While funding the entire budget request for border security technology and related infrastructure, Senate appropriators are concerned that plans to procure a key system as part of a future sensor network may be too risky.
“If it applies nowhere else, the phrase ‘once burned, twice shy’ applies here,” the Senate Appropriations Committee says in its report accompanying its version of the FY ’13 Homeland Security Appropriations Bill. The report refers to Customs and Border Protection’s plans to buy the Integrated Fixed Tower (IFT) network of radar and camera-equipped surveillance towers that are expected to line portions of the nation’s southwest border with Mexico.
Last month, CBP issued a Request for Proposals for the IFT procurement and expects to award a contract in the first quarter of FY ’13, which is in the October to December 2012 timeframe. The report says that before the first deployment goes through operational testing, CBP plans to begin the next two deployments.
“Given the history of the border technology program under any name, the committee is skeptical that this plan is prudent,” the Senate report says. “In this era of increasingly scarce resources, it is more important than ever to ensure the system works as best as possible before investing further resources.”
The IFT program is similar to the earlier Secure Border Initiative Network (SBInet) that DHS terminated in early 2011 after it struggled through several years of a difficult integration and missed deadlines. SBInet was deployed along more than 50 miles of border in Arizona and despite the integration challenges the Border Patrol has said it is a valuable tool in helping to combat illegal border crossings from Mexico. Boeing [BA] supplied SBInet.
House appropriators in their FY ’13 budget report note that the IFT program is already behind schedule and warn that the technologies have not met CBP’s previous expectations (Defense Daily, May 18).
The Senate report praises CBP for a caveat the agency inserted into the IFT RFP that tells industry it will cancel the solicitation if no one bids a solution with enough performance at an affordable price.
While both the House and Senate propose funding the $327.1 million budget request for the Border Security Fencing, Infrastructure, and Technology (BSFIT) account, which includes IFT, both rescind millions of dollars in obligated funding from prior year budgets. The House proposes a $40.4 million rescission and the Senate $92 million.
The Senate report says $639 million is available for border technology from unobligated balances while the House puts the figure at $732.8 million within the BSFIT account. The Senate appropriators caution that while SBInet is “now working well and proving its capabilities,” the system was “poorly managed” and they are concerned about providing additional funding given that there is no way of knowing if previous deployment issues will be solved with the IFT installations.