Word: homelands
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...terrorist attack on a chemical facility could kill thousands of people and endanger up to a million, federal experts say, so in mid-2002, the White House assigned the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to secure the nation's chemical plants. The EPA and the fledgling White House Office of Homeland Security spent months developing a legislative package requiring the chemical industry to beef up security. In March 2003 a dozen senior Administration officials met in the Old Executive Office Building next door to the White House to put the finishing touches on what they considered a major initiative...
...that meeting, though, officials were surprised to see a new face--Philip Perry. As the top lawyer for the White House's Office of Management and Budget, Perry helped oversee Administration regulatory initiatives. According to Bob Bostock, then homeland-security adviser at the EPA, Perry, who hadn't attended any of the prior meetings, declared the proposal dead in a matter of minutes. "Perry said that any federal legislation to deal with this issue would be dead on arrival on the Hill," recalls Bostock, "and that the chemical industry was taking voluntary steps that were sufficient." Perry, who is married...
Today only about 1,100 of the nation's 15,000 biggest plants participate in the voluntary security program. Even Bush loyalists are worried about the vulnerability that remains. "Not all chemical sites are good partners," said Asa Hutchinson, a former top Homeland Security official, at a recent chemical-industry gathering. "Some of the top-tier sites will not let Homeland Security inside the fence...
...available and that even if it did exist, costs would be prohibitive. Senior officials at the DHS agreed, and that fall they persuaded House-Senate conferees to strip Markey's amendment from the appropriations bill. "The Bush Administration bends over backwards for industry while turning its back on needed homeland-security safeguards," Markey complains. "It's commerce over common sense." But Russ Knocke, a DHS spokesman, argues that such public-private partnerships maximize security without "shutting down the systems and industries we depend upon...
...standards for container locks and seals or for port-worker identification cards. The country has spent $18 billion on making airports more secure since Sept. 11, but it has invested only $630 million to safeguard the nation's ports, even though a study last year by the Department of Homeland Security and the Coast Guard found that almost 70 of the 361 U.S. ports are vulnerable to terrorism...