Homeland Security Struggling To Fund Chem-Bio Defense.

AuthorMachi, Vivienne

The Department of Homeland Security is facing prolonged budget cuts in its chemical and biological defense portfolio, as it works to address concerns that state and local municipalities are underprepared for a potential attack.

As technologies advance, the prospect of an adversary using a biological weapon--involving biological toxins or infectious agents such as bacteria or viruses--or a chemical warfare agent to target the U.S. homeland is becoming more probable, analysts and officials said.

In terms of biosecurity, "we are much better prepared than we were" post-9/11, said Tom Inglesby, director of the Center for Health Security at the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health in Baltimore, Maryland. "But we are not where we need to be, and the progress is, in some cases, somewhat fragile."

The world has witnessed the use of chemical weapons against hundreds of people in Syria in recent years, said Rebecca Hersman, director of the project on nuclear issues at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank. Earlier this year, the half-brother of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un was assassinated in Malaysia with the nerve agent VX, and the Islamic State has launched multiple chemical attacks against Iraqi and Syrian forces since 2016.

"So what you are seeing... is a recognition at the state and local level and across DHS that chemical threats, even from a domestic perspective, may have been pushed too far off-burner," she said.

The department's science and technology directorate took a 28 percent budget cut when the omnibus bill for fiscal year 2017 was signed in May, and the chemical biological defense division is "taking a cut much more significant than that" in fiscal year 2018, said John Fischer, division director.

"I wish I were flat, but I'm not," he said at the National Defense Industrial Association's Chemical-Biological-Radiological and Nuclear Defense Conference in Wilmington, Delaware.

The directorate in May released a budget overview for congressional justification, which stated over $58 million would be put toward chemical, biological and explosive defense research and development for 2017, assuming a continuing resolution would remain in effect for the rest of the fiscal year. Less than $53 million was requested for 2018, according to the document. DHS did not respond to requests for an interview.

Programs to develop biosurveillance systems to collect and exploit data in the case of an attack, build more reliable chemical detectors, and develop repositories of biothreat agents that could be used for detection, response and recovery, all see budget reductions in 2018, according to the budget document.

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