Jan. 12, 2009 – 7:45 p.m.
Scant days before he leaves office, President Bush ordered the creation of a cabinet-level working group to assess the security at biomedical research laboratories and provide recommendations to improve it.
The executive order establishes the “Working Group on Strengthening the Biosecurity of the United States” within the Defense Department, with the secretaries of Defense and Heath and Human Services as its co-chairmen. Members of the group include the Director of National Intelligence, the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency and the secretaries of State, Agriculture, Commerce, Transportation, Energy and Homeland Security.
According to the order, the group is tasked with evaluating the laws, regulation and practices that govern facility and personnel security at the nation’s labs that research, handle, store or transport certain biological agents.
By mid-2009, the group will have to submit an unclassified report that contains a summary of the information it collected, as well as recommendation for new legislation, regulations or guidance to create better security.
Biosecurity has proved a contentious issue in the past few years, with some members of Congress decrying a lack of proper security at both government and private labs. One of those voices has been
“President Bush’s last-minute executive order is a step in the right direction, but stops far short of the action needed to ensure the security of biosafety labs,” he said. “My subcommittee has already held two hearings on the risks associated with the proliferation of high-containment labs, and what we have learned so far is troubling. While congress and now the president’s own working group study the security of biosafety labs, the president should issue a governmentwide moratorium on the construction of any new level 3 and 4 labs until the study can be completed and its results provided to the appropriate congressional committees.”
Stupak and Democrats from Energy and Commerce have made the recommendation before — in August, as it prepared to investigate Fort Detrick, a Maryland government biodefense lab, then-full committee Chairman
Bush’s order drew mixed reviews from congressional committees dealing with homeland security. On the Senate side, the plan for a working group drew praise.
“This appears to be a good first step towards formulating a policy to unify the federal government’s oversight of its biosecurity efforts,” said Leslie Phillips, communications director for the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. “[Chairman Joseph Lieberman, I-Conn.] is working on legislation in this area that will address several of the key biosecurity failings identified by the Commission on the Prevention of WMD Proliferation and Terrorism.”
On the House side, though, the chairman of the Homeland Security Committee suggested that the last-minute nature of the order was emblematic of Bush administration’s failings on the issue.
“The establishment of a working group composed of the secretaries of various departments and agencies now, as a new administration takes over, gives yet another example of how the Bush administration identified a problem that needed to be fixed, but could not exercise the necessary management to get the other departments and agencies to address the problem,” said
Last year, committee Democrats decried a decision by the Department of Homeland Security’s Science and Technology Directorate to replace its Animal Disease Center — the only foot-and-mouth lab in the country, located on an island off the coast of New York — with a new mainland facility, scheduled to be built in Kansas.
Rob Margetta can be reached at rmargetta@cq.com.
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