Opening comments of Secretary Ridge at the First Meeting of the Homeland Security Advisory Council

Release Date: 06/30/03 00:00:00

For Immediate Release
Office of the Press Secretary
June 30, 2003

Mr. Chairman, Judge Webster, ladies and gentlemen, I have the opportunity to share with you a few remarks this morning.  The first really is pride to be working with you.  It is an enormous source of satisfaction for the management team of this new Department to be associated with such an extraordinarily talented group of men and women, who will serve as the Department’s advisory committee and with whom we look forward to continuing the relationship and the work that many of us began together well over a year ago. I thank you for your willingness to participate.  We are grateful, as is the President, for the support you have given the Department, for your ideas and energy and, frankly, as we set up the new Department there will be a great deal of work for us to do in the future as well.

As we take a look at the group of men and women who serve on the Advisory Committee, we see those who have had extraordinary careers in the public sector and the private sector, who have dealt with international and domestic businesses, who have been involved with science and technology - frankly it is a mini-microcosm of what the Department of Homeland Security is all about, and that is engaging in a national effort to secure the homelands.  So we are grateful to be working with you and grateful that you have accepted this responsibility.

What I would like to do is just share with you briefly some of the progress to date that we have made since March first.  As you know, I took over towards the end of January, but the consolidation began on March first, and I think it is very important to highlight some of the things we have done, and then my colleagues on the management team are going to give you more specific briefings in a few moments.

First of all, we have begun to establish the Department of Homeland Security as the focal point to coordinate all state and local efforts.  It is really rather remarkable to see how reflexively state and local governments, from time to time, give us a call to let us know what is going on in their respective states and their respective communities.  It is a huge plus for us and for the President.  As I said before, he asked us to design not a federal strategy, but a national strategy.  He realized that the partnerships that we needed to create were at the state and local  and private sectors, an in a very short time - and again we will continue to improve it - but this relationship I think is on pretty solid and firm ground, and we need, with your help, and within the Department, to continue to make it even stronger and better.

To that end, we are far better prepared today and far more secure today than we were on September 12, 2001.  That is because the federal government has expended billions of dollars, state and local governments and the private sector have expended billions of dollars, and clearly there is a shared fiscal responsibility and clearly we are going to spend, at the federal level and all other levels of government and in the private sector, billions and billions of dollars in the years ahead.  But the fact of the mater remains that, with dollars and the ingenuity and the innovation and leadership, not just at the federal level, but across this country, we are safe and more secure.  That does not mean that we still don't have a great deal of work to do and that does not mean that out internal and external goal of rising to a new level of readiness and security every single day will ever be met.  We constantly want to get better.  We don't guarantee the development of a fail-safe system, but we certainly guarantee that every single day we will be strong and more secure, and I believe that in the very short time that we have been at this we have accomplished that goal.

For those who take a look at the broad portfolio of responsibilities within the Department, we have begun to establish national performance standards, mutual aid systems, credentialing protocols to help us measure outcomes - not just inputs - but to determine are we getting security for every security dollar we have invested.  It is fashionable, very appropriately, in the political world to assess how well you are doing by how much you spent.  That is one barometer.  It is equally appropriate I think to make sure and assess how well you are doing by how well those dollars are spent and to what end.  And to that end, now that the Department is up and running, by the time we begin the process of distributing dollars from the President's 2004 budget, to the state and locals for example, the governors and mayors have all been advised that dollars will only be distributed according to a statewide plan that is locally developed.  Because we need to build a national infrastructure, a national response capability, a national prevention capability.

So again, we have made a lot of progress, beginning with this 2004 budget, which is our first budget for the Department, those dollars are no going to be spent indiscriminately.  As well meaning as the expenditures have been in the past, with most going to necessary items, we want each state to develop a plan that is locally driven, and the dollars will be distributed according to those plans.  We will use performance standards that we have developed, and frankly you have helped developed.  Remember the state-wide template initiative?  They have been distributed to the governors, the homeland security advisors, mayors of big cities, all the regular associations, and they can develop their plans around the document you spent a great deal of time preparing.  We will use the performance standards that you have identified to help test and measure our capabilities with our state and local partners.

Recently we finished TOPOFF 2, which tested a weapon of mass destruction attack on two large cities, Seattle and Chicago.  We are in the process of reviewing, with a critical and constructive eye, the results of those two exercises.  TO show you the depth of the exercises, there were over 120 federal, state and local agencies that participated in those two exercises.  A lot of lessons learned, to be applied as individual states do their exercises late on in the year, obviously to be applied in the next TOPOFF exercise as well.

There was a horrible tragedy yesterday in Chicago, where part of a building collapsed and twelve people lost their lives.  It was not a terrorism incident, but as FEMA and the local emergency management agency become the all-hazard response teams, responding to whatever the emergency is, it was interesting to note that one of the observers said yesterday that the response was quicker, the coordination and communication better at every level,  Some felt that we were able to reduce the loss of life.  Having said that, there is no good news associated with that story because twelve people died.  But if you are trying to take some comfort, it is that kind of collaboration and communication that we need to develop across the country.

We are protecting our borders, seaports and airports through "mart border" agreements with Canada and Mexico.  We have business incentives, such as the Customs Trade Partnership Against Terrorism and the Container Security Initiative with major international ports.  We are also strengthening enforcement of our immigration laws, most notably with the new biometric-based US Visits System.  The Congress and the President have endorsed the notion that, in the post-9/11 world, when people come into this country, we want to identify who they are, and we want to make sure that once their visa has expired that they have left the country.  Congress initially called in an entry-exit system.  We prefer to rename it US Visit System, because we are still an open and welcoming country.  We want people to visit.  We want people to get schooled here.  We want people to get medical treatment here. We want people to recreate here. But when they have visas, we have to do a better job of monitoring when they come in and when they leave.  So to that end America requires greater scrutiny of those who enter and certainly more vigorous enforcement of those who overstay their welcome. So with greater vigilance and new approaches towards dealing with this kind of issue, again, every single day will be more secure as a country.

This week, I might add, the Department has emphasized the citizenship and the openness of this country.  We are going to swear in about 10,000 new Americans this week of July Fourth.  I was with Eduardo Aguirre about six weeks ago in Los Angeles, and if you really wanted to put in a microcosm what we are trying to protect and why we are trying to protect it, you ought to go to the Naturalization Service, because people come to this country because of the opportunities we have, the freedoms we have and the way of life we have.  That is at the heart of what we are trying to protect.  There were 4,200 people in Los Angles from 135 different countries. That says it all. And we want to retain that quality about us, but at the same time, in the post-9/11 environment we have to be a lot more vigilant about who comes in and a lot more concerned about those who overstay.  But it is going to be a great week for the Department in that regard.

As I have said many, many times before, it is a national strategy, not a federal one.  And you have heard me say this and I will repeat it over and over, it is a mantra we have within the Department, that the homeland is secure when the home town is secure.  That is why working with the states and the mayors is so critically important.  That is why working with the private sector is so critically important.

Now there are a couple of things I am going to ask all of you. This is more of a reminder because you bring this kind of mindset to homeland security since the day we first started working together, but we ask you to be inquisitive, provocative.  There is nothing here that can't stand a second or third challenge, a second or third look.  You do that day to day in your companies, you universities, wherever you work, whatever you do.  So we ask you to be inquisitive.  We know you are innovative.  We think your ideas will help us preserve our ideals in this country and we also will be looking to you to help us integrate the new units that we pull in.  We have 22 units that we have pulled in, we have 180 terrific people who go to work every day trying to do their best to secure the homeland.  But we have integration of people and resources and technology and as we go about reorganizing and integrating these people and resources, many of you have done that and we will be looking to you for some guidance there.

We also think it would be very helpful if the advisory group, just as you did with the statewide template initiative, we really developed a common language, a common vocabulary, and homeland security lexicon, as it were.  What do we mean when we are talking about risk management?  What do we mean when we are talking about critical infrastructure?   What do we mean when we talk about first responders?  There is a long list.  Interoperability is not just communications and equipment.  Interoperability is making sure that everybody understands concepts and definitions up and down the line.  And I think it would be a very productive effort on the part of the Advisory Committee, again working with the state and locals and the private sector, so we are basically all singing off the same song sheet when it comes to what we do and how we do it and how we set up priorities.

We are also going to need your help to integrate the work of the Department with the private sector. This is a huge undertaking because 85% of the critical infrastructure is owned by the private sector.  We reach out to the private sector on a day-to-day basis in many different ways.  We have an office that is really an outreach office to deal with the private sector.  We have a science and technology sector, and here the genius and the creativity and the innovation will be captured and we will take that science and technology and apply it to critical missions and prioritizes.  There is infrastructure protection - actually it is the Information Analysis Infrastructure Protection Unit - where we take a look at the threat, determine its credibility, and then map it against and match it against the infrastructure and make sure we have done everything we can to harden that particular target or that venue.  

So again, as we reach out in these various forms to the private sector and coordinate those efforts, your ability and your willingness to assist integrate the private sector into what we do I think is critically important. Chuck McCreary just sent out a broad agency agreement.  Basically there were several million dollars available to the private sector as we are looking right now for some off-the-shelf technology we may use in a variety of different venues, and I think we have 3,300 responses.  Again, those of us who get a chance to see what is out there and see what we might be able to tap into feel pretty comfortable that, in addition to being more or resolute and more persevering and determined and more committed than our enemies - we are a heck of a lot smarter.  The creative genius of this country is really going to help us secure us over the long term.

I would like you to help us establish a Department of Homeland Security award, similar to the Department of Commerce's Malcolm Balderidge Award.  I think it is very important of our to recognize the quality and ingenuity in the private sector, as well as best practices of state and local government.  So again, how we go about developing that award, establishing criteria, setting up a review process so we can recognize exceptional effort in the area of homeland security.

Finally, you should know that there will be other assignments as well and someone will be discussing, I am sure, later on today and in the months and years ahead.   Actually I am going to ask your indulgence for one other change.  I would like to take some of the meetings outside of Washington, DC.  I think it would be very, very helpful if the Advisory Council had a chance to visit some of the sites around the country.  Literally, let's go down to the borders and take a look at that challenge, with regard to immigration or with regard to commercial integration between Canada and Mexico. The President has said many times we need to provide greater security at the borders.  If we do it right, we might be able to facilitate commerce.  There are a lot of venues we need to visit and we will let you and the chairman and the vice-chairman decide where they should be.

We have made a lot of progress in the first hundred-plus days.  We certainly have a great deal more work to do, but I want to thank you for your considerable input and effort to this point.  An I have the pleasure of saying that, as of Thursday night, when General Labutti was sworn in, we have all the principal Undersecretaries nominated and confirmed and sworn in and we have the nucleus of our management team here.  I would like each one of them to just spend a few moments, if that is all right with you, Mr. Chairman, just highlighting some of their priorities and some of the work that they have done.

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