Hal Rogers: “What are we doing about cargo on passenger planes? What are we doing about it, and where are we? Well, at the moment we…”

“What are we doing about cargo on passenger planes? What are we doing about it, and where are we? Well, at the moment we physically inspect a certain percent of all cargo on passenger planes. That percentage is a law enforcement-sensitive number, and we cannot talk about it publicly, but it is a percentage that we actually physically inspect. The rest cannot be put on a plane unless it has been certified by the government to come from somebody we know, a FedEx or UPS or some other known shipper, a Toyota, GM, where we have gone to that shipper and put them through a rigorous examination so that we know whether or not they are reliable and their chain of supply, their security of supply has been checked. We are developing machinery, however, to be able to take the place of all of that. The machinery is just simply not there yet. It is being developed, and in the bill we appropriate $118.5 million for air cargo security. It is an enormous figure. That is $33.5 million more than we spent this year or that the President requested. We topped everybody in that respect. And $75 million of that is going to develop new technologies. One of these days we will have machines that will do for cargo on passenger planes what we do for baggage on passenger planes. We simply do not have it yet.”