David Obey: “this bill should not even be here at this time. The Committee on Appropriations chairman, the gentleman from Kentucky…”

“this bill should not even be here at this time. The Committee on Appropriations chairman, the gentleman from Kentucky (Mr. Rogers), knows his stuff. And he demonstrated that last year when he did very heavy oversight of the Transportation Security Administration, which was totally screwed up at the time. The problem we have with this bill being before us today is that this new agency was extremely reluctant to provide useful information to this Congress so that we could make intelligent judgments about how to allocate money to this new agency. And we have a specific problem, because the reorganization bill that passed with much ballyhoo last year is not what it is cracked up to be. Before the passage of that legislation we had 133 agencies that had something to do with homeland security. And what the bill finally did was to take 22 of those agencies, not including the FBI and the CIA, the two gut agencies in our fight against terrorism, so they took 22 agencies, put them in the department that they called 'Homeland Security,' and we are supposed to stand up and sing Hosannas. The problem is that left 111 other agencies uncoordinated, outside the tent. So we had that basic confusion to begin with, and now we have even more confusion at the agency. This new agency, for instance, we are told still has not prepared a telephone directory for its employees so people can reach who they are supposed to reach if they have a problem.”