as one of the as you know concerns expressed by members of this committee is the number of vacancies and if in fact as we wind down this administration if that issue is elevated it creates significant vulnerabilities for this country and so i'm asking it in the spirit of  to say to you on top of it and i hope it does not become a problem moving forward the national response plan that was due june first that is now people including many state and local responders to have their input into the next version of the national response plan we then sat down and tried to distill all that advice improvements we've already made but i think what it will do is simplify and clarify some of that we discovered over the last couple of years but you do recognize that it was due at the beginning  lessons we learned from watching some of the less appealing contract experiences of the past ten years is that we should not accept something from the contractor take responsibility for it  something with u s government money unless i'm satisfied it works in the real world and if it can't be made to work prepared to go and find something that will be made to work well to obviously be disappointed i believe the contractor understand what's at stake in getting  work properly and i think they put their a team in place to do it but my mandate to the head of the border patrol is i want to make sure the people who actually have to operate it are satisfied with the way it works and that's what we're going to do  we're going to start accepting about a month we should get it done well before the end of the year thank you very much but on that point i say that the day before june fifteenth rollout we  were we had a hearing here and we were told the next day it would be ready to go and the only thing i share with you is we are concerned as well not it will cost the taxpayers more money will not somehow this technology  is somehow not proven to be what it is if it's the contract it would have a virtual fence is absolutely important to our overall border security mission and i would impress upon you source no be a contractor committed staff has been trying to get a copy of that contract your testimony said that the department's going to be transparent  just being as transparent as we can in the department we need to call your attention to your to do list i'm sure james behind you has already made a copy of it and  courses they may wish to act the witness and accordance with our committee rules recognize members who were present at the start of the hearing based on seniority on the committee alternating between majority and minority secretary secretary is a new report out today from the inspector general of the department of homeland security it's on the department's oversight of passenger aircraft aagot and passenger toggled inspection on passenger planes let me just summarize with some of the quotes from this report it says this i'm quoting now that the current level of oversight does not provide a carriers are meeting congressionally mandated goals of tripling the amount of cargo screened passenger aircraft quote t s a information reported to the congress regarding air carrier compliance with legislative and regulatory requirements may be inaccurate quote t s a security programs are not clearly written t s a aviation security inspectors and air carriers to interpret and apply the regulations do so differently party such as air carriers or shippers are following the rules it calls into question t s a is ability to monitor and report air carrier compliance and screening regulations it says that aviation security inspectors who are supposed to be monitoring compliance with the current screening requirements are poorly trained and lacked the resources needed to do their important job so mr secretary this is under the existing is that the t s a intends not on physically inspecting all cargo which goes onto passenger planes one hundred percent of which is required under the law but instead kip hawley who runs t s a and that department under your leadership is now saying that they are going to do a modified version of what they're already doing that rather than having real screening bombs looking inside of cargo so what i want to know mr secretary is is your department going to follow this new law are you going to require one hundred percent screening of the contents of all cogdill going on to pass to planes or are we going to come back in another year and have another blistering scalding indictment of this double standard where all of our bags  in the non implementation preexisting law which wasn't as strong as and i'm very concerned that passengers in america thought that congress was tightening the laws so that every piece of cargo was physically  airlines to check the airplanes themselves to make sure we are going to put into effect a certification program that require shippers to check packages before they're palletized that we have the same standard of protection me to get on the plane without checking my bag that's correct a congressman should not be trusted in the passenger cabin of a plane but you shouldn't allow a ship or standing right behind me in line to not have checked because his  secretary as long as you check inside the box and right now you do not have a system that will check inside these boxes physically to make sure that there are no bombs and the public counts expectation will still be a firestorm that comes from this secretary i don't want to spend too much more time on this issue but as a chief republican co sponsor on this legislation we first checked carry on we didn't check the the luggage that went into the belly of the aircraft and then we moved to screening all luggage it is over three years to do a third a third of third and what we believe is that if we don't check the cargo it is a huge a huge flaw in the system so what i'm unclear about is if you have him paid people to inspect and they are paid by the government by the contractors to inspect but a disinterested party then i think you're doing this for the law if you're basically saying that the shippers have to check their own cargo then then i get a little concerned and i want to make sure if you're saying that we need to put it on the record but if you're saying something different then i'd like to hear that that's a great opportunity to make sure we're clear about this now obviously we haven't written the regulation yet and i'm quite confident as we write the regulation and we get is going to be a lot obligation clear standards for what they have to do in terms of checking that which they're going to ship themselves make sure that that is validated by inspection of their activities to make sure they are living up to what they're supposed to do  back to the known shipper another no it's not it's not it seems to me that mr mark raises a concern that i think will want to follow but i can just tell you the belief of those who voted for this bill is that we would have a my attention because we know what we are and i'm a little concerned that it sounds too much like known shipper but i'd like to ask you this question we knew during the cold war what our strategy was it was contain deal with what the nine eleven commission said and by the way i think it's a very inconvenient truth that we're having to confront islamist terrorists and others not just one global warming this is an inconvenient truth what is our strategy risk in terms of homegrown terrorism our ability detect and disrupt plots reduce the risk our ability and this is maybe a longer term issue to counteract radicalization and then it has to do address all elements of that some of them in my department some of them frankly are in department of defense or department of justice or of the intelligence community but all of them synchronized along that basic strategy let me just close by saying that i think and i appreciate your answer but i think part of it has to be detect prevent preempt and mutually assured me and maybe act even unilaterally if a small group of dedicated s can create an altered biological agent that can wipe out humanity as we know it even jimmy carter is not going to wait for permission to deal with that threat but i appreciate your response thank you thank you very