July 8, 2011
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Bioterrorism R&D Facing Some Serious InsecurityBy: Rob Margetta, CQ Staff Tara O’Toole, a physician and authority on bioterrorism who runs the Department of Homeland Security’s Science and Technology Directorate, is understandably perturbed that the House wants to deeply cut her budget. And she’s blunt about what that would mean. “The House cuts are basically the end of the S&T directorate,” she said. “We would essentially stop doing research and development.” O’Toole’s division was one of the few parts of Homeland Security built from scratch when the department was created in 2003. It was designed to emulate the Pentagon’s famed Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, albeit with a fraction of the budget. S&T’s mission is to identify ideas that can help with homeland security operations and foster their development into usable technology. In a young department with an evolving mission, that process hasn’t been quick, and the setbacks have been frequent, leading some lawmakers to question the directorate’s effectiveness. Now, a Congress desperate to save money has issued a proposal that Republicans say would overhaul the directorate and that Democrats say would effectively kill it. The Homeland Security appropriations bill the House passed in June would cut 42 percent of funding for S&T, leaving it with $398 million for research and development in fiscal 2012. O’Toole says such a reduction would be crushing. The directorate deems some university center and critical laboratory expenses mandatory, including funding for a biodefense center that studies weaponized pathogens, and an animal-disease facility considered the country’s first line of defense against viruses that can decimate livestock. After paying for those, S&T would be left with just over $100 million for its entire innovation portfolio — and a sizable chunk of that money would have to go toward shuttering the projects it currently funds, O’Toole said. However, Robert B. Aderholt, an Alabama Republican who chairs the House Homeland Security Appropriations Subcommittee, says there’s a good reason for the reductions in his proposed bill: The directorate hasn’t done enough with the research money it has received so far. “In short, S&T has not fully justified the billions of taxpayer dollars that it has spent on R&D,” Aderholt said. “I believe the spending reductions included in the House bill will force the directorate to concentrate its efforts on the highest-priority projects.” S&T has plenty of defenders in Congress, and the Senate’s Homeland Security appropriations bill almost certainly will include more money. Whatever the outcome of the funding battle, though, those who follow Homeland Security research say the House bill shows there is a fundamental disagreement between scientists and lawmakers about how well the directorate is functioning, and where research and development stands on the Homeland Security priority list. O’Toole has said repeatedly that she isn’t opposed to speeding up the process of turning research into tangible results — in fact, since her appointment in 2009, she’s made that a top priority, cutting off projects considered unlikely to yield benefits that could be used in the field. “We’re not interested in science projects for their own sake,” she said. A Turbulent History Building the directorate from the ground up in 2003, without a predecessor agency, made for a rough start, say officials and congressional overseers, and a beginning that involved plenty of mistakes. One factor that worked against S&T firmly establishing its role as central science coordinator was its relatively small budget. “S&T was grossly underfunded if its role was going to be like that of research and development at the Department of Defense or the Department of Energy,” says David Olive, a lobbyist at the firm Catalyst Partners who watches the directorate. Another drawback was office politics. A number of larger agencies with backgrounds in technology preferred to ignore the fledgling science directorate. Several agencies had their own high-tech divisions; O’Toole, though, says the divisions were actually technology acquisitions shops, without the engineering and science background that S&T brings. In its first years, Homeland Security experienced several failures stemming from its acquisitions offices. Among them were a program to deploy chemical detecting “puffers” to airports, another to build an electronic “virtual fence” along the Southwest border, and a third for the Coast Guard to replace its aging fleet, a project that wasted millions of dollars in its initial stages. Since then, the agencies are much more open to cooperation, O’Toole said, and her directorate wants to take advantage of the good will. To help prevent similar problems, S&T has focused on a congressional mandate to evaluate the department’s major purchases, such as radio systems and surveillance equipment. Acting Deputy Undersecretary Paul Benda says it serves as something akin to Best Buy’s “Geek Squad” for Homeland Security agencies, consulting with them on contracts and projects. It already has spotted at least one vendor making impossible promises, he said. Aderholt’s criticism of S&T also has roots in its formative years. Companies and consultants who work with the directorate say it lacked focus early on, that it seemed to pursue science with no real path to creating useful technology. But, they say, it turned a corner with the appointment of O’Toole’s predecessor, Rear Adm. Jay M. Cohen, who is credited with raising S&T’s profile and streamlining its commercialization process. O’Toole bristles at what she calls an outdated reputation. She ticks off a list of successful recent projects, including:
Although Republicans have taken the position that in a tough budget year Congress must focus on “core DHS functions” such as border security and disaster relief, O’Toole argues that the programs on the chopping block this year are vital to the department’s missions. S&T already has decided that if the reduction goes through, it would have to scrap seismic detectors for tunnels below the Southwest border, methods for finding improvised explosive devices, imaging systems to track natural disasters and research in dozens of other areas. “We do research and development that no one else is going to do,” she said. “The market isn’t going to pull biodefense research to the forefront. It’s not going to focus on detecting homemade bombs.” Private Sector Worries A significant part of S&T’s work involves coordinating with the private sector. The directorate maintains an open solicitation asking anyone in the commercial or academic world for ideas about high-priority technology projects. It regularly works as a technology manager, sponsoring projects with the goal of producing something that agencies such as the Coast Guard or TSA can later buy. That public-private relationship has at times been rocky — in the early years, particularly, companies said that S&T was unresponsive — but now, corporate executives shudder at the idea of the House budget cuts. Marc Pearl, CEO of the Homeland Security and Defense Business Council, says his trade group “has always been outspoken about some of the procedural issues they need to address. But our view has been about improving the process, not removing the directorate’s ability to do R&D.” The homeland security market is still small, particularly compared with the giants of defense contracting. O’Toole says that 40 percent of her research budget goes directly to colleges and universities and to companies working within that market. If government spending dries up, she says, about 1,400 jobs are on the line, many of them in cutting-edge technology. That possibility hasn’t gone unnoticed. “Given the large and disparate homeland security market and the challenges that poses to the private sector, S&T is absolutely necessary if we are going to get the most affordable, resilient products to our first-responders,” says Bradley C. Schreiber, a former Homeland Security adviser who is vice president of Washington operations for the not-for-profit Applied Science Foundation for Homeland Security. Back to Basics The directorate has a group of strident congressional defenders — mostly Democrats — who say they have no intention of letting the House cuts becoming a reality. Although the Senate Homeland Security Appropriations Subcommittee has yet to unveil its version of the bill, Chairwoman Mary L. Landrieu has cited the S&T language as one of her biggest problems with the House bill. “While I share the goal of producing a fiscally disciplined Homeland Security bill,” the Louisiana Democrat said, “we should not make shortsighted cuts that could jeopardize our security.” Other supporters of the research office include Rep. David E. Price of North Carolina, the senior Democrat on Aderholt’s subcommittee, and Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman, the Connecticut independent who chairs the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. They will be facing off against opponents convinced that S&T is not only failing to turn around timely results, but is also duplicating the work of other federal agencies. “The federal government spends billions of dollars each year on R&D and faces a responsibility to taxpayers to be certain that those funds are not wasted on programs that duplicate similar efforts being conducted elsewhere,” a committee report on his bill said. S&T supporters said the criticism is rooted in a misconception about how research works at different departments. A certain amount of duplication is inevitable, O’Toole says, but she meets four times a year with her Pentagon counterpart and monitors private-sector development to ensure that her directorate’s projects remain distinct. David Olive said the big players in research may be looking at common technologies, but that they’re seeking to apply them in very different ways. “I don’t think the members of Congress understand that there’s a very big difference between what the Defense Department does for research and development, and what DHS does,” he says. Aderholt’s opinion about S&T isn’t entirely negative; he noted that it “is engaged in many promising research areas and is maturing in its organizational and mission support efforts, such as in assisting DHS agencies in coordinating their research requirements and in the testing and evaluation of new technology.” But during a hearing before the release of his bill, Aderholt told O’Toole that her agency just doesn’t have much name recognition on Capitol Hill. “More than anything, Science and Technology has to sell itself as a good investment,” he said. Olive called that a telling point. The directorate needs to be more proactive about communicating its progress to Congress, possibly offering briefings by its project managers, he said. “Dr. O’Toole and the S&T folks have a good story to tell, but for some reason, they have been reluctant to tell it,” he said. It’s a weakness that O’Toole said she intends to remedy, although whether it will help in the coming appropriations debate is an open question. “I think S&T has not done a good job of branding itself for Congress,” she said. FOR FURTHER READING: Counterterrorism threats, CQ Weekly, p. 1250; House appropriations bill is HR 2017 (H Rept 112-91), p. 1118; Homeland Security Act (PL 107-296), 2002 Almanac, p. 7-3. Rob Margetta can be reached at rmargetta@cq.com |
