrorist incident, a fire, flood, earthquake, whatever, they're organized that way, and that's the way the State structure is.

Within region No. 1, at the bottom, there are a number of counties including Los Angeles County. In the State structure within Los Angeles County, the principal person is the local sheriff. He has responsibility for the 88 cities that are within that county, as well as over 130 unincorporated areas.

Within Los Angeles County, the DOD approach was to select three cities. They selected 3 of the 120 cities: Glendale, Los Angeles, and Long Beach. They targeted their program to those cities rather than the county, the way it was structured.

The Los Angeles County people went to DOD and explained the situation, how they were organized in the State, to try to see if they could come up with a different arrangement. Unfortunately, it didn't work. DOD is stuck with their program of focusing, or targeting the city. So in other words, within Los Angeles County, DOD is going to make three separate trips; they will visit the cities of Glendale, Los Angeles, and Long Beach. They will have three separate training programs; they will have three separate deliveries of equipment packages.

In nearby region 6 there are another five cities that are also within 30 miles of another program city. So within that area you basically have eight cities. In fact, in the State of California there are 18 of the 120 cities. And under the approach the DOD is using, the DOD will make 18 separate visits to the State; they will visit 18 cities; it will have 18 training programs and it will have 18 equipment packages.

Now, one of the other points I would like to make is that you say 30 miles; when you have an incident, it's really important to get there quickly and to be there onsite, and if you had to move by the

road structure within some of these places we're talking about, 30 miles would take you in excess of an hour or maybe 2 hours, depending on what time of day it was.

One of the things that we learned on our visit to the cities and to the community out there, is that many of these communities have a whole host of assets, to include air assets to allow them to get to places quickly if need be.

I would like to turn to another chart that shows the State of Virginia. This emphasizes the principle again of structures that exist, the State of Virginia is organized a little bit differently, but the principle is still the same. It's organized into regions. Unlike the State of California, the Virginia structure is designed to deal with incidents focused on hazardous material responses. They've 13 teams within that State.

We've mentioned the Tidewater area. There are four separate cities. Three of those cities fall within team L, and one city, Newport News, falls within Team K-all of them within 30 miles of each other. One of the reasons Virginia decided to go this way was from an affordability perspective. In other words, they didn't think it was possible to be able to afford having response capabilities in every single jurisdiction. So they organized this way to help and to organize responses to critical incidents.

One State official that we talked to summarized one of the points that we are trying to make here. That official told us that, “I don't want to seem ungrateful and we'll accept all the help we can get. On the other hand, it seems like the DOD approach has ignored 30 years of national and State emergency response structure, and did it their way rather than building on what already existed."

If the program was refocused, DOD could leverage State emergency management structures, mutual aid agreements among local jurisdictions, or other collaborative arrangements for emergency response. Training in fewer locations, while taking advantage of existing emergency response structures, could hasten the accomplishment of program goals and reinforce local response integration. Such an approach also would cover a greater percentage of the population and make effective use of existing local emergency training

venues.

The third issue I wanted to talk about has to do with the equipment component. The legislation authorizes DOD to lend, rather than to give or grant, training equipment to each city. The loan agreement between DOD and the cities specifies that the loan is for 5 years and that the cities are to repair, maintain, and replace the equipment. The loan agreement terms have caused frustration and confusion among local officials.

Some cities we visited viewed the acceptance of the equipment as an unfunded Federal mandate because DOD has provided no funds to sustain the equipment. DOD officials told us that the equipment was intended only to support city training needs, and they wanted to encourage cities to share the burden of preparing for WMD terrorism by funding additional equipment needs themselves. But many local officials told us that they were fairly certain they could not justify the high cost for this equipment when stacked against the many other competing priorities for local funding.