Bush budget scraps 9,790 border patrol agents

[struggle4progress]

President uses law's escape clause to drop funding for new homeland security force
Michael Hedges, Houston Chronicle

Wednesday, February 9, 2005

Washington -- The law signed by President Bush less than two months ago to add thousands of border patrol agents along the U.S.-Mexico border has crashed into the reality of Bush's austere federal budget proposal, officials said Tuesday.

Officially approved by Bush on Dec. 17 after extensive bickering in Congress, the National Intelligence Reform Act included the requirement to add 10,000 border patrol agents in the five years beginning with 2006. Roughly 80 percent of the agents were to patrol the southern U.S. border from Texas to California, along which thousands of people cross into the United States illegally every year.

But Bush's proposed 2006 budget, revealed Monday, funds only 210 new border agents. <snip>

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2005/02/09/MNGOKB837T1.DTL

[Gloria]

1. OK, Dems, rev up for this one!!!!!

eom

[havocmom]

2. The CHEAP LABOR PARTY does not give a fig about Homeland Security

This is more proof. The DO want to make sure there is a big pool of people willing to work without the safeguards like workers comp, unemployment benefits, limits on hours, and so on. Their contributers rely on off the books employees so they can make obscene profits instead of just reasonable profits.

And how about inspecting cargo containers coming into US ports? Anybody know if 80-95% are STILL NOT INSPECTED!

Was talking about this with the guy on the next pillow. The junta will not spend $$ on real security if it means paying people to do real work. They WILL, however, manage to make billion$ vanish from the DOD budget via buying high priced gadgets from corporations with contracts and payoffs to guys who also work for Iran. And the troops in Iraq have to ask family to send knives, water and food.

[VelvetMonkeyWrench]

3. cargo container inspections

I see this as a sort of moot point in a practical sense.

If say someone wanted to ship a nuke bomb into CONUS, inspecting off loaded containers wouldn't be terribly useful because they'd just use a GPS trigger and have it blow when the ship was somewhere near the port (or at least that's how I'd design one so it would defeat depot inspections).

What is happening now is pre-vetting of containers at some of the higher risk origins BEFORE they get loaded.

I've given this quite a bit of thought over the past couple of years and did a bit of research on container volumes coming into ports. The shipping volume is truly staggering. I did a quick SWAG on what it would take to inspect everything coming in, based on a 30-45 minute check per container(inspect time, paperwork, etc). I think the number I came up with was something like 2,000 additional inspectors (plus gear, admin, blah blah) to come close to being able to do it.

In reality, I think the 30-45 minute figure I SWAG'd on is wildely unrealistic too. These things come in packed like sardine cans, so the time to pull it apart, open everything, and put it all back together again is probably more like 12 hours or more if a good check is to be performed - and that would need even more people to jackass the load out, prep it for the actual inspectors, then reseal crates and stuff so it can all be repacked. Naturally, all this handling of the cargos will result in significant rates of breakage, and docks being docks, a fair amount of theft as well - a minor point, but something the govt would have to compensate recipients/senders for.

If someone is going to nuke the US, the bomb will probably come UPS air freight with a GPS trigger.