A failure by Congress to provide a Homeland Security appropriations bill in some form for the current fiscal year will hamper a range of operations and acquisitions including cyber security, support for first responders nationwide, and nuclear detection, officials representing different components of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) said on Thursday.
A lapse in DHS funding for FY ’15 would hurt cyber awareness operations though a loss of 140 staff at a national cyber threat watch center, the National Cybersecurity & Communications Integration Center, delays in awarding a contract to protect more federal agencies with the EINSTEIN cyber intrusion detection system, delay in a new contract for the Continuous Diagnostics and Mitigation program that would allow agencies to learn of critical vulnerabilities in their networks, and decrease the volume and timeliness of information shared within the government and with the private sector, Andy Ozment, assistant secretary for Cybersecurity and Communications at DHS, told the House Homeland Security Subcommittee on Cybersecurity, Infrastructure Protection, and Security Technologies.
William Noonan, the Secret Service agent in charge of the agency’s Cyber Operations Branch, told the panel that if funds for DHS run out it will slow down the execution of the cyber program and delay hiring. The Secret Service investigates cyber criminal activity.
DHS is currently operating under a continuing resolution that funds the department at FY ’14 levels across programs. The resolution expires Feb. 27. The House last month approved a nearly $40 billion appropriations bill for the department that also includes amendments that would block executive actions on immigration announced by President Obama in November.
The president has warned Congress that he will veto the spending bill if it contains the immigration riders. The Senate so far has failed to bring the bill up for consideration due to opposition by Democrats. Republicans in the House show no signs of budging on their version of the bill.
The last time DHS was shut down in October 2013, about 200,000 of its 231,000 employees were exempt although they worked for nearly several weeks without pay, William Painter, an analyst with the Congressional Research Service’s Government and Finance Division, told the panel. Still, the shutdown affected components differently, with about 95 percent of employees at the Science & Technology (S&T) branch and the Domestic Nuclear Detection Office (DNDO) furloughed, he said.
At the National Protection and Programs Directorate, which includes the NCCIC and other infrastructure protection operations, 43 percent of employees were furloughed, while just 8 percent of Secret Service employees were out of work, according to a chart in Painter’s prepared remarks.
“Most of the research and development activities funded by S&T and DNDO are performed by contractors,” Painter said in his prepared statement. “Even if its work was funded prior to the shutdown, a contractor might be prevented from continuing its work if it required access to a closed DHS facility or interaction with a furloughed DHS employee. If the shutdown persisted for an extended period, some contractors might suspend their work because of uncertainty or cash flow issues.”
If the continuing resolution is continued on an interim basis, as it is currently structured, an agency may face “several challenges in confronting a dynamic threat environment and developing new technologies,” Painter said. DHS Secretary Jeh Johnson has already warned that if the current resolution continues, new programs won’t be initiated and grants to state and local agencies will be at risk.
Joseph Martin, acting director of the First Responders Group within DHS S&T, said that a shutdown would disrupt support to first responders and could also cause small businesses and universities that support his agency’s research to lose confidence in working with the department.
Huban Gowadia, DNDO director, said that her agency would still be able to respond in support of law enforcement officials to alerts by radiation detection equipment, although the staff would be stretched thin. Acquisitions of new handheld radiation detection and identification equipment would be delayed, she said, noting that the systems are need to replace equipment that is no longer supported by vendors and is at the end of its life-cycle.
Even if a continuing resolution is extended for the rest of the fiscal year, there may still be hesitancy to commit resources given the budget uncertainty, Painter also said in his prepared remarks referring to the ability of an agency like S&T to shift some funding around.