Port security requires more funds say top lawmakers
Security at U.S. ports depends on more funding, three ranking members of congressional committees on terrorism and security said Thursday.
Full funding of ports' requests to the government for security programs is critical to national security, U.S. Rep. Loretta Sanchez, D-Calif. told reporters during a news conference at the Port of Long Beach. Sanchez chairs the Subcommittee on Border, Maritime and Global Counter-Terrorism.
Long Beach and neighboring Port of Los Angeles comprise the nation's largest and the world-s fifth-largest port complex.
The Bush administration's 2008 budget provides $210 million for the Port Security Grant Program, about half the $400 million that supporters requested.
Sanchez, and Reps. Jim Langevin, D-R.I., and Dave Reichert, R-Wash., toured a terminal at the Long Beach port and saw how X-ray machines and radiation detectors are being used to scan cargo containers.
The lawmakers said their biggest concern was that a terrorist might sneak radioactive material inside a cargo container bound for a U.S. port.
Langevin pointed to what he saw as glaring security loopholes in the nation's port system.
'We need to move even more aggressively to make sure we have radiation detection equipment in place in all of our ports and all of our border crossings,” Langevin, who chairs the Subcommittee on Emerging Threats, Cybersecurity, and Science and Technology, told the Associated Press.
Twenty-two of the nation's biggest ports are expected to have radiation detection devices in use by the end of this year, and more than 90 percent of ports and border crossings should have them by the end of next year, Langevin said.
The lawmakers also said the U.S. government needed to quickly develop a method for identifying all port workers. The Transportation Worker Identification Card, which is under development, would apply to anyone entering the ports.
Sanchez said she hopes that by mid-2008, 'everybody related to a port' will have the card.
Port labor and business groups have expressed concern about current workers not being able to pass background checks required for the new card.
'We're working through those issues to ensure that it is not so strict that we don't have anybody coming to take the jobs that we have here,' Sanchez said.