DHS secretaries, past and present, make plea for funding

Past and present leaders of the Department of Homeland Security on Wednesday urged Congress to quickly broker an agreement to fully fund the DHS as the Senate moved closer to averting a partial shutdown.

{mosads}DHS Secretary Jeh Johnson and two former agency heads, Tom Ridge and Michael Chertoff, warned of concrete and dramatic consequences if a funding lapse is not avoided.

Johnson, as he has done for weeks, detailed the department’s security reach from counterterrorism to ports, airlines, cybersecurity and infrastructure and said a shutdown would put the nation in jeopardy.

Johnson said that he remains optimistic that Congress can reach a deal, but said he is planning for a possible lapse of funding at midnight Friday.

He also said that there are drawbacks to passing a continuing resolution, which would fund the department at last year’s levels.

Ridge, who was the agency’s first head after President George W. Bush, argued that “the breadth and the depth of the threat streams” in 2015 are “far greater and more complex” than that immediately following the Sept. 11 attacks that spurred the creation of the department.

Ridge said shutting down the department is the wrong way to address President Obama’s immigration executive order.

“This is not the way to right that wrong,” he said.

Ridge argued that there are other legislative ways to express dissatisfaction with the president’s actions, including sending the president immigration legislation.

“You have to engage it in the right form,” he said. “Send the president some measures to elevate the debate. But you don’t elevate the debate and you don’t send the message by refusing to compensate the men and women who go to work every single day in a uniform of public service when their mission is to keep us safer and more secure.”

Chertoff, who followed Ridge at the agency under Bush, said that while there are some deep concerns about the immigration order, “what I don’t think makes sense is to hold the entire set of operations of the Department of Homeland Security in abeyance as a hostage as the legislative branch starts to play game of chicken with the president.”

“At this particular moment, given what is going on in the world and even in this country in terms of the security challenges we face we cannot afford to be distracting the men and women on the front lines of our homeland security with concerns about whether they will get administrative support they need, the equipment they need and their salaries and their paychecks,” he added.

He said a shutdown would “cause a lot of pain and a lot of difficulty for American citizens as well as the hundreds of thousands of people who work for DHS.”

Just ahead of the press conference ,there was a glimmer of hope from the Senate.

Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid (Nev.) said his party will support the “clean” funding bill put forward by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.).