I am very worried about that program, both from a national security standpoint and from an effectiveness standpoint.

I think it is the most difficult position of all the Cabinet Secretaries.

I think it is important to have you do an analysis of that from where you stand with your experience and then get back to us within 6 months on what your thoughts are.

Will you publicly commit today to give us your word that under your leadership, you will require the Department to respond to congressional inquiries in a timely fashion?

I think he has the potential of being the best Secretary for this Department we have ever had.

I think that is a wise thing to do.

This Committee and my office have struggled to receive timely responses from the Department of Homeland Security to our inquiries.

We are not handling it. We are limiting practicing physicians' ability to notify.

I do not care if Oklahoma never gets another dollar of Homeland Security grants as long as the dollars that are spent are spent on high-risk areas.

I surely hope we can work together through the upcoming years to fix the Department of Homeland Security.

I will not consider that his questionnaire has been completed.

I am extremely disturbed by the responses to the questionnaire because the staff...has cut and pasted the identical answers.

if Homeland Security cannot apply the very rules to itself it is asking other agencies to comply with, what authority can they have in executing cybersecurity at other agencies if they do not even follow their own rules for their own…

It is an important area because it may mean that we need to maybe modify some of the student debt parameters and restrict its use somewhat.

It is the responsibility of each individual agency to make sure they comply with that.

I believe that this is an important issue that we have to get at.

The American people ought to be asking what in the world is going on.

We need an automated system to do that? What about random audits? How about firing a contractor who does not perform?

It is accountability. And all I want to know is what are the results of holding some--did we hold whoever made that decision accountable?

A large proportion of our officers that we either contract or have are not trained.

I kind of see this as a multitude of problems. I mentioned in my opening statement we overclassify, which is a problem for the American people because that means it is not transparent.

Why should you automate it? Why shouldn't you force your contractors to automate it and present it to you?

To me it begs the question, you are not up to date on your taxes, you no longer have a clearance, period.

But what I am asking is they do not monitor the individual agencies to see if they are in compliance.

To me this is not a political issue. This is an issue of us failing to do our job in a proper way when it comes to security clearances.