David Obey: “there are two problems that we face in dealing with this bill. The first is that we have an agency which is essentially…”

“there are two problems that we face in dealing with this bill. The first is that we have an agency which is essentially incompetent and dysfunctional. We are trying to protect the Nation's security by working through an agency which is gargantuan, which is bureaucratic, to say the least, which is filled with inertia, and filled with people working at cross purposes. Outside of that it does a terrific job. And the chairman and the ranking member of the subcommittee have tried to do their dead level best to provide the kind of Congressional oversight that is necessary if you are going to help bring this agency out of its troubles and put that agency in a posture where it can be a trusted repository of the responsibilities that we have given to it. The second problem we have is that we still have not faced up to the need. Even though the agency which we must go through in order to deal with this problem is a mess, we still have not faced up to the fact that we need more resources. We still only inspect a tiny percentage of the container cargo which comes into this country every day. We still inspect an infinitesimal percentage of cargo on passenger airplanes. Mr. Sabo has focused on that issue many times.…”