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U.S. Response: Bush Budget Targets WMD Threat, But Shortfalls Remain By Bryan Bender The budget plan calls for new spending in a variety of areas — including thwarting terrorists seeking to acquire weapons of mass destruction, preparing the public health system to better deal with a WMD attack and expanding the worldwide dragnet for operatives of the al-Qaeda terror network. Lawmakers and nongovernmental experts, however, contend that while Bush’s $2.23 trillion budget proposal makes significant investments in defending against catastrophic terrorism, many of the White House’s other budget priorities — paramount among them additional income tax cuts — are draining federal resources away from unmet security needs. They contend that the administration’s budget makes significant strides in reducing the threat of a WMD attack, but that those efforts still do not match the enormity of the problem. “We are doing everything in our power to protect the people and to prevent that day from ever happening,” Bush said when he unveiled his budget proposal Feb. 3 at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Md. “We know that our enemies have been working to acquire weapons of mass destruction. That is a fact,” he said. “We have every reason to believe that terrorists and outlaw regimes would turn these weapons on the United States,” he added. “If their ambitions were ever realized, they would set out to inflict catastrophic harm on the United States, with many times the casualties of September the 11th,” Bush said. Biological Preparations Combined with the specter of a possible war with Iraq to disarm President Saddam Hussein’s regime of its suspected chemical, biological and nuclear weapons programs, the Bush administration is focusing renewed attention on the possibility that a successful WMD attack could be mounted inside U.S. borders. The most worrisome scenario is a biological attack with the potential to inflict thousands if not millions of casualties. To address this threat, one key new effort proposed in the new budget is called Project BioShield. The effort includes $6 billion over the next few years “to quickly make available safer, and more effective vaccines and treatments against agents like smallpox, anthrax, botulinum toxin, ebola, and plague,” Bush told NIH scientists last week (see GSN, Jan. 30). “Under Project BioShield, the government will have the spending authority to purchase these vaccines in huge amounts, sufficient to meet any emergency that may come,” Bush added. “We’ll have better and safer smallpox vaccine, antibodies to treat botox, sophisticated devices that can confirm a case of anthrax infection almost instantly. We will ensure that promising medicines are available for use in an emergency,” he said. The Health and Human Services Department, headed by Secretary Tommy Thompson, is taking a more active role following the 2001 anthrax attacks to help the nation defend against a variety of bioterrorist threats. In fiscal 2004, Thompson is asking Congress for $3.6 billion to counter bioterrorism. While that figure does not reflect the millions in additional spending allocated immediately after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks — for security improvements and laboratory construction — “the budget significantly expands the research funding needed to develop vaccines and medicines that will make these biologic agents much less effective as weapons,” according to department budget documents. “In addition to the substantial increase for this research, the administration will propose legislation that enables the National Institutes of Health to start and complete this work more quickly and efficiently,” the documents state. “HHS will work closely with the Department of Homeland Security to ensure that its pharmaceutical stockpiles include proper amounts of effective drugs, vaccines, and other biologics,” said the documents. Homeland Security Department The main line of defense for the United States in the face of catastrophic terrorism is the newly established Homeland Security Department. The agency, headed by Tom Ridge, is seeking $36.2 billion in the fiscal year beginning Oct. 1, reflecting a 7.4 percent increase in domestic security spending. The department — which includes the Customs Service, Immigration and Naturalization Service, Secret Service and Coast Guard, among other agencies — plans to allocate $829 million for “information analysis and infrastructure protection,” including a newly announced intelligence division that will serve as a clearing house for domestic and foreign intelligence related to homeland security (see GSN, Jan. 30). Other programs, however, would suffer, according to some observers. For example, spending for the Border Patrol would decrease by 1.5 percent to $18.1 billion. “It’s largely flat,” said Steven Kosiak of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments of the Bush budget request. The overall homeland security budget “raises concerns about whether there will have to be a trade-off between domestic security and other government priorities,” he said. In some of the harshest criticism, Senator Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) said the budget reflects the “quirky notion of the White House that you can improve homeland security without spending the dollars. It makes no sense.” Representative John Spratt (D-N.C.) agreed more money is needed for homeland security. “The increase in homeland security, as I understand it, is about $4 billion. It comes on top of a net homeland security provision of about $34 billion. “It’s relatively small in the face of the magnitude of the problem,” he said. “People who sat through more of the briefings than I have will tell you that there are all kinds of urgent unmet homeland security needs out there that they don’t talk about in public because they don’t want to invite attention to them. So there are lots of vulnerabilities we have. The question is, which ones get addressed?” Spratt asked. Spratt, the senior Democrat on the House Budget Committee, said much of the shortfall is at the local level, where first responders would be on the front line of any mass casualty attack. “If you go to the mayors, they’ll tell you they have yet to see the first cent for first responders, even in our large cities, which are likely to be vulnerable to a terrorist attack again,” he said in a Feb. 3 press briefing. “So $4 billion, I don’t think we’ll have any trouble at all supporting that on our side. We’ll probably try to plus it up a bit on our side,” Spratt said. Securing Nuclear Materials The Bush administration in recent weeks has also highlighted plans for the Energy Department to increase it efforts to stem the proliferation of WMD materials and expertise in the former Soviet Union by securing them at their source. The department’s budget request calls for $1.3 billion to be spent on nuclear nonproliferation programs in Russia and neighboring countries, a 30 percent increase over fiscal 2003 (see GSN, Jan. 29). Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham said the additional funding — what he described as the largest such investment to date — would help dispose of additional nuclear material in Russia, secure research facilities that contain radioactive materials, improve techniques to detect the smuggling of nuclear materials and new efforts to consolidate dangerous materials, among a variety of other priorities. However, many believe the so-called Cooperative Threat Reduction program and related efforts to secure former Soviet materials are not moving quickly enough. “The rate at which progress has been made is not enough to secure the materials in a short amount of time,” said Clifford Singer, director of the Arms Control, Disarmament and International Security program at the University of Illinois at Urbana. The new budget does reflect that the administration is “headed in the right direction,” he added, “particularly the safeguarding of nuclear facilities” both in the former Soviet Union and in the United States. “You just can’t expect to be finished in three years no matter how much money you throw at it,” Singer cautioned. “We’re talking about decades,” he said.
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