Price Statement on Department of Homeland Security FY15 Budget Request

March 11, 2014
Press Release
Price Statement on Department of Homeland Security FY15 Budget Request

Good afternoon, Mr. Secretary, and welcome. This is your first appearance before our subcommittee and your first opportunity to answer questions on the President’s Fiscal Year 2015 budget request. I hope you will find our hearings to be both constructive and beneficial to your mission as Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security.  The relationship between the Appropriations Committee, Cabinet Secretaries, and component heads is critical to ensuring agencies have the resources they need, while protecting taxpayer dollars.  We want to be your partners in helping to make the Department successful across the broad range of its mission areas.  This subcommittee is inclined to be candid and probing, but I hope our questions will be fair and reasonable.  You have a difficult job, so even when there are disagreements, we still appreciate and respect your service to the country and look forward to working together.

You have inherited a Department that is now more than 10 years old.  It has had its share of growing pains, but it has made significant progress in many areas under the leadership of each of your predecessors.  I know your intent is to build on and hasten that progress.

One area that is in dire need of some progress is the morale of DHS personnel, which ranks as the lowest among Federal agencies. I know from our conversations that this is a priority for you, and I look forward to hearing more about your strategy to not only address it, but continue to build the Department into “one DHS.”

Part of the morale problem, I know, has to do with extended vacancies across multiple DHS leadership offices.  Some of those vacancies can be explained by delays in the Senate confirmation process – although we have seen some progress on that front, including three important confirmations last week. But for many, the Department or the Administration was slow to act. So I hope you can also give us a feel for when we might see all of these vacancies filled.  Beyond employee morale, you need long term leaders in charge of all of your departmental components to help you do your job effectively.

I have been particularly impressed with the strides made across the Department in using risk-based strategies to prioritize the use of limited resources.  From risk-based screening by TSA and prioritizing criminal alien deportations by ICE, to improved targeting of passengers and cargo by CBP, the Department is taking a more strategic approach to accomplishing its many missions. 

That approach is especially needed now as we continue to live in an era of fiscal restraint.  The fiscal year 2015 net discretionary budget request for the Department of Homeland Security is $38.2 billion, not including an additional $6.4 billion in disaster relief funding that does not count toward the discretionary cap.  This total is $1.1 billion below current year funding level.

DHS is of course not the only agency being asked to do more with less. While I am hopeful that we can move forward in a bipartisan manner based on the previously agreed upon top-line FY15 numbers, this agreement will still leave massive shortfalls in funding for critical federal needs in health and research grants, infrastructure investments, and veterans benefits. Some will be quick to criticize the Homeland Security budget request, but this is part of a bigger picture than includes government shutdowns; destructive sequestration cuts; unwise, repeated cuts in critical investments – all of which, unfortunately, has left the Administration with severely limited options.

There is perhaps no greater challenge for the Department than border and immigration enforcement. This is not only because of the fact that our immigration system is fundamentally flawed, but also because the politics surrounding it are so contentious – plagued, I am afraid, by exaggerations of both facts and rhetoric as well as legitimate policy differences. My experience on this subcommittee ever since its creation has convinced me of the futility of approaching immigration as simply an enforcement issue or simply throwing money at the border or any other aspect of the problem. We must have comprehensive reform.

In fact, we should have had it long ago, and if we can accomplish reform this year, Mr. Secretary, that would go farther than anything else I can imagine to make your job more manageable and your department more successful.

  One of things that the subcommittee would greatly benefit from – and that would help clear the air around the overall immigration debate – would be more comprehensive and timely data about how the Department is managing its border and immigration enforcement responsibilities.  How many individuals are being apprehended, where are they being apprehended, and how do they fit into the Department’s enforcement priorities?  How many meet ICE’s statutory or policy criteria for detention?  How many are put on Alternatives to Detention or some other non-detention form of supervision, and which enforcement priority levels do they fit into?

We need to have more confidence that our detention resources are used for those who are threats to the community or are serious flight risks, and that ATD programs – which are much less expensive, work effectively as a detention alternative.    Better information may not be the way to reach consensus on questions of border and immigration enforcement policy, but it would hopefully elevate the discussion to one based more on empirical evidence and agreed upon data.

With regard to immigration enforcement policy, there has been a significant debate about ICE’s use of “prosecutorial discretion”, but the use of law enforcement discretion has a long and credible history.  In fact, as you well know yourself Mr. Secretary, every prosecuting office in the country utilizes discretion on which cases to pursue and to what extent. In fact, any prosecutor not exercising discretion is derelict in his or her duty to the taxpayers. So we should have a discussion about the priorities the Department has established for immigration enforcement, but I hope we can all agree that it simply must prioritize. A convicted felon, by definition, has committed a more serious crime than a misdemeanor offender or a deferred-action eligible individual and therefore poses a bigger risk to the public. We simply don’t have the resources to do it all.

Now on the specific budget proposal, unfortunately there are some recycled proposals that I was disappointed to see again. I want to particularly register my concerns with the proposed cuts to FEMA grants and to the Coast Guard’s acquisition budget.   Both of those accounts represent important investments in the nation’s future homeland security capabilities that we cannot shortchange. 

I am also wary of the proposed transfer of the funding and responsibility for the Emergency Food and Shelter Program from FEMA to the Department of Housing and Urban Development.  That idea has been proposed and rejected in the past because the stakeholder community did not support the change.

Mr. Secretary, I look forward to your testimony and our discussion today, and I look forward to continuing to work with you this year in support of the Department’s important missions.

113th Congress