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American Morning

Preview of Today's Homeland Security Hearing

Aired July 11, 2002 - 09:31   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
PAULA ZAHN, CNN ANCHOR: Some top brass of the Bush administration will be on Capitol Hill a little bit later no this morning at a homeland security hearing. And Kate Snow now has a preview for us from Capitol Hill.

Good morning, Kate.

KATE SNOW, CNN ANCHOR: Good morning, Paula this is first time a special select committee formed in the House is going to meet, and they're going to have a very big audience today, very key people coming in to talk to them, in the aftermath of September 11th, of course. President Bush is asking the Congress to pass a plan to completely redo the way homeland security is handled by government agencies. He proposed a sweeping new department, a very large bureaucracy with the goal of protecting the homeland.

Now the chairman of this committee, Representative Dick Armey, and you see them waiting there for big four to arrive -- the chairman will say in opening statement that the president has asked no less of us that embark in the most significant transformation of government in half a century. Consolidating hundreds of agencies, services and teams is not a task taken lightly. He also points out that not often do you have the four most senior cabinet level officials showing up in one room as we expect them to come any minute now.

The four are, of course, Secretary of State Colin Powell who will be here this morning, Secretary of Treasury Paul O'Neill, who, by the way, put off a trip overseas to be here this morning, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, who is recovering from surgery on his thumb, apparently in pain this morning, but he was told by the White House he had to be here, too, and Attorney General John Ashcroft.

Paula, a big part of this is getting all four of them to sit at a table here to talk to the committee, and getting that picture of the four senior cabinet officials in front of this committee. The picture very important to the administration, because they want to show that they're very serious about this homeland security plan. But I can tell that you the real work on the plan itself, sort of the nitty- gritty details is being done right now in a lot of other committees here on Capitol Hill.

In fact, some 11 different committees this week are meeting to do what they call marking up of the bill, taking a section of the bill and changing it the way they see fit. They have made some rather significant changes at the committee level.

One of the big questions: what's in and what's out of the new Homeland Security Department? Yesterday, the Judiciary Committee in the House voted to just put part of INS in, the Immigration and Naturalization Service, not the whole thing, and that's not what the president wanted. He wanted the entire Immigration and Naturalization Service to be in this new department. The Secret Service, the Judiciary Committee, voted to move that not to the new Homeland Security Department, as the president wanted, but to move it somewhere else, over to the Justice Department.

And finally, the science committee, voted to create another undersecretary, a science and technology undersecretary. The president's plan, by the way, already had five undersecretaries, so that would be additional there. Some other questions you may here come up this morning, Paula, issues about cost of this new department. Some Democrats raise concerns about that. And Democrats raising concern about federal workers in this new department, will they have the same kind of rights that other federal workers in existing government agencies already have.

Paula, a lot of this is what you might call sausage making right now. A lot of this is at the very basic level of getting down to work and figuring out what this department is going to look like. We expect next week and the week after it will really get to this select committee that's meeting this morning; they will start taking the reigns on this. They may pass something that's a little bit different than what the president wanted originally -- Paula.

ZAHN: A lot of territory to cover there. Thanks so much for the preview, Kate.

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