A full 365 days of homeland security

Alicia Robinson

Although cake and candles don’t appear to have been involved, Rep.

Chris Cox recently celebrated the one-year anniversary of the

creation of the Department of Homeland Security.

As chairman of the U.S. House of Representative’s committee on

homeland security, Cox has been intimately involved with the

department’s activities from the start, and he said he’s pleased with

the progress that’s been made to date in increasing the nation’s

security.

“It’s truly impressive to see how much has been accomplished in a

mere 12 months,” he said. “Just a year ago, there was no such thing

as the Homeland Security Department.”

One big advancement Cox cited is the sharing of more intelligence

than ever before among different levels of government and law

enforcement. The department is now in cooperation with 22 countries

to screen two-thirds of all cargo bound for the U.S., and plans are

in place to have 80% of incoming cargo screened by the end of this

year, Cox said.

“We recognized that once suspicious cargo makes it into a U.S.

port, it’s too late,” he said.

All noncitizens of the U.S. now must offer biometric

identification -- usually a fingerprint -- when entering the country,

and airports are screening 100% of checked luggage, he said.

Since Sept. 11, 2001, the federal government has given out more

than $8 billion in grants to emergency responders for equipment and

training. Cox said the next big initiative for the department would

be overhauling the way it disburses funding to states and counties to

get homeland security dollars to them faster and with less red tape.

“I think without question that America is safer today than it was

a year ago,” he said. “We have made enormous progress and we’ve

covered a lot of ground in just one year, but we still have miles to

go.”

Congressman backs presidential vetoes that save

Cox is sending a clear message to President George W. Bush that he

and his colleagues will unite behind any presidential vetoes of bills

that require unnecessary spending.

He’s even put it in writing, and as of Tuesday, he had convinced

107 House members to sign a letter to Bush stating their support for

any veto of superfluous spending bills. Sustaining a veto requires

146 House members. Among the letter’s signatories is Rep. Dana

Rohrabacher.

A news release on the House Policy Committee website notes that

Cox wrote a similar letter in 2002 that was signed by 150 House

members.

Asteroids deserve more attention from amateurs

Perhaps hoping to establish another line of defense against stray

space objects, the House on Wednesday passed a Rohrabacher-sponsored

bill to encourage amateur astronomers to discover and track

near-Earth asteroids.

The congressman’s office announced the approval of House

Resolution 912 creating the Charles “Pete” Conrad Astronomy Awards --

named for the third man to walk on the moon -- and directing NASA to

make awards of $3,000 to astronomers for their research.

“Asteroids deserve a lot more attention from the scientific

community,” Rohrabacher said in a statement. “The first step is a

thorough tracking of all sizable Near Earth Objects, and H.R. 912 is

a modest step toward this goal.”

As chairman of the House Space and Aeronautics Subcommittee,

Rohrabacher has warned colleagues in the past of asteroids that could

collide with the earth. In 1998, he chastised then-President Bill

Clinton for ending an Air Force Program that would develop technology

to rendezvous with asteroids and gather data from them.