Sam Farr: “I rise as a member of the Appropriations Committee subcommittee. I want to give you a little bit of background of how…”

“I rise as a member of the Appropriations Committee subcommittee. I want to give you a little bit of background of how this whole thing started. Homeland Security was an agency created after 9/11, and as admitted by many Members on the other side of the aisle, the agency itself was the biggest bureaucracy created. As you remember, it just took employees from all different agencies, including Department of Agriculture, and put it into one agency called Homeland Security. And we created an appropriations committee and essentially just funded it with what it asked, without all the first instance. And I remember Mr. Rogers, who was the first chairman of that committee, bringing to the Appropriations Committee the bill last year and indicating this is a huge bureaucracy. It has almost 200,000 people in it, very hard to wrap your hands around it, just sort of hold your nose and vote for it. There were no earmarks in the bill, as there aren't any earmarks here tonight, and we adopted it. What happened with the new chairmanship with Mr. Price is that first thing he did was ask, we better look at what this is all about. Homeland security for what? Security, what are we fighting? So we invited in all these experts to sort of give us an overview of what is risk, what is fear, what should we be looking at, and it was very sensible.”