Vermont Victories In Homeland Security Budget Bill –

Senate OKs Leahy’s Amendment
To Delay Border-Crossing Requirements,
As Leahy Also Beats Back Bid
To Curb First Responder Grants To Smaller States

WASHINGTON (Thursday, July 13) – Vermont Thursday scored two significant policy wins engineered by Sen. Patrick Leahy as the U.S. Senate passed the annual homeland security budget bill.

In the home stretch to the bill’s Senate passage Thursday evening, Leahy successfully led the effort to beat back an attempt to weaken the funding formula he authored for first-responder grants – his all-state minimum formula that has brought more than $65 million to Vermont in the last four years.  The Leahy grant formula, which he included in the USA PATRIOT Act of 2001, assures that Vermont and other states receive basic grants for their first responder agencies – the police, fire and rescue departments that are responsible for homeland security and emergency preparedness.  The bid to weaken the Leahy formula lost in a vote of 34 to 66.

The bill also includes Leahy’s legislation to postpone and improve implementation of the controversial Pass Card system for border crossings, which will require new identity cards and methods for crossing U.S. borders, including the Northern Border with Canada.  Leahy and Sen. Ted Stevens (R-Alaska) earlier had added to the bill their amendment to delay implementation of the Pass Card system – part of the Western Hemisphere Travel Initiative (WHTI) -- for 17 months, until June 1, 2009, and to require the Secretary of Homeland Security and the Secretary of State to certify to Congress that several standards are met before the program moves forward. 

Leahy is a senior member of the Appropriations Committee and of its Homeland Security Subcommittee, which handled the Senate’s work in drafting the annual appropriations bill for the Department of Homeland Security.  The bill now goes to conference with the House version of the bill, which does not include Leahy’s WHTI amendment but which does also maintain the Leahy formula for first-responder grants.

Leahy says the lack of sufficient coordination on the Pass Card (or “Passport Card”) system between DHS and State, and between the Bush Administration and the Government of Canada, spells trouble for the system.  “This has been shaping up as a bureaucratic nightmare that could clog our borders while making us even less secure,” said Leahy.  “We need to prod these agencies to come to grips with these problems and fix them beforehand, not afterward.”

The certification requirements in Leahy’s WHTI amendment require the two departments to:

1.      Ensure that the technology for any Passport Card meets certain security standards – and that DHS and State agree on that technology.

2.      Share the technology with the governments of Canada and Mexico.

3.      Justify the fee set for the Passport Card.  

4.      Develop an alternative procedure for groups of children traveling across the border under adult supervision with parental consent.

5.   Install all necessary technological infrastructure at the ports of entry to process the cards and train U.S. agents at the border crossings in all aspects of the new technology.

6.      Make the Passport Card available for international land and sea travel between the United States and Canada, Mexico, or the Caribbean and Bermuda.

7.      Establish a unified implementation date for all sea and land borders. 

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