House Passes Homeland Security Bill

Datamation content and product recommendations are editorially independent. We may make money when you click on links to our partners. Learn More.

The U.S. House of Representatives passed a new version of legislation Tuesday night that will create a cabinet-level Department of Homeland Security combining 22 federal agencies with an estimated budget of $37.4 billion, including $2.12 billion for IT.

The Senate is expected to pass the same legislation as early as next week and send the bill to President George W. Bush, who has called the legislation “the single most important business” before the lame duck Congress.

The new department will represent the largest reorganization of the federal government since 1947 when Congress combined a number of military agencies into the Department of Defense. The major agencies giving up their independent status and joining the Department of Homeland Defense include the Secret Service, the Coast Guard, the Customs Service, the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the Immigration and Nationalization Service.

A new provision in the compromise bill includes allowing the new Secretary of Homeland Defense to designate a lead research organization to help coordinate security research across the government, the academic community and the private sector.

Another new provision, adopted from the Senate version, establishes and funds a Homeland Security Advanced Research Projects Agency, similar to DoD’s DARPA, to help identify promising technologies.

The legislation also adds two new provisions that “encourage partnerships between government and the private sector to better protect civilian infrastructures such as telecommunications, transportation nodes and power grids.”

In addition, it establishes procedures to encourage private industry to share infrastructure vulnerabilities with the government to help identify and correct weaknesses and calls for a so-called NET Guard, volunteer teams to help local communities respond and recover from attacks on information systems and communications networks.

The combined 2002 IT budgets for the agencies being incorporated into the new department is $1.47 billion. That number is expected to jump to $2.12 billion in 2003. Overall, the Government Electronics and Information Technology Association (GEIA) is predicting total federal IT spending will be approximately $53 billion. According to GEIA, federal IT spending will reach approximately $67 billion by 2008.