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S. Hrg. 114–515 

ASSESSING THE STATE OF OUR NATION’S 

BIODEFENSE 

HEARING 

BEFORE THE

COMMITTEE ON 

HOMELAND SECURITY AND 

GOVERNMENTAL AFFAIRS 

UNITED STATES SENATE 

ONE HUNDRED FOURTEENTH CONGRESS 

FIRST SESSION 

OCTOBER 28, 2015 

Available via the World Wide Web: http://www.fdsys.gov/ 

Printed for the use of the 

Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs 

( 
(II) 

COMMITTEE ON HOMELAND SECURITY AND GOVERNMENTAL AFFAIRS 

RON JOHNSON, Wisconsin Chairman 

JOHN MCCAIN, Arizona 

ROB PORTMAN, Ohio 

RAND PAUL, Kentucky 

JAMES LANKFORD, Oklahoma 

MICHAEL B. ENZI, Wyoming 

KELLY AYOTTE, New Hampshire 

JONI ERNST, Iowa 

BEN SASSE, Nebraska 

THOMAS R. CARPER, Delaware 

CLAIRE MCCASKILL, Missouri 

JON TESTER, Montana 

TAMMY BALDWIN, Wisconsin 

HEIDI HEITKAMP, North Dakota 

CORY A. BOOKER, New Jersey 

GARY C. PETERS, Michigan 

KEITH B. ASHDOWN, Staff Director 

GABE SUDDUTH, Senior Professional Staff Member 

GABRIELLE A. BATKIN, Minority Staff Director 

JOHN P. KILVINGTON, Minority Deputy Staff Director 

ROBERT H. BRADLEY II, Minority Professional Staff Member 

LAURA W. KILBRIDE, Chief Clerk 

BENJAMIN C. GRAZDA, Hearing Clerk 
(III) 

C O N T E N T S 

Opening statements: Page 

Senator Johnson ............................................................................................... 1 

Senator Carper ................................................................................................. 2 

Senator Ernst .................................................................................................... 16 

Senator Heitkamp ............................................................................................ 19 

Prepared statements: 

Senator Johnson ............................................................................................... 31 

Senator Carper ................................................................................................. 33 

WITNESS 

WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 28, 2015 

Hon. Joseph I. Lieberman, Co-Chair, Blue Ribbon Study Panel on Biodefense . 4 

Hon. Thomas J. Ridge, Co-Chair, Blue Ribbon Study Panel on Biodefense ....... 7 

ALPHABETICAL LIST OF WITNESSES

Lieberman, Hon. Joseph I.: 

Testimony .......................................................................................................... 4 

Joint prepared statement ................................................................................. 35 

Ridge, Hon. Thomas J.: 

Testimony .......................................................................................................... 7 

Joint prepared statement ................................................................................. 35 

APPENDIX 

Biodefense Report .................................................................................................... 41 

Responses to post-hearing questions for the Record from Senator Lieberman 

and Governor Ridge ............................................................................................. 140 

(1) 

1The prepared statement of Senator Johnson appears in the Appendix on page 31. 

ASSESSING THE STATE OF OUR NATION’S 

BIODEFENSE 

WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 28, 2015 

U.S. SENATE, COMMITTEE ON HOMELAND SECURITY

AND GOVERNMENTAL AFFAIRS, Washington, DC. 

The Committee met, pursuant to notice, at 2:33 p.m., in room 

SD–342, Dirksen Senate Office Building, Hon. Ron Johnson, Chairman of the Committee, presiding. 

Present: Senators Johnson, Ayotte, Ernst, Carper, McCaskill, 

Heitkamp, Booker, and Peters. 

OPENING STATEMENT OF CHAIRMAN JOHNSON 

Chairman JOHNSON. This hearing will come to order. I think I 

can speak for everybody on the Committee here. It is just a real 

pleasure to welcome back Senator Lieberman, the former Chairman of this Committee, and former Secretary Tom Ridge, two patriots, two great Americans who continue to serve their country, 

particularly now on this particular subject, something that really 

should concern all of us: potential biological warfare, naturally occurring pathogens, those types of things, and what we need to do 

to defend our Nation against these threats. 

Senator Lieberman, I am not sure whether I mentioned this last 

time you were here, but working with our esteemed Ranking Member Senator Carper, when I took over the chairmanship, I did 

something that you normally do in business. You start out, first of 

all, on an area of agreement. But we developed a mission Statement for the Committee, and it is pretty simple: To enhance the 

economic and national security of America. It is something we all 

agreed on. It kind of helps direct the activities of the Committee. 

And let us face it, if we are facing a biological threat, that would 

threaten both our national security and our economic security. And 

I truly appreciate the time you have put into this commission, this 

effort, to the report that I believe you released this morning and 

you are testifying about today, because this is a very serious issue. 

And rather than listen to me yammer on, I am going to ask that 

my opening statement be entered for the record.1 I just really want 

to spend more time listening to what you have found and what 

your recommendations really are. 

With that, I will turn it over to Senator Carper. 
2 

OPENING STATEMENT OF SENATOR CARPER 

Senator CARPER. Thanks, Mr. Chairman. 

I was telling the Chairman, as you all walked in to take your 

seats, that sitting down before us are two of my all-time favorite 

people. Tom Ridge and I were elected to the House of Representatives—we are both Vietnam veterans. We were elected to the 

House in 1982, same freshman class, and served together there 

for—I was there for 10 years, he was there for 12—and then went 

on to become Governors. When Joe Lieberman was running for 

President, he was good enough to let me be his general campaign 

manager for President in the Delaware primary, and it was this 

high watermark. And he finished second there, seven votes ahead 

of John Edwards. Hotly contested. 

Senator LIEBERMAN. Seven historic votes. [Laughter.] 

Senator CARPER. Yes, they were. And when Tom Ridge was running for Governor, I told everybody from Pennsylvania that I met 

in Delaware, I said, ‘‘Do you know Tom Ridge is running for Governor up there?’’ And they said, ‘‘Yes, I have heard that name.’’ 

And I told everybody what a great guy you were. And you turned 

out to be a great Governor. 

Joe was good enough to encourage me as a freshman Senator, 

when I was considering Committee assignments, to consider this 

one, and he said, ‘‘Who knows? You might even end up as the 

Chairman someday.’’ And sure enough, I do not think as good as 

the ones who preceded me, but it was a joy serving with both of 

you in those capacities, and it is great to have you before us today. 

We thank you really for your extraordinary service in years gone 

by and your continued service, as the Chairman says, to our country. 

In recent years, public officials and academic experts alike have 

sounded the alarm about our ability to deal effectively with biological threats. We think about it a lot in Delaware. As Senator 

Lieberman knows, we think a lot about avian influenza, and he 

knows all about chickens in Delaware. But since 2000, several commissions, including the 9/11 Commission, have affirmed the danger 

that the release of a biological agent can pose to all of us. In doing 

so, they have urged us to devote more attention and resources to 

detecting, preventing, and responding to such an incident. 

Our experience with Ebola over the last year in East Africa 

serves as a fresh reminder that biological threats are real. Over 

11,000 people worldwide lost their lives in that Ebola outbreak, 

and a number of Americans were infected with that disease. The 

spread of this disease, as well as the public alarm over that epidemic, demonstrate the importance of having the appropriate policies, public engagement plans, and resources in place ahead of 

time. 

It is important to remember, too, that biological threats do not 

just have an adverse effect on our health and our homeland security. As the Chairman has said, they can also dramatically impact 

and adversely impact our economy. As some of us will recall, just 

a couple of months ago, parts of our country, including parts that 

we are privileged to represent, struggled with an outbreak of highly pathogenic avian flu from wild birds going on the flyways and 

leaving behind their droppings and creating great havoc, great loss. 
3 

Though harmless to people so far, the virus devastated some 

parts of the poultry industry, not just chickens, broilers, but turkey, egg-laying hens, and the impact on businesses that we heard 

about right here in testimony that was offered in some cases very 

great. 

Further complicating matters, there have also been a number of 

troubling incidents over the past year at Federal and nongovernmental labs where research of infectious diseases is done. 

The reports of deadly pathogens being mishandled or misplaced 

is concerning to all of us and underscores the need for more rigorous oversight both here and in the administration. 

And in the midst of these developments, a number of very smart 

people came together and began examining how the Federal Government, our Federal Government, in conjunction with State, local, 

and nongovernmental entities, was doing at preventing and combating potential biological hazards. 

Since last year, the Blue Ribbon Study Panel on Biodefense—led 

by our two very able friends here—has convened a number of public meetings, and consulted with a whole lot of experts. And their 

goal was simple, actually: offer recommendations on how to improve our efforts and address capability gaps that had previously 

been overlooked. 

That review, released earlier this morning, I believe, contains a 

number of valuable recommendations that could significantly improve our biosecurity efforts. We sure hope so. And I urge our administration and I urge all of us in the Congress to give these recommendations the attention they deserve and then take action. 

I remember when you were our Chairman, you and Susan were 

leading this Committee, we had the 9/11 Commission come before 

us. They had all their recommendations, which I think they adopted unanimously, and shared them with us, and my recollection is 

we ended up approving, I do not know, 80, 90 percent of all of 

them, and also unanimously. But the idea was not just to sit on 

them but do something with them. 

I look forward to discussing the Panel’s findings today. I am confident that our witnesses can help Congress identify any number 

of common-sense improvements to our Nation’s biodefense systems 

that could be enacted with bipartisan support. 

Again, our thanks to Senator Lieberman and thanks to Governor 

Ridge for being here today to discuss their work and that of the 

team they led. I look forward to a productive hearing and knowing 

that the two of you are going to enjoy this as well as we will. And 

to paraphrase one of our former commanders-in-chief, ‘‘Bring it 

on! ′′ 

Chairman JOHNSON. Thank you, Senator Carper. 

Well, as Senator Lieberman well knows, it is the tradition of this 

Committee to swear in witnesses, so if you will both rise and raise 

your right hand. Do you swear that the testimony you will give before this Committee will be the truth, the whole truth, and nothing 

but the truth, so help you, God? 

Senator LIEBERMAN. I do. 

Governor Ridge. I do. 

Chairman JOHNSON. Please be seated. 
4 

1The joint prepared statement of Senator Lieberman appears in the Appendix on page 35. 

TESTIMONY OF THE HONORABLE JOSEPH I. LIEBERMAN,1 COCHAIR, BLUE RIBBON STUDY PANEL ON BIODEFENSE 

Senator LIEBERMAN. Thanks very much, Mr. Chairman and Senator Carper. It is really great to be back here. Thank you for your 

warm personal and supportive introductions. And it is great to see 

other Members of the Committee. I spent a lot of years in this 

room, and I look back with a real sense of appreciation that I had 

the opportunity to do so. This was really a center of bipartisan activity when it was not happening in a lot of other places. I am just 

impressed and appreciative that you have continued the tradition 

of mixed seating here. It was a small step for mankind but a large 

step for Congress. [Laughter.] 

I probably have used that before, but, anyway, this Committee 

has a history of obviously, leadership on homeland security but also 

interest in the biological threat and in improving our biodefense. 

And for that reason, and, of course, my own personal history here, 

I am really grateful that this Senate Committee is the first to hold 

a hearing on our report, and I appreciate the interest very much. 

And, frankly, I hope as this goes on that the Committee will decide 

to be champions and advocates for some of the things we recommend as you determine your support. 

This commission came together, our Panel came together about 

a year ago. It was a small group of people, but greatly supported 

by the two ladies behind us, Dr. Asha George and Dr. Ellen Carlin, 

who led our staff. The committee was composed of Secretary Ridge 

and me, although I know he likes to be called ‘‘Governor Ridge,’’ 

prefers that, as all former Governors—— 

Senator CARPER. My staff had written it down ‘‘Secretary’’ and 

I crossed that out. 

Senator LIEBERMAN. I understand. You are forgiven. So great to 

work with Tom Ridge. You could not ask for a more constructive, 

more well-intentioned person to work with. 

The Panel was really bipartisan: Former Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Donna Shalala, former 

Congressman Jim Greenwood; former Senate Majority Leader Tom 

Daschle, of course, who was himself a target in the anthrax attacks 

in 2001; and former Homeland Security Advisor during the Bush 

Administration, Ken Wainstein. 

I am going to just talk for a bit and keep an eye on the clock 

so I do not go too long, first to say the title of the hearing is ‘‘Assessing the State of Our Nation’s Biodefense,’’ and I would say that 

the bottom-line conclusion of this report is that we are better defended than we were in 2001 after the anthrax attacks, but really 

the State of our biodefense is inadequate, and we are unprepared 

for the very real biological threats we face, both from terrorists and 

from naturally emerging contagious diseases. The reality is that we are spending about $6 billion a year on 

biodefense, and, interestingly, that is not a number that you can 

find easily in the Federal budget. We had to go to a group at the 

University of Pittsburgh who did some analysis on it because there 

is no unified budget for biodefense. And we concluded that we are 

not getting our money’s worth, and this particular area of home-
5 

land security really needs another look, a review, which we started 

and obviously we hope Congress will continue. 

Is the threat real from infectious disease, an intentional bioterror 

attack? We would say clearly yes. Naturally occurring biothreats 

such as Ebola or avian flu, as was described, are bypassing borders 

to emerge on our shores, and they will continue to do so. 

Terrorist groups like the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant 

(ISIL) are devastating the Middle East, setting new horrific standards for inhumanity and brutality, and have specifically endorsed— 

ISIL has specifically endorsed—the use of biological weapons and 

threatened to use them against the American homeland. So this is 

a real threat. 

Are we ready for it? I will go back to the two things that I mentioned briefly. Let us talk about Ebola. The response to Ebola, in 

my opinion and most people’s, was unacceptable. Ebola had been 

deemed a material threat, designated so by the Department of 

Homeland Security (DHS), for nearly a decade before last year’s 

outbreak, which killed I think more than 6,000 people in Africa. 

But we did not have a single rapid diagnostic vaccine or treatment 

available. 

The response to Ebola, as you will remember, by our government 

was uncoordinated, to put it mildly, and I found at least with people I was talking to that a panic was emerging. The public was terrified about Ebola coming here. Even with 10 months of warning, 

while the Ebola virus spread overseas, Federal agencies did not actually provide hospitals in the United States with the basic guidance they would need to manage an Ebola case. 

It is quite possible—we do not know—that the next outbreak of 

Ebola or something like it will not give us 10 months’ warning, and 

the danger is, of course, it will be much more communicable. 

The second is avian flu. Senator Carper talked about it, so I will 

just touch on it briefly. But the reality is that almost 50 million 

birds, poultry, were euthanized, culled, as a result of the avian flu 

outbreak. And we were lucky that it did not cross over to the 

human population. We have no guarantee that it might not the 

next time we are hit with avian flu. But as you said, and it is important to note, the economic consequences of that outbreak were 

severe. I saw one estimate that said we actually spent almost $1 

billion of taxpayer money to respond to it, but also the direct impact on the poultry industry, and even on consumer prices, of 

course, as a result of what happened. 

The experts that we heard from on our Panel said that they 

would expect—not all of them, but some that came to us—said that 

they would expect as early as the coming year, wild migratory 

birds will bring back another wave of avian flu. Nobody can say for 

sure whether that will be the same variety. The Department of Agriculture (USDA) has a vaccine that they are weighing putting out, 

but we do not know whether the next version of avian flu might 

not only mutate but actually cross over to the human population 

with those consequences. 

And so we are not ready, and our aim was to try to make recommendations to suggest how we could be more ready. This report—and I give the staff a lot of credit for this—is really substantive. In other words, I distinguish it. It is not wonkish. It is 
6 

quite practical. It is very detailed. And I think all of us learned a 

lot in this process. There are 33 categories of recommendations. 

There are about 100 action items, and I think each of them deserves to be considered. I will just give you one example, and then 

I will make a final point. 

One of the things that I learned in my work on this Committee 

which I had not really appreciated enough was the interconnection 

between human and animal pathogens, and of the number of the 

various biological threats listed by the Department of Homeland 

Security, there is only one, as I recall, smallpox, that does not 

begin in an animal population. The same is true of infectious diseases. And yet we separate these two. We do not think about them 

together as one. And to me and I think members of the Panel, one 

of the most stunning oversights or omissions here is that there is 

no national registry or list of contemporary presence or outbreak 

of animal diseases so that they can be tracked. There is a list by 

which we aim to track human diseases to see if there is an infectious disease pandemic taking place, but as I said, these more often 

than not start with animal diseases. 

So one of our recommendations—it happens to be number 7—is 

to create such a list and implement a system by which it can be 

conveyed on a real-time basis to relevant public and private authorities. 

The final point I wanted to make is that the first recommendation may be critical to any hope to see anything happen on all the 

other recommendations because in this area, as in so many areas 

of government, nobody is driving this bus. Nobody is leading the 

effort, coordinating the effort. And as a result, there is a tremendous amount of overlap. As I say, we do not even actually know in 

the Federal Government how much we are spending every year on 

biodefense. We need a coordinator, a leader. 

We started to think about who should do this. I mean, there is 

an Assistant Secretary at HHS that has wide-ranging responsibilities. Should we put that person in charge? But as we went on to 

make a long story short, we thought what if you take one department person and put them in charge of everybody else, including 

departments that are equal, at least in size, that it is probably not 

going to work. And then we thought, well, maybe we will create a 

new Assistant National Security Adviser or, God forbid, another 

czar, and everybody said no, that will not do it. And we ended up 

where we did not start, which is to recommend, surprisingly, that 

we should give this responsibility to the Vice President of the 

United States because that office has such stature and make sure 

that—and this would have to be done by the President—the Vice 

President have authority to create a Biodefense Council, a Biodefense Strategy, and be in charge of a unified biodefense budget. 

So the reason I come back and say that may be the primary recommendation, it is not in that sense the most important—there are 

a lot of detailed recommendations—because we fear that if there is 

not somebody driving the bus, even if some of the other recommendations are adopted, their implementation is going to be 

haphazard and our biosecurity will suffer. 

I will end with what I said at the beginning. I hope that some 

of you on the Committee and the Committee itself will think about 
7 

1The joint prepared statement of Governor Ridge appears in the Appendix on page 35. 

taking whatever parts of this report seem sensible and necessary 

to you and become leaders in the Senate and Congress and seeing 

it through to implementation. 

Thanks very much for having us here. 

Chairman JOHNSON. Thank you, Senator Lieberman. By the way, 

if you check the record, I was actually going to introduce you, but 

I guess we did it anyway. 

Senator LIEBERMAN. Oh, I am sorry. OK. 

Chairman JOHNSON. Not a problem. 

Senator LIEBERMAN. Once I was sworn in, I was ready to go. 

Chairman JOHNSON. By the way, the other tradition I think that 

we have in addition to kind of mixing up here on the panel is I 

really do think we have maintained the tradition that certainly I 

saw as you being a Chairman of really trying to find those areas 

of agreement, try and concentrate on those things that unify us 

rather than exploit the differences. And, again, I think you and 

Susan Collins did a great job setting that example, as did Chairman Carper and Ranking Member Tom Coburn. So we have tried 

to maintain that as much as possible. 

Senator LIEBERMAN. I know you have, and I thank you for that, 

Senator. 

Chairman JOHNSON. Our next witness is Governor Tom Ridge, 

who also served as Co-Chair of the Blue Ribbon Study Panel on 

Biodefense. He is currently CEO of Ridge Global, an international 

security risk management advisory firm, among other private sector roles. Before 9/11, he served as the Governor of Pennsylvania 

for 6 years. After 9/11, he was appointed the First Assistant to the 

President for Homeland Security and in 2003 the first Secretary of 

Homeland Security. Governor Ridge. 

TESTIMONY OF THE HONORABLE THOMAS J. RIDGE,1 COCHAIR, BLUE RIBBON STUDY PANEL ON BIODEFENSE 

Governor RIDGE. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, Senator Carper, ladies and gentlemen. First of all, I want to thank you for the invitation to participate in today’s hearing. I was thinking about those 

kind comments you made about Senator Lieberman and Senator 

Collins, and I would just put an exclamation point behind them, because I had many appearances on the Hill through multiple committees, given the fact there are 108 committees and subcommittees that the Secretary of Homeland Security has to report to. And 

I must tell you that the bipartisan nature of this Committee and 

the very constructive way that both R’s and D’s looked to provide 

challenges, of course, but counsel to the Department it is embedded 

in my mind as the way government and politics ought to intersect, 

so I want to thank you for maintaining that. And it is great to be 

with Senator Lieberman. I have great admiration for his record of 

service, and when we talk with our colleagues and you take a look 

at the four men and women who constituted this Panel and take 

a look at the ex officio members and then take a look at the capable staff directed by the two extraordinary professionals seated behind us, we said we did not need one more report, because since 

2001 there have been four different studies and commissions that 
8 

have dealt, in part or in whole, with weapons of mass destruction 

(WMD) and bioweapons and problems. And yet in spite of these 

well-intentioned efforts and some thoughtfulness approaching this 

issue, not much has changed during the past 14 years. And we all 

agreed that we are not only going to complete a report, but we are 

going to make some very specific recommendations and then go beyond recommendations, even include action items to implement 

those recommendations. So I am not going to spend a great deal 

of time reviewing them. I do encourage everyone, however, it is 

about as thoughtful, as probative, and as important a report on the 

nature of the biothreat that I think this Congress has ever seen. 

And we are looking for champions. We are looking for bipartisan 

champions. It is a national problem. It requires a solution set that 

is bipartisan in nature. 

By the way, I understand that you passed the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act (CISA) today. Is that right? Senator, did you 

tell me that? That is something I have been working on for 4 years 

as well. So from the cyber side, I want to thank you for the bipartisan support. Things get done here, and they are even more effective when they are bipartisan, and that is what we are looking for, 

bipartisan champions here. 

So let me make a few observations and then we will open it up 

to questions, if you would like. 

The recommendations contained in this report go far beyond 

Homeland Security Presidential Directive No. 10, which is the cornerstone, which is really the foundation around which we built our 

report, but there is so much more to it than that. Together, our recommendations address the broad spectrum of biodefense activities: 

prevention, deterrence, preparedness, detection, response, attribution, recovery, and mitigation. It is a wide range of issues that need 

simultaneous attention. They are not really one-off. One thing you 

will see in this report is many of the recommendations and the action items are interconnected because it is about building an architecture, a system of oversight and integration not only of Federal 

capabilities but State and local, academic, private sector, and the 

like to deal with the threat. 

One of the reasons we all joined this Panel was we felt very 

strongly that this threat has not been given attention. It has not 

been part of the national conversation with regard to threats to 

America’s national security and to our economic prosperity, and we 

all know that whether the pathogen is thrown at us by a terrorist 

or a nation State. By the way, the global community, including 

Iran, North Korea, Syria, Russia, and China, maintain dual capacities, both offensive and defensive weapons, and as the Senator 

pointed out, it is pretty clear that terrorists have not only talked 

about it, but they have access to computers. We better start worrying about them hacking into intellectual property and developing 

the capabilities to genetically modify some of the stuff that is out 

there, and then Mother Nature. We know from the Ebola crisis 

Mother Nature is always lurking around the corner, and what really frustrated many of us was when I—and particularly yours truly. 

I will speak just for myself. When I became Secretary. When I was 

the Assistant to the President in the White House within the first 
9 

couple weeks, I got a long list of pathogens that everybody was 

worried about. This is 2001. One of those was Ebola. 

Now, one would have thought if somebody in the Federal Government considered Ebola to be a potential problem, then by 2014 or 

2015, we would have had an antidote and a vaccine ready for it, 

because as we all know, pathogens neither know politics nor 

boundaries. And given the geopolitical nature and given the forces 

of globalization, what happens over there now happens here. 

So it was a part of the scenario, and everybody did the best they 

could in response to that. But one would have thought, given its 

identification over a decade previously, we would have been better 

prepared to deal with it, because it then was a high priority. 

So that is what we tried to do. We address in our recommendations programs and policies, and we set them out short term, midterm, long term. We want to make perfectly clear, at least according to this Panel—and we talked to a lot of experts, had hearings 

outside of Washington. We want to make it perfectly clear who 

should execute each item. We like the notion of responsibility and 

then accountability. We like that. Exactly what they should do, we 

make very specific recommendations, action items, and the timeframe we think it needs to be done. This is actionable information, 

and we think it is pretty important that many of these initiatives 

be undertaken simultaneously rather than one-off. 

I would like to share with you a couple thoughts about the central piece of this, and then we will get into the question-and-answer period. 

We strongly recommend and strongly believe that the only person in the national government, in the Federal Government that 

has the capacity and, frankly, the political and financial muscle to 

move and build an integrated architecture to deal with the biothreat is the Vice President of the United States. We know there 

have been czars in the past. Often government responds after the 

incident. Remember, we are talking about prevention and intelligence and readiness and all those things. So the czar has been 

there. I will speak from my own experience as Assistant to the 

President. The office next to the President, I used the Roosevelt 

Room, but Assistants to the President still cannot move money 

around. You can make recommendations, but you do not, frankly, 

have as much clout on the Hill. You know this. I am preaching to 

the choir. And then all of a sudden you become a Secretary, and 

then you find out—and this is not a criticism, but there is still a 

lot of turf in this town, has been, always will be. That is how we 

operate. I understand that completely. So whether you are a czar 

or an Assistant to the President, certainly an Assistant Secretary 

of HHS for Preparedness and Response does not have the cachet, 

even individual Secretaries. And this challenge, we felt, since it 

cuts across multiple agencies and is of the highest importance, we 

think we need to elevate our attention and rebuild that architecture. The President is pretty busy, and the Vice President certainly 

will have their share of responsibilities. But there was one person 

we thought could cut through it. 

So in addition to the recommendations that we have here, we 

need to explain to you why we thought the Vice President should 

be in charge. That is one. It is cross-cutting. I believe Secretaries 
10 

will pay attention to the Vice President because that office, that individual is speaking for the President. 

We also think that that is the place—and we are going to ask 

Congress in the future to appropriate money for the Biodefense Coordination Council that will be in the Vice President’s Office, and 

this is going to be an integrated set of capable people, government 

and nongovernment, public, private, and academic research institutions. We do not have a national strategy, ladies and gentlemen. 

This is a real threat. We cannot get ahead of this threat because 

it already exists. So let us accept the reality it exists. And we have 

to do everything we can to reduce our risk of not only exposure but 

also to be a lot better prepared because we know we cannot develop 

a fail-safe system in order to immunize ourselves permanently. So 

we have to do that. 

So we need a national strategy. Who better to oversee that than 

the Vice President with the right group of people around him? 

We need a unified budget. I can speak, as I tried to do as the 

Secretary—I know I wanted what the Department needed, and everybody else. And we had some cross-cutting jurisdictions, and another Secretary wanted to do what he or she wanted. But at the 

end of the day, we need somebody in the White House working 

with the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) to make sure 

that the unified budget reflects not the Cabinet department or the 

agency or the institution’s preferences, but what is in the best interest in supporting an overall biodefense architecture and plan. So 

you need the strategy. You need the unified budget. And then obviously we give you recommendations with regard to how we think 

the action items, frankly, would follow on these recommendations 

in order to build out that architecture. 

And why do we do all that? Because if you take a look in the 

back of this, there are 25 pieces of legislation, Executive Orders 

(EO)—25 pieces of legislation or Executive Orders or treaties that 

deal with biodefense. You probably cannot name them all. We could 

not either, thank you, but our staff pointed them out. There are 50 

political appointees in the Federal Government all having some responsibility of biodefense. 

Look at Appendix A, and this is something near and dear to my 

heart. There are four pages of congressional committees and subcommittees that have disparate jurisdictions over bits and pieces. 

So we are basically saying that, in addition to the really substantive recommendations we made, there are three of them—the 

first two will drive what we think will create a sense of urgency. 

We do not want to be reckless about it. A lot of these things are 

going to take account years to embed into our architecture. But it 

is serious enough, the Vice President ought to oversee it. The Cabinet Secretaries pay attention to the Vice President and the President of the United States. And we can move this along to where 

we do not create a fail-safe system, but we create a far better system than exists today. I think the American public—and I am not 

going to speak for the American public, but I just know in my conversations with a lot of people, Ebola concerned a few. Then you 

explain to them how responsibility—there is nobody responsible ultimately. There is no ultimate accountability in the system for biodefense. And so we give that responsibility and accountability to 
11 

the Vice President, and we are quite confident that that individual 

with bipartisan support in the House and the Senate can get these 

things done. 

So we are grateful for the opportunity to share these thoughts 

with you, and hopefully we have convinced you enough in this 

Committee that has broad jurisdiction that we will find a couple 

champions in here to help us with these short-, medium-, and longterm recommendations and see that they become part of the biodefense architecture we have in this country. And we thank you 

very much. 

Chairman JOHNSON. Thank you, Governor. 

It seems you are both recommending the Vice President. It just 

begs the question. Have either of you or have both of you spoken 

with Vice President Biden, by any chance, to just get his thoughts 

and input in terms of having a Vice President, whether it is him 

or his successor? Again, did you speak with him? 

Senator LIEBERMAN. Not yet. I notified Steve Ricchetti, who is 

his chief of staff, that the report would make this recommendation, 

and we sent a copy over yesterday afternoon so they would have 

some advance notice on it. So I have no idea—— 

Chairman JOHNSON. So no reaction out of that? 

Senator LIEBERMAN. No. 

Chairman JOHNSON. Can you just talk about exactly how you 

think this unified budget would work? Would you recommend taking out the funding from the different agencies, the different departments, unify it in, for example, the budget of the Executive Office, allocate it to the Vice President, and then he would reallocate 

it back to those different departments and agencies? I mean, how 

would you see that working? 

Senator LIEBERMAN. So I am going to give a legislator’s response 

and then yield to the former Cabinet member. The truth is we did 

not dig down on that. Your expression of, your implementation of, 

our idea makes sense. That is one way to do it. I mean, the main 

point, the main thing is to have somebody who knows really the 

totality of what is being spent on this important area of biodefense 

and then can make judgments about what is working and what is 

not and move money around within the budget, or I suppose if the 

Vice President thinks so, ask for more money. 

But we think that what we are recommending can be done pretty 

much within the existing dollars, as we see them. Governor. 

Governor RIDGE. I think it is a wonderful question. I am particularly interested in promoting the Vice President because of my experience with Vice President Cheney. We do not have a Nuclear 

Detection Office unless he got involved in the conversation in the 

White House and he advocated on the Hill some of the initiatives 

around biodefense, BioShield and the like. His staff was critically 

important in design and affecting. So I really think with the appropriate support, it is an office that can really make a huge difference. 

I guess in the world understanding and appreciating the process, 

a Cabinet—first of all, the Cabinet members, they project a budget 

based on what they view to be the institutional needs and what 

they want to do. I got that. I did it. Cabinet Secretaries do that. 
12 

But then I see the Vice President taking a look at the line items 

from HHS and Agriculture and DHS and the Department of Defense (DOD) and the rest of them, mapping what they want as opposed to the national strategy and see how those requests for dollars line up with the national strategy. And I suspect there will be 

some inconsistencies, and so I would like to see the inconsistencies 

resolved in the President’s budget that he submits to Congress. 

There will be turf battles and financial battles, but you do not get 

things done in this town unless you control the purse strings. I just 

think having somebody who works so closely with the President 

and OMB, I think he could probably shuffle some money around in 

a way that may annoy or aggravate a Secretary or two or an agency or two, but, again, it is not about them. It is about the broader 

mission of building an architecture and a response capability to bio. 

So I think it would work very well. You do not have to go outside 

the existing budget process. I think you let the Secretaries do what 

they do, and then you let the Vice President realign, consistent 

with that overall national strategy, which is probably going to take 

another year or two to develop, I understand that. But I think it 

is appropriately placed within that office. 

Chairman JOHNSON. I am sure Senator Lieberman, when he was 

Chairman of this Committee, valued the GAO as much as we do. 

And certainly we have seen study after study of duplicated programs in the Federal Government, so your recommendation, again, 

as I was reading my embargoed copy, that does seem to be the 

strongest recommendation about that unified organization, that 

unified leadership. And from my standpoint, I think you make a 

strong argument. If anything, it would save you money because you 

eliminate a lot of that duplicated effort, so you have more money 

to actually effectively utilize to fight the threats. 

One thing I was mindful of as I was going through that my embargoed copy was the number of hearings you were suggesting, and 

I just did my own little mental calculation. I think it was 11 out 

of 15. It suggested that the Homeland Security and Governmental 

Affairs Committee hold those hearings. With that Vice President in 

charge, what department do you think would be pretty much the 

go-to department? I mean, I realize there is a lot of authority 

spread all over the place, but just based on kind of the hearing 

schedule, it seems like the Department of Homeland Security 

would be pretty key, although in your testimony you were talking 

about HHS. Can you give me some sort of sense in terms of, even 

within a department, where an awful lot of your recommendations 

are going to reside? 

Governor RIDGE. Well, I do not think we can possibly—a lot of 

it has to do with what they decide is the national strategy. I think 

there are three or four that could have a dominant position to play. 

Our warfighters keep looking at this. They want to be able to detect on the battlefield and respond and recover. Because of our concern and connection with the zoonotic transfer from animals, Ag 

has to have a significant role in here, and DHS. So I am not necessarily sure there has to be an epicenter of one department. I do 

think, however, there has to be more than rhetorical coordination. 

There actually has to be real coordination, which means that the 

programs really should not be redundant, but they ought to be ac-
13 

tually integrated. And so I am not prepared to say that one department or another, because I think you could see three or four critical 

departments. And, again, that leads us back to the Vice President. 

Chairman JOHNSON. You have to have that top—— 

Governor Ridge. So, I mean, listen, I know all about turf fights 

within the executive branch. It happens all the time. 

Senator LIEBERMAN. So, to a certain extent, probably the wrong 

way to describe it, we backed into the recommendation that the 

Vice President be the leader of this effort, because every 

time—even the natural department, if you were going to choose a 

department to lead it, would be the Department of Homeland Security, because this biodefense is an element of homeland security. 

But then Homeland Security has to start saying to somebody at 

HHS or the Department of Agriculture, ‘‘This program of yours is 

not working. There is too much money in it. We have to pull money 

out and put it into BioWatch in the DHS.’’ That puts DHS in a 

hard position and why we thought it had to be elevated, as Governor Ridge said, to the Vice Presidency. 

Chairman JOHNSON. OK. Just real quick, with the few seconds 

I have remaining, you mentioned Ebola. Did your Panel take a look 

at how far we have progressed in terms of a potential vaccine? I 

have asked this of others as well. But what is your input on that, 

the progress made? 

Senator LIEBERMAN. Well, we understand that there is a vaccine 

coming along, but I am actually thinking more about-—yes, OK. So 

the vaccine is coming along, but it has not been approved yet. And 

the sooner the better. 

Governor RIDGE. And it is 14 years after the Federal Government 

said this is a potential problem. 

Chairman JOHNSON. Senator Carper. 

Senator CARPER. Thanks. Thanks so much. I want to go back to 

mention something that is not part of biosecurity, but something 

that both of you played a real big role in, and that is, the work that 

we accomplished yesterday in the Senate on information sharing, 

cybersecurity information sharing. And I remember well when Joe 

Lieberman was leading this Committee the efforts that you and 

Dianne Feinstein, and myself and others helped, but I wish you 

could have been here with us yesterday when it all came to fruition, and you laid the groundwork. And Governor Ridge was part 

of—actually, I think sort of the face for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce for supporting the efforts, and we are just grateful to each 

of you for your contribution. I said yesterday it was one of my 

happiest days in my 15 years in the Senate, and you all played a 

big role in getting us on the right path, so thanks. 

Senator LIEBERMAN. Thanks, Senator Carper, and thank you for 

your leadership on this. I probably would have been happier if I 

was on the floor with you yesterday, but I was pretty happy following it. It is a really significant accomplishment. 

Incidentally, I just quickly related there is a lot of connection of 

cybersecurity to biosecurity, and in the most direct way here, if you 

have a company dealing with pathogens or even vaccines, let us 

say, preventive activity, and they are hacked, right now they are 

probably going to be nervous about calling the government because 
14 

they are going to reveal things that could subject them to liability. 

Well, when this legislation is law, that is open. 

And, of course, what that means from the government point of 

view is that you can begin to notice patterns of what is being 

hacked and wonder about where it is coming from and find out 

where it is coming from. 

So the implications, it is a really substantial accomplishment, 

and I really congratulate all of you on it. 

Senator CARPER. Thank you. I asked my staff to help me reach 

out to the Vice President later this week, and guess what we are 

going to talk about? We are going to talk about this. 

Senator LIEBERMAN. Great. 

Senator CARPER. And I would ask you to do a little bit of role 

playing here with us for a minute and just anticipate for us that 

conversation when we talk to the Vice President—— 

Governor RIDGE. You came to it a lot closer than I did, so you 

can play the role. [Laughter.] 

Senator CARPER. Anticipate what the Vice President is going to 

say, and then what should we say to try to convince him to take 

this on? 

Senator LIEBERMAN. Well, so this is a very personal reaction. I 

would say this Vice President, Joe Biden, might be—I hope—sort 

of intrigued by this because, this is specific. 

Senator CARPER. Maybe if I mention avian influenza right at the 

top. All politics is local. 

Senator LIEBERMAN. Make it close to home. But let us say it is 

a Vice President—and, incidentally, to be clear, we did some legal 

research on this. We decided it is the better part of wisdom here 

and probably law that the Congress cannot mandate that the Vice 

President take on this responsibility. This is really an appeal to the 

President to designate the Vice President to do this. 

I think that Vice President Biden might be challenged and intrigued by this possibility and want to see if in his last year in office he can bring this together to work better. 

I suppose if you had a virtual Vice President, he might say or 

she might say, ‘‘Why are you giving me this responsibility? This is 

the beginning of your going to make me into the new Super Czar?’’ 

Obviously, that is up to the President, and the President has priorities. But as a choice between creating a new czar and making the 

Vice President of the United States now and in the future responsible for some critical areas, coordinating them, I would choose the 

Vice President. 

Senator CARPER. Good. Governor, do you want to add anything 

to that? 

Governor RIDGE. Just I like the word that the Senator used: ‘‘intrigued.’’ The architecture that we are talking about requires a lot 

of engagement at the Federal level and State and local levels. That 

means obviously the Vice President will have some pretty good political connections, having obviously prevailed in a national election. And that integration of those government capabilities and the 

ability to move among the Cabinet agencies and also to engage, to 

build. I would like to think that any Vice President would welcome 

the opportunity to build, not unilaterally but with everybody else, 

to build a platform to deal with a real substantive threat to the na-
15 

tional security and economic security of this country and would 

take it on obviously as a cause celebre—not that he does not have 

other things to do, but give that individual, who obviously is interested in both politics and governing, the opportunity, now that they 

have won the competitive side in politics, a chance to really do 

some substantive work on the governing side. And I think that 

would certainly appeal, I think, to most. 

Senator CARPER. OK. Thanks. 

What do you see is the most likely form that a biological threat 

would take? And a related followup: In your opinions, have the 

risks associated with biological materials increased over time? And 

why? 

Senator LIEBERMAN. Well, I will start, Senator Carper. On page 

1 of this report, we have a scenario, which we made up, fortunately, but we think it is plausible, of the opening statement of the 

chairman of a congressional investigation that begins 9 weeks after 

terrorists unleash a biological attack on our Nation’s capital. And 

there it was a multifaceted—in this scenario, which is plausible, it 

was a multifaceted attack that began with aerosol sprays and also, 

unfortunately, was comprised of essentially poisoning or infecting 

of animal populations with diseases that would be communicated 

to people. 

So, I mean, the problem here is, as Tom said in his opening 

statement, that some big powers have this capacity, dual-use capacity. It is certainly not as complicated as building a nuclear 

weapon—to build the capacity to carry out a biological attack. And, 

of course, it is easier either to get into the country, sneak it into 

the country, or to build it here. 

So I would say that the threat of a bioterrorist attack is greater 

than it has been, and I would also say, without belaboring the 

point, that the threat from a naturally occurring biological attack, 

which is to say an infectious disease pandemic, is greater, just to 

state it summarily, because we are all traveling more, we are moving around the world, and we are bringing disease along with us. 

And it is amazing. A word that I came to appreciate a lot during 

our study was ‘‘zoonotic.’’ I do not know if I knew that word before, 

but this is a disease that is conveyed from animals to people, particularly by migratory bird populations. It is really quite threatening. And I guess the birds are traveling as much or more than 

they ever have, too, so that threat is greater than ever. 

Governor RIDGE. Senator, I do not think we can discount, given 

the nature of the world today, some of these pathogens, either, 

leaving the laboratories of the Nation State and particularly ending 

up in the hands of terrorist organizations. Holding them precisely 

accountable for their actions is pretty difficult, attributing and then 

holding them accountable. So I think we cannot underestimate that 

possibility. 

I happen to believe that the science has changed dramatically, 

and we also know that in recent history you had scientists in certain parts of the world with minimal capacities, but with the advance of technology, are able to do some rather—to manipulate 

matters and create problems that are presently perhaps unforeseen. 
16 

It is very interesting. I do encourage, if Congress does not read 

the entire blueprint, they ought to read the two-page scenario that 

we tried to set up as a plausible scenario. It is the Nipah virus. 

It is in pigs. It is in Southeast Asia. And it would not take too 

much to genetically engineer it, and once it is in the system—and 

it was interesting that those called before the Governmental Affairs 

Committee 9 weeks after it happens are the Governors of the four 

States that got hit. The second panel was the Secretary of State, 

Secretary of Defense (SECDEF), the Attorney General (AG), and 

the Director of National Intelligence (DNI). And the third is the 

Secretary of Ag, Secretary of Health and Human Services, and the 

Secretary of Homeland Security. That shows you the totality of the 

groups and people interested in this and one more reason why we 

hope the President would encourage the Vice President to take the 

task on. 

So we should take the words of the 9/11 Commission. One observation they made I think is relevant to this discussion. They concluded the Federal Government suffered pre-9/11 from ‘‘the failure 

of imagination.’’ It does not take much to imagine the pathogen 

finding its way to a terrorist organization, and we know Mother 

Nature—I mean, Mother Nature keeps playing around with H1N1 

every year. And, by the way, let us think about that. Two years 

ago, we were advised that it would be potentially a more virulent 

strain of H1N1. Remember we had notice? And remember we did 

not have the vaccines ready for it? That is just Mother Nature. 

So a lot of work needs to be done. A lot of good people for the 

past 15 years have put their best foot forward, but they are not 

marching in unison. Senator Lieberman and I kind of look at as 

you get all these good people out there in organizations, they are 

like in the orchestra, but their sheet music is all different, and they 

have no conductor. Well, we want everybody playing off the same 

sheet of music, and we want the Vice President to conduct the 

song. 

Senator CARPER. Thank you. 

Chairman JOHNSON. Senator Ernst. 

OPENING STATEMENT OF SENATOR ERNST 

Senator ERNST. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. 

Gentlemen, thank you so much for being here this afternoon. 

This is a really fascinating topic and one that we really do need 

to pay attention to. 

Now, your Panel also made a recommendation to implement military-civilian collaboration for biodefense, and I sit on both the 

Armed Services Committee and on this Committee of Homeland 

Security, and as a veteran, I would really be interested to learn 

more about this particular recommendation and the level of military and civilian collaboration that you have seen in the past, 

where we really need to take that for the future, and what we can 

do better in those areas. Senator Lieberman, if you would start, 

please? 

Senator LIEBERMAN. Thanks very much, Senator Ernst. So here 

is an example. You will see in our report that we are critical of the 

so-called BioWatch program which the Department of Homeland 

Security operates, which was supposed to be an early detection sys-
17 

tem for biological pathogens in the air. Our judgment is that it is 

an old system, it is using old technology, and, frankly, it is not up 

to the challenge. It is not doing the job. 

At the same time, we found that the U.S. military is doing some 

aggressive, cutting-edge work on detecting biological pathogens in 

the air with the first natural priority being, concern being, to protect the men and women of the U.S. military either in conflict or 

in areas where they may be subject to biological attack. And the 

military is way ahead, in our opinion, of what the Department of 

Homeland Security has in the BioWatch program. 

So there is a case where we think that we are wasting money 

on BioWatch, to put it bluntly, and that this seems like a natural 

collaboration if we could take some of the breakthrough technologies that are being developed in the Department of Defense 

and allow them through collaboration to be applied to the domestic 

challenge. 

Tom, do you want to comment? 

Governor RIDGE. Senator, I understand next year will be your 

26th in your service? 

Senator ERNST. 24. 

Governor RIDGE. 24? Well, thank you very much. 

Senator LIEBERMAN. You must have been very young when you 

went—— 

Senator ERNST. I was maybe 12. [Laughter.] 

Senator LIEBERMAN. That is what I would have guessed. 

Senator ERNST. Thank you. You are very kind. 

Governor RIDGE. Your record of public service obviously precedes 

it here, so I thank you for that, one soldier to another. 

A couple thoughts, if I might. I think Senator Lieberman highlighted it quite well. We know the DOD—we do everything we can 

to protect our warfighters, and their investment in their Defense 

Advanced Research Program with regard to early detection on the 

battlefield I am quite confident has led to discoveries or learning 

relative to medical countermeasures. So somehow the biological 

contaminant gets past the protective gear, I mean, just even protective gear alone. So you see technology, you see protective gear, you 

see probably the advance of medical countermeasures. 

I remember as Governor of Pennsylvania and then as Secretary, 

we witnessed some exercises where the National Guard in respective States had WMD response and recovery capability. There is 

learning there, as well as capacity to help the State and locals respond if there is an event. And so I think while they may be—I 

think they are at—the epicenter of a lot of this work, and one of 

the frustrations that I think we have had in the Federal Government is that a lot of this work is always siloed. And, if it has an 

application at DOD, maybe the form may change a little bit, but 

it ought to be at DHS, it ought to be in the civilian world. 

So I think there is a lot of learning in the area of technology, protective gear, response and recovery capability, medical countermeasures, getting DOD integrating some of its learning with not 

only Federal agencies but with the State and locals will just enhance their capability. 

Senator ERNST. Well, and, Governor, you led to my next question 

as well. With the siloing effect that we have in so many of our 
18 

agencies across the Federal Government, how does the Federal 

Government do a better job at working with our State and local officials? You mentioned the National Guard. Every State has a civil 

support team that deals with nuclear, biological, radiological episodes and can respond. And they are at the cutting edge. How do 

we take some of that knowledge and share it with those local emergency management coordinators at the county? We have to do a 

better job at that. And do you see that there are ways that we can 

break out of those silos and really effectively communicate across 

those various levels of coordination and effort? 

Governor RIDGE. Well, first of all, I think they have to have a 

significant presence on the Biodefense Coordination Council because they are every bit as important to delivering particularly the 

response and recovery, although they do need intelligence and you 

need to bolster the public health capability clearly. They need to 

be invited in to participate and viewed not as an adjunct to what 

the Federal Government is doing but as a partner. I do not believe 

that the Federal Government—we cannot secure the country from 

bioweapons and pathogens inside the Beltway. And as we all know, 

the first responders are back home at the local level, then the State 

level. They are the first in and the last out. 

Senator ERNST. Right. 

Governor RIDGE. And I know one of the challenges we have had 

historically is that there has been a second or third variation of the 

National Incident Management System, but it is pretty clear, at 

least in response to Ebola, that maybe there had not been enough 

outreach to the State and locals dealing with that kind of challenge 

at the local level. They joined later on. 

So I think if you invite it, you will find many willing participants, and I think we need to see them as a resource. And I am 

going back to my experience as Secretary of Homeland Security. 

You cannot secure the country as strong as we are and as big as 

our budgets are, the number of programs we have, you cannot do 

it from inside D.C. 

Senator ERNST. Exactly. 

Governor RIDGE. You better look at the Governors and the mayors and the public health people as partners, not as ‘‘we will get 

to you later.’’ No, no, no. You get to them now. And I think they 

will respond very favorably. 

Senator ERNST. I do think that is a great point, and I would love 

to see that level of cooperation amongst all of our governmental officials and those that are responding to the crises. 

Of course, Senator Carper, we have the avian influenza that hit 

Iowa very hard, about 48 million birds or so that were lost. Twothirds of those birds that were lost were from Iowa. So it hit very 

hard, and we really needed to see multiple levels of coordination. 

Governor RIDGE. To that point, if I might, there is one recommendation we have not brought up. The Senator alluded to it. 

We do not have a national animal disease surveillance database. 

Senator ERNST. Right. 

Governor RIDGE. We do not. 

Senator ERNST. Right. Something very basic. 

Governor RIDGE. We have seen—particularly if you believe, as 

the scientists say, that 99.9 percent of those pathogens that ulti-
19 

mately affect humans come out of—their etiology is in—animals. So 

why don’t we complement what we know about human disease 

with animal disease? Because I suspect people a heck of a lot 

smarter than I am, which is a ton of them, might be able to see 

the connection and even anticipate some problems. 

Senator ERNST. I think this is a great recommendation. 

Senator LIEBERMAN. So you want to know if there is an infectious disease epidemic beginning to spread in the country. You 

want to know if there is evidence of a biological attack, which, of 

course, is not visible until people start to show the symptoms of it. 

And this will happen always at the State and local level. So for 

that kind of timely warning to be able to deal with the kind of crisis before it spreads, you have to have State and local people involved. 

I will say that there are some States—I do not know the number—that already have the kind of registry or database on a realtime basis of animal disease that we are recommending for the 

Federal Government. So, some of these States are ahead of us, for 

the same reason that we want to do this nationally, because they 

want to see something happening before it begins to spread to 

other animals and our other populations of animals, of the same 

animal or to people. 

Senator ERNST. Yes, well, thank you, gentlemen. I appreciate 

your efforts on this project, and hopefully we can see some of these 

recommendations into fruition. So thank you. 

Senator LIEBERMAN. Thank you. 

Governor RIDGE. Thank you, Senator. 

Senator ERNST. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. 

Chairman JOHNSON. Senator Heitkamp. 

OPENING STATEMENT OF SENATOR HEITKAMP 

Senator HEITKAMP. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and thank you 

both for your work on this effort. I think it is something that I 

think gets ignored, to our peril, and having such high level analysis 

and bipartisan analysis, I think, is hugely helpful. With that said, 

I recently participated in an hour-long discussion with the head of 

the World Bank, Dr. Kim, who I do not know if you are familiar 

with him, but he is basically a prominent infectious disease physician. He also brings some interesting kind of geopolitical understanding to that role. 

When asked what he thought was the greatest economic vulnerability in the world, he said pandemic. And I think we sometimes 

just focus on health, but we do not realize that the economic implications of a pandemic will be absolutely devastating, especially in 

the developing world. And we asked him a series of questions about 

where he saw the next outbreak, what the next kind of cutting 

edge concern was that he had. He talked about flu and he talked 

about a number of other things. 

And I think it is interesting because as we prepare for our national defense, we cannot do this without preparing for an international defense, whether it is, in fact, providing food security in 

areas where people basically have had their economies shut down, 

or whether it is—so that people stay in place, that we do not see 

a migration, we do not see continuing spread of infectious disease, 
20 

and then also, taking a look at preparedness, not just prevention, 

but preparedness. 

And so I am wondering, in the work that you did, as you looked 

at the scenarios, you looked at the potential issues that could come 

up, whether you spent any time kind of saying, These are the five 

likely next things beyond Ebola that could happen, let us run the 

scenario on how that happens, because we know most of these 

pandemics, most of these concerns actually originate in the developing world. 

And I do not care which one of you take on that question, but 

I am curious about how we reach beyond the work that you have 

done to get a world prepared for a pandemic. 

Senator LIEBERMAN. That is a great question. So incidentally, I 

want to just sort of put an exclamation point, Senator Heitkamp, 

after your first point, which is that this is a threat on the bioterrorist side of it that is really under-appreciated by the population, 

in part, because, Thank God, much to our surprise since the anthrax attacks right here on Capitol Hill in 2011, we have not had 

a biological attack, which everybody—not everybody—but most experts would have guessed at that point that would have happened. 

So it seems a little bit distant. 

However, although people do not want to live every day with this 

fear, the reaction that I saw to the Ebola crisis last year was really 

panic. So I think people are fearful, at least when it begins to happen, of the threat of a pandemic outbreak. I am struck by what you 

said Dr. Kim said and he is probably right. I mean, some 

people—there are other examples, but really, it is a threat in terms 

of dislocating. 

So I do not know that we listed, in terms of probabilities, what 

is next. There are some things going on now—sorry that Senator 

Carper is not here because I have learned about a disease moving 

to the United States called chikungunya. It has nothing to do with 

chicken. Is it originally an African word? I think so. Yes. But 

meaning something entirely different, but it threatens us now. We 

are not really ready for it. 

So that is one. It is beginning to be seen in the southern part 

of our country, particularly around Florida. So you want to? 

Governor RIDGE. I do. I do have the benefit—well, the good Senator who was responding to your question had the benefit of taking 

a look at my recommendations, and I think if you will look at 7(c) 

and 33, I mean, I think this demonstrates the extent to which this 

extraordinary group of Americans looked across the board at as 

wide a range of issues it could possibly cover. 

But we do think that it is important, in 7(c) if you have it there, 

prioritize emerging and re-emerging infectious diseases, where we 

ask the Secretary of Health and Human Services, in coordination 

with Ag. and Defense, to prioritize these emerging infectious diseases. And then we turn quickly—and there is more to that—then 

you turn to Recommendation 33 and this is probably more to your 

point, Senator. 

Somebody needs to provide international leadership on this issue. 

The United States of America seems to be the country that should 

do so, and we think we ought to build, with our friends in the global community, perhaps through the State Department, whoever, a 
21 

functional and agile global public health response apparatus to include the convening of human and animal health leaders from 

around the world to help start to set some of these priorities. 

You also see it as an adjunct to this, we think the intelligence 

community (IC), even within the United States, does not pay 

enough attention to this. Probably this has a lot to do with the fact 

that it is, one is probably resources, and two it is important, but 

it is not that important for us to be really paying a lot of attention 

to this. And I think if you can have a global database. 

If you can convene annual leaders, particularly in these countries, the emerging countries, you can get that kind of collaboration. To your point, America provides a leadership, but given the 

globalization of these pandemics, we are all potentially affected. 

Senator HEITKAMP. Just as you have looked for a home, where 

is the point, the immediate point of accountability, which is the addressing of this device present? And the immediate point of accountability to help prepare, but also to orchestrate and to have the 

clout to effectuate a response, we do not have that on an international level. 

And that lack of leadership on the international level, I think, 

makes us much—we can do all these things that you are suggesting, but until we actually build from these efforts, take these 

same ideas and build out in a global sense, we will be only as secure as one border crossing. 

And so I think it is critically important that this work not stop 

at this point where we are just looking at what is happening within 

our borders, that we heed his warning and heed the warning of a 

lot of people who deal with infectious diseases, especially as it relates to flu and the eventual antibiotic resistant kinds of diseases 

that we anticipate we are breeding, that we actually have a global 

response and we have a point of accountability in global response. 

And I think that is trickier because as we know—there is a cop 

on the beat in the United States of America because we are a country that is rule of law—there is no one global cop on the beat. And 

if we do not recognize that, we really threaten our security, I think. 

Senator LIEBERMAN. That is an excellent point. The obvious candidate internationally to do that is the World Health Organization 

(WHO), but it does not have the rule of law authority that the U.S. 

Government has here. As I was listening to you, in some sense, we 

thought about protecting the people of America from infectious disease pandemics that are coming either by birds or animals or people from elsewhere in the world. 

I think we have assumed that—we have not assumed help from 

overseas. We have sort of assumed—we have to be ready to deal 

with it here and how do we deal with it here. In the 33d, the last 

recommendation that Tom referred to, we do ask the Secretary of 

State to convene a meeting of global experts in animal and human 

health to talk about the interaction, also what could be done globally to stop the outbreaks. 

The truth is, there was some effective work done on Ebola in Africa, even though 6,000 people died. But when it started, just listening to the news, it sounded like it could be much worse. So Dr. 

Kim actually is a great person to lead this because this is his field 

and I hope he will. 
22 

Senator HEITKAMP. I am sure he would be glad that you volunteered him, Senator. 

Governor RIDGE. It is one more reason, though, I think to have 

the Vice President involved. If the Vice President shows up armin-arm with the Secretary of State, you are speaking with the authority of the President of the United States, and you want to convene at the highest level, you are going to get there. 

The other advantage, I think, of America being much more aggressive externally is that if we come up with these medical countermeasures available to the world, I think that is an extension of 

our value system that is every bit as important as any other thing 

we do. And finally, with your very appropriate comments with regard to identifying the threats and emerging diseases in these 

countries, I always view our borders as the last line of defense, because we know the threat is out there, so we use the military and 

everybody else to try to deal with terrorism before it brings, the 

horror to our shores. 

We need to take the same mind set and say, ‘‘Look, no matter 

what we do here to detect and prevent and prepare, we are going 

to have to respond, to recovery but we just cannot be thinking of 

ourselves internally. The threat is global and in many areas in the 

emerging countries, so we have to pay a lot more attention than 

we ever have in the past. 

Senator HEITKAMP. I do not think there is any doubt about it. 

Senator LIEBERMAN. Thank you. 

Chairman JOHNSON. Thank you, Senator Heitkamp. As long as 

we are talking globally, and Senator Lieberman, you mentioned the 

World Health Organization, I think it is widely recognized that 

with Ebola outbreak, the World Health Organization did not exactly respond the way the world would have liked. Do you believe 

that is the organization where this global database and this response really should emanate from, or do you think it is just not 

a reformable organization and we have to look to something else? 

Senator LIEBERMAN. Right. So we did not really dig into that 

deeply. I mean, I had the same impression that you did, that the 

WHO did not respond as well or as quickly as we would have liked. 

I do not know what the alternatives are unless people acted 

through the U.N. and created some separate entity. But I think we 

have just got to try to make it better and to understand. I do not 

know if you can think of anything else globally. 

Governor RIDGE. No. I mean, the bottom line is that the world 

is paying a lot closer attention to cyber threats, a lot closer attention to the threat of terrorism, the threat of nuclear proliferation. 

But globally, the threat is under-appreciated and it will take strong 

leadership. I mean, we want America to get back engaged. We do 

not normally show up. They meet every couple of years on the treaty with regard to bio weapons, and while we know that some of the 

participants have signed the treaty are building the dual capacity, 

we still ought to show a face there. 

We have to be much more aggressive with regard to the World 

Trade Organization (WTO). So I cannot think of another organization. We do not have time to create a new one. We just ought to 

extract as much information and get as much benefit, because I do 

think the organization may not be the rallying point, but it could 
23 

be used as a bully pulpit for us and we have to convene leaders 

from these countries that are really concerned. And we can do that 

independently of WTO, that is for sure. 

Chairman JOHNSON. Well, you repeated the phrase, failure of 

imagination. I think it is denial of reality. Some of these things are 

just so horrific to even think about, that will never happen. You 

have to recognize that yes, it might. Did you do any work or did 

you take a look at the possibility of stockpiling medicines? You 

mentioned anthrax. I know we did not have enough Cipro at the 

time. Where are we in terms of potentially stockpiling preventative 

medicines or cures? 

Governor Ridge. Well, we did take a look and made some recommendations with regard to the national stockpile. One, we do 

not have that much stockpile. Again, our medical countermeasures 

are really in the embryonic stage right now. We have not even 

identified those potential pathogens with which we think there 

needs to be innovation and an antidote developed. 

We also recognize that even if you have the right materials 

stockpiled, we still have not figured out a way to distribute it, mass 

population. We have tried the Postal Service. We have tried a couple of others. There is some learning there. So again, it is part of 

the response and recovery recommendations we make to revisit 

that issue and pay a lot more attention to it than we have in the 

past. 

Senator LIEBERMAN. Mr. Chairman, I do want to mention—it is 

not directly responsive, but it is related—that it happens that Senator Ayotte and Senator Booker have introduced a bill for the Department of Homeland Security to reach into its stockpile of anthrax vaccine and provide it for first responders across the country. 

Now, part of this is because parts of the stockpile are coming to 

the point—— 

Chairman JOHNSON. Getting old. 

Senator LIEBERMAN. They are getting old, right. So we might as 

well use them for that purpose. But we are not—I mean, one of the 

major recommendations that comes out of this is that we still have 

not figured out how to leverage the ingenuity and innovation of the 

pharmaceutical sector of our economy to get involved in developing 

medical countermeasures to diseases that in some sense are hypothetical. 

We do not know that it is going to happen. And we have tried 

different ways to incentivize businesses to do that. Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA) has been 

the instrument of that and I think we have a feeling that we ought 

to, as much as we respect the National Institutes of Health 

(NIH)—now I am going to join you in getting in trouble. 

Governor RIDGE. We respect them, but we also think that there 

is a disproportionate emphasis placed on basic research and not 

enough with regard to applied. 

Senator LIEBERMAN. Yes. 

Governor RIDGE. You take a look at what NIH gets and Dr. Fauci 

is an incredible public servant, NIH has existed for over 100 years, 

but its mission, original mission has been expanded across. They 

are not coordinating activity within the Federal Government. It is 

much too big for NIH. 
24 

So again, when we devised this architecture and approach, we 

were not looking to spend a lot of new money. We think just reprogramming some of it, and that is a classic example and I think, 

Senator, I do not mean to interrupt him, but I think we felt that 

there is not enough innovation in the marketplace. And the market 

will not really respond, first of all, just to even get access to some 

of the dollars for research. 

The process is just constipated. I mean, it is like paperwork and 

paperwork and paperwork and who knows if you are going to get 

at the outcome. We want to take the contracting authority from 

HHS and put it over in BARDA. But I would like to think that as 

part of the building of a new strategy, you would sit down, not only 

with the big pharmas, but sit down with a small company. They 

are more inclined to be focusing on one antidote, one or two vaccines and what do they need to have an incentive. The incentive 

just cannot be the market because there is no market. 

Chairman JOHNSON. Right. 

Governor RIDGE. And you hope there will never be a market for 

it. So what is it that we have to do to encourage you to expend the 

dollars necessary to build that countermeasure? Why do you not 

tell them the story about when you were with your colleague, you 

wanted to extend the patent life in order to—great story. 

Senator LIEBERMAN. Oh, yes. Thank you. So a few months after 

9/11, and the anthrax attacks really after 9/11, I do not know if 

Chuck Ludlum is here. He worked with me in my office. And we 

were talking about the problem that there were not medical—pharmaceutical countermeasures and how do we create a market incentive where there is no natural market incentive for pharmaceutical 

companies to devote research to this. 

So he came up with the idea—of course, at the time I took credit 

for it. He came up with the idea that we should create a process 

where a company develops a proposal for a medical countermeasure. They go to HHS, stating this simplistically, and if they 

cross the threshold of plausibility, then they are put on a track, 

and if they do develop an effective medical countermeasure, then 

their reward is—because they still do not know whether there is 

a market—that they can then take one of their drugs, presumably 

one of the more popular drugs, and extend the patent life, I think 

we said for a year, maybe 2 years, but a year. 

So this seemed like a very logical idea, to create an incentive for 

pharmaceutical companies to get into this area where there is no 

guaranteed market. 

Chairman JOHNSON. So again, that is for potentially development, but again, stockpiling. About the only entity, the only market 

would be for government to start stockpiling something that expires. 

Senator LIEBERMAN. Just keep buying it, that is right. 

Chairman JOHNSON. That is just a natural contract. 

Senator LIEBERMAN. So what happened was that this brilliant 

idea of ours did not seem so brilliant to the generic drug industry 

which did not want the patent life extended. 

Chairman JOHNSON. They are always interested. 

Senator LIEBERMAN. And they came over the Hill like a cavalry 

and that was the end of that idea. 
25 

Chairman JOHNSON. Well, good try. 

Chairman JOHNSON. Nice try. 

Governor RIDGE. Maybe, perhaps, one of these days with science 

and technology moving as quickly as it is, we will be a lot closer 

to vaccines on demand if somewhere, not necessarily in the government, but out there in the private sector, we have this collaborative 

research capability based on priorities, based on information, based 

on intelligence. But for the time being, we are just going to have 

to go to the stockpile mode, but I think in years ahead, we might 

be able to come up with a better way than that to maybe 

incentivize. 

Chairman JOHNSON. Well, I will think liability protection would 

be somewhat key to that as well. Senator Carper. 

Senator CARPER. Just a reminder. We have a facility located 

close to the University of Delaware where we have a number of bioscience companies and large, not so large, but mid-sized and small. 

One of them actually works on developing plant-based vaccines, not 

using eggs, but using, among other things, tobacco plants and 

being able to create vaccines more quickly and a variety of them. 

When I first visited them years ago, I wondered, this might come 

in handy someday, and they have done pretty well to advance their 

strategy. So I think I am going to pay them another visit just based 

on what we are talking about here. I would ask you a question and 

I just want you to answer it shortly. 

We all have a chance in what we have done and what you all 

have done is visit schools. I love to visit schools from grade schools 

all the way up through college. But sometimes the kids ask me for 

advice or I have just given them advice. One time a kid said he was 

trying to decide what to do with his life and he wanted my advice. 

He was going to do this, he was going to do that. And I said to him, 

Aim high, aim high, there is more room up there. Aim high. 

And the idea of asking the Vice President or encouraging the 

President to direct the Vice President to take the lead on this, that 

is aiming high. What if neither the President nor the Vice President have any interest in the Vice President doing this? What 

would be Plan B? 

Senator LIEBERMAN. Well, I hate to use the term—maybe I will 

not use the term—Plan B would be somebody like the czar, I mean, 

somebody in the White House so that they had the implicit authority of the Presidency to coordinate. Again, I think the conclusion 

we reach is you cannot take somebody in one of the departments 

and put them over everybody else in the various departments. 

Senator CARPER. If I could interrupt just for a moment? The legislation that we passed last year, Dr. Coburn and I authored, coauthored it, on trying to figure out on the Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA), the question of what is the appropriate role for OMB and the Department of Homeland Security 

with respect to Federal information management. 

And we included there language that basically said, DHS has the 

authority to direct agencies. We had a term for it. What was the 

term? Binding operational directives, binding operational directives, to really tell the agencies what they had to do. So there is 

a precedent for that. 
26 

Senator LIEBERMAN. So I mentioned before that if you had to 

choose one department, it would be the Department of Homeland 

Security because this is a homeland security threat. Some of this, 

incidentally, also implicates a Federal Emergency Management 

Agency (FEMA) responsibility because of emergency reaction to, let 

us say, a bioterrorist attack or a pandemic disease outbreak. But 

I think it is still hard in this kind of case to ask one of the departments to assume a superior role to the others. 

Senator CARPER. All right. 

Senator LIEBERMAN. Again, I guess the hierarchy for us would 

be—we have not really explored this—Vice President, somebody in 

the National Security Council so you have the implicit—although 

Governor Ridge, really explained why you can only go so far. There 

he was in the White House, have a meeting in the Roosevelt Room 

that impressed people, but he did not have that authority that the 

Vice President has. 

Governor RIDGE. Maybe one example my friend rated. I remember—no reason for you to know this, but long before we passed the 

Department of Homeland Security, months and months before that, 

I convened the President’s Homeland Security Group, probably a 

half to two-thirds of the Cabinet, because there had been multiple 

studies, some of them mandated by Congress, a lot of the think 

tanks, in a 21st Century world, building a border-centric agency. 

It makes a lot of sense. Kind of monitor the goods and people it 

served coming across the border. Fine. 

And I sent out a memo and announced that I wanted to—I felt 

we ought to—collaborate, communicate, hold hands, sing Kumbaya, 

I want part of your agency, I do not want part of your agency, I 

would like some money here and I would like to see some money 

there. 

And the answer I got from everybody except Paul O’Neill was, 

‘‘No, we just need to communicate better, we need to coordinate 

better.’’ Nobody wanted to give up turf, nobody. Fast forward 4 or 

5 months. Roosevelt Room, same people are in the room, one additional person, happens to be the President of the United States. We 

are sending a piece of legislation up to the Hill tomorrow, whenever, we are going to create a Department of Homeland Security. 

I know you are going to be shocked. Unanimous support for that 

initiative. Why? Because the President said, this is what we are 

going to do. That is why we feel so strongly that it is imperative 

for the President, hopefully, and a willing Vice President to volunteer. It is everything I would think a Vice President would want 

to do. You have domestic and international, you have Federal, 

State, and local, you interact with the corporate community. You 

have to lead an effort globally and extend America’s influence in 

a very positive way. 

I would like to think that the next President, regardless of what 

side of the aisle they come from, will be persuasive enough and the 

Vice President would be willing enough, to take it on. Because once 

it is embedded, I think you have the infrastructure you need to 

really do something about this threat. 

Senator CARPER. OK. Thank you. One of the more noteworthy 

recommendations coming from the panel is the suggestion of uni-
27 

fying the bio threats strategies both for animals and for human 

beings. I think you call the approach One Health? 

Governor RIDGE. One Health. 

Senator LIEBERMAN. One Health. 

Senator CARPER. That would allow government to better track 

and combat animal-based disease outbreaks. Two questions. One, 

how do you envision this strategy working amongst the different 

agencies responsible for animal and for human health programs? 

And two, what programs do you think should be prioritized? Two 

questions. How do you envision this strategy working amongst the 

different agencies responsible for animal and for human health programs and which programs do you think should be prioritized? 

Governor RIDGE. Let me take a shot at that first. First of all, I 

think the recommendation is really to have us think about the 

connectivity among the three elements, environment, animals, and 

humans, because right now, like everything else, it is all siloed. So 

as you are building out this national platform, I think, to the extent that some of these agencies interact with all three, we would 

want to assimilate the information, have the analysis done with 

that in mind. I do not have any specific recommendations as to how 

they prioritize in it, inside of it, but it is just a change in mentality. 

Right now we are not paying any attention to animal health. 

There is very little consideration internally within any of these 

agencies or appreciation that most of your problems emanate in 

animals and in wildlife. But we do not really view that as part of 

the intellectual infrastructure around which we build a platform of 

medical countermeasures or even gather intelligence, let alone response and recovery mechanisms. So I think it has much to do with 

changing an approach toward any particular initiative. 

Senator CARPER. Senator Lieberman. 

Senator LIEBERMAN. No, I think that is the main point, to recognize the divisions between human health and animal health or 

human disease and animal disease are artificial. So you have to 

deal with them together. I just want to talk about what we are 

talking about here. We are asking the Vice President to direct the 

National Security Council to review all strategic biodefense documents. This is an example, to answer your question, to ensure that 

animal health and environmental health agencies are identified 

and assign responsibilities and that their activities are fully 

aligned. 

And then, Mr. Chairman, two down in terms of action items, this 

is a response to an earlier question you asked which we did not 

have an answer to because there is not an answer right now, 

prioritize emerging and re-emerging infectious diseases. And to do 

that by combining the efforts of the Secretary of HHS, the Secretary of Agriculture, and interestingly and relevantly, the Secretary of Defense. 

I think this is something that people are not adequately aware 

of, but more to the point, it is not the awareness which is reality. 

It is not being reflected in a way our government is acting and, 

therefore, we are both wasting resources, but we are also not preparing ourselves adequately to deal with threats to animals and 

humans. 
28 

Chairman JOHNSON. Thank you. I know I stole this from Chairman Carper, he might have stolen this from you. 

Senator LIEBERMAN. Yes. 

Chairman JOHNSON. Another tradition of this Committee is basically to give our witnesses kind of one last shot, so if there is something you have not mentioned if you want to kind of summarize 

your points, happy to give you an opportunity before we close out 

the hearing. We will start with you, Governor Ridge. 

Governor RIDGE. No, I just think that we are looking for champions, Senator. What we thought, what we have analyzed, the goahead plan, it is all here. We know that you and Senator Carper 

are going to take it seriously. We hope that through your advocacy 

and that of others within this body and over in the House we can 

find some champions to affect this. 

This is a real threat. We cannot get ahead of it because it exists 

and we just need folks, hopefully, to take this blueprint seriously, 

and act on it. I do not want this to be the fifth report that ends 

up on the shelf gathering dust by the time we acted on it. We 

thank you. This is the first public action and it is in the right Committee of jurisdiction, because I think it may be a long time since 

I looked at your jurisdictional aperture, but I think you could call 

it—— 

Chairman JOHNSON. It is broad. 

Governor RIDGE. I think you can call them all in if you want. I 

mean, you could have SECDEF, HHS, you can have them all here 

and say, The Vice President’s plan said you ought to do this and 

you are not doing that. Why not? 

Chairman JOHNSON. You should take comfort in the fact that I 

was really focusing on the hearings you were recommending, so you 

probably found your champions. Senator Lieberman. 

Senator LIEBERMAN. Thanks for the opportunity, Mr. Chairman. 

So with your permission, I am going to tell a story that is only remotely relevant, but he inspired it with that story. 

Chairman JOHNSON. Senator Carper does that all the time. 

Senator LIEBERMAN. I know. 

Senator CARPER. That was what I learned from Joe Lieberman. 

Chairman JOHNSON. There is nothing wrong with Tom in inspiring me. It is an old technique. 

Senator LIEBERMAN. So Governor Ridge told this great story 

about the planning at the White House for the proposal for a new 

Department of Homeland Security and how the Cabinet did not 

know about it. So we had our bill on the floor for the Department 

of Homeland—or out, anyway. 

I have a specific recollection, after President Bush put out the 

proposal that you have just described for the Department of Homeland Security, a day or two later the late, great Senator Robert C. 

Byrd took the floor and he said, ‘‘Where did this proposal come 

from?–’’ He said, ‘‘I have been informed that not even members of 

President Bush’s Cabinet knew it was coming. There was some 

small group of people in a room, a closed room in the White House 

somewhere.’’ 

And I can hear Senator Byrd on the floor saying, ‘‘Who was 

there? Was Hamilton there? Was Madison there? Was Washington 

there? Was Jefferson there? I realize now I am at the table with 
29 

Thomas Jefferson. He was there. OK.’’ So thank you for allowing 

me that freedom of expression, old war stories. We miss Senator 

Byrd, really. He was something. God bless him. 

So I just echo what Tom said. We need champions. And I will say 

this. We both approached this, the request to co-chair this operation, with the sort of skepticism or questioning that one has in 

this life after public office, which is, ‘‘Is this really going to matter? 

Is it worth my time? Are we going to do anything? ’’ But we were 

worried enough about the problem that we took it on. And I must 

say, for my part, part of it was frankly to work with Tom Ridge 

again. 

But at the end of this, now the day that we issued our report, 

I think we come away feeling this is a real threat to our 

country, not enough is being done about it, and it would be irresponsible—we are asking you to be champions, it would be irresponsible of us to leave the field, drop the report and go back to 

whatever we are doing. 

So we are going to try to find a way to keep this panel going, 

including the staff without which we would not have done anything 

of what we have done so far. And I want you to know that insofar 

as this Committee or you individually become champions of the report, we want to be in a position, and we feel reasonably confident 

we will be, to back you up, to support you because we think it is 

that important. Again, thank you very much for your time and 

your interest. 

Chairman JOHNSON. Senator Carper. 

Senator CARPER. There had been a former Governor of Delaware 

named Russell Peterson and a former President of the University 

of Delaware named Art Trabant who came to see me, I think in 

1993, 1994, my first year as Governor. And they had a proposal 

that they delivered to me on how to transform the area along the 

industrial wasteland along the Christina River where the train station is in Wilmington right along I–95 where a baseball stadium 

is. 

And they had the incredible vision of what we could do with that 

land where 10,000 people once worked to build ships that helped 

win World War II. The war was over, decayed, industrial wasteland 

followed in its wake. And they represented a wonderful vision and 

I said to them at the meeting, I said, Who is going to do this? Who 

is going to lead this effort? 

And former Governor Peterson, who was by then about 80, he 

said to me, he said, You are. And I said, Why me? And he said, 

Because you are a Governor and that is what Governors do. And 

that is what we have done and it is just wonderful. Sometime I 

hope you can come and visit. It is on the riverfront. I think Governor Ridge has maybe been there once or twice. 

But I am really encouraged by what you said. If the Chairman 

and I are as persuasive as we are, go meet with the Vice President 

next week and say, We had a hearing, this is a great idea, tell him 

who presented it to us and all, I am not sure we are going to be 

as effective as we might be if we did not do it with you, maybe the 

four of us to sit down with the Vice President and say, This is 

something we think is important and we just think it is something 
30 

you ought to consider adding in your last 15—14 months, really, as 

Vice President to your portfolio. What do you think? 

Senator LIEBERMAN. Well, that would be great. We would be 

there, sure. 

Senator CARPER. Good. Thank you. 

Chairman JOHNSON. I would be happy to participate. By the way, 

that story was almost related. 

Senator CARPER. I am getting better. He got a better overtime, 

why should I not? 

Chairman JOHNSON. Let us face it. The Blue Ribbon Panel found 

two fabulous champions, Governor Ridge, Senator Lieberman, you 

are true patriots. You served your Nation, you are continuing to 

serve it. We want to work with you. I look at this as a great blueprint. Like I said, take comfort from the fact that I have already 

gone down that list of hearings. Again, a blueprint. We are going 

to want to follow that, we went to work with you on this. 

These threats are real. One thing I have noticed about Washington D.C. is there is an awful lot of reality denying going on 

around here and I am not into reality denying. If we are going to 

solve problems, the first step is you have to acknowledge—in reality you have to admit you have that problem. You guys certainly 

together put together this Blue Ribbon Panel that describes a reality that we have to face. So I really do appreciate it. 

I think the technique we have been trying to follow, and this is 

what happened with cyber security, too, it is amazing what you can 

accomplish when you really do not care who gets credit for it. We 

had the CISA bill out of the Intel Committee. We could have 

claimed jurisdiction; we did not. We said that is a good bill. We 

worked together on the Federal Cyber Security Enhancement Act. 

We got that put in the manager’s amendment. 

So when you concentrate on the areas of agreement that unify 

us and unite us, you can actually accomplish something, rather 

than trying to exploit our divisions. So this surely should be an 

area that unifies us because we agree this is a problem that needs 

to be addressed. We want to work with you over the coming 

months, possibly years, to really address this very real threat. 

So again, thank you for your service and you can be assured that 

we will work with you in the future on this. 

Senator LIEBERMAN. That is great. 

Governor Ridge. Thank you. 

Chairman JOHNSON. With that, the hearing record will remain 

open for another 15 days until November 12 5 p.m. for the submission of statements and questions for the record. This hearing is adjourned. 

[Whereupon, the Committee was adjourned at 4:12 p.m.] 
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