A pair of House Homeland Security hearings Wednesday stressed the meeting of statutory deadlines as part of an effort to have policies in place when the Homeland Security Department changes hands for the first time in January.

The Border, Maritime and Global Counterterrorism Subcommittee panel pressed officials from the Homeland Security and State departments on whether statutory requirements and rapidly approaching deadlines can be met in order to expand the Visa Waiver Program.

And the Subcommittee on Emerging Threats, Cybersecurity, and Science and Technology was told that biosurveillance efforts face significant challenges to meet the deadlines imposed by the Sept. 11 Commission legislation (PL 110-53), but DHS officials are optimistic.

The hearings are part of a monthlong focus on the 9/11 commission law by the committee, which Chairman Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., said had the goal of ensuring a smooth presidential transition.

A rule proposed by DHS in April that would require airlines and cruise ships to collect biometric information from departing passengers was of particular concern to members of the Border, Maritime and Global Counterterrorism Subcommittee.

Subcommittee Chairwoman Loretta Sanchez, D-Calif., said the rule “not only poses an additional burden on an already stressed industry, but it will also cost the industry over $12 billion to implement the program and to train their employees.”

Sanchez added that collecting biometric information on travelers entering and leaving the country is “an inherently governmental responsibility.” Customs and Border Protection “already collects the information for incoming travelers so there is really no need to hand that responsibility off to the airlines,” she said.

The rule is an effort to comply with a June 30, 2009, deadline for implementation of departure tracking procedures. Missing the deadline would prevent the expansion of visa free travel privileges. Eight countries have already signed security and intelligence sharing agreements in anticipation of being admitted to the program.

Ranking Republican Mark Souder of Indiana said that although he was concerned about deadlines being met, he is encouraged progress is being made to collect biometric information on air and sea components.

But, he said, similar progress has not been made in implementing land biometric exit collection, he said.

“I’ve been extremely disappointed that very little effort has been dedicated to a land solution and there appears to be lack of will within the department to address this security vulnerability,” Souder said.

Robert Mocny, director of US-VISIT at DHS, explained that because no existing government infrastructure or personnel exist for collecting biometrics from departing air and sea passengers, it “needs to be incorporated with the current airport departure process.”

But when Sanchez asked the witnesses about contingency plans if Congress rejects the proposed rule or decides to suspend the Visa Waiver Program, the officials had difficultly explaining their Plan B.

“We don’t have a contingency plan,” Mocny said.

“We have the [public] comments now and we’re going to publish the rule in a timely fashion. If that doesn’t go forward, we would have to replan, retool and reschedule from a budget standpoint,” he said.

Stephen A. Edson, deputy assistant secretary of State for visa services, told the panel that if the visa wavier program were suspended, “our contingency plan would be muddling through, honestly.”

Edson explained that ending the visa waiver program would triple the department’s workload.

“Immediately, we’d have to deal with this the best that we could  . . .  tripling the number of visa applications is not something we could handle,” Edson said, “It would take years and it would affect travel and commerce in this country.”

Nearly one year after codifying the 9/11 commission’s recommendations, the Subcommittee on Emerging Threats, Cybersecurity, and Science and Technology held a hearing to determine whether the department is meeting the disease-detection requirements of the law.

It isn’t, but witnesses at the hearing Wednesday differed on the extent of the problem.

The legislation included two key sections related to protecting the nation from natural or man-made biological threats; one (Section 1101) created the National Biosurveillance Integration Center and set a September deadline for full operation. The other (Section 1102) required the Government Accountability Office to submit a report to Congress describing all federal, state, and local disease-watching efforts.

The preliminary observations of the report, released Wednesday, found that two critical elements of the government’s biological defenses — the center and the related BioWatch program, both of which are managed by the Department of Homeland Security — were missing operational deadlines.

Despite the looming deadline, the National Biosurveillance Integration Center had not gained memoranda of understanding with five of the agencies involved in the effort, including the Department of Veterans Affairs, FBI, and Environmental Protection Agency, as well as more complicated operational agreements, said William O. Jenkins, director of homeland security and justice issues for the Government Accountability Office. In addition, the center had not defined what capabilities the center would have to be fully operational or trained employees to use the information technology system, which won’t be completed until 2009.

Chairman James R. Langevin, D-R.I., said he hoped the witnesses could shed light on the problem.

“I am concerned that, although progress has been made, most estimates are that we are still two years from having the full participation of federal, state, local, tribal, private sector, and international partners that a robust biosurveillance capability requires,” Langevin said.

Robert Hooks, deputy assistant secretary for WMD and biodefense at DHS’s Office of Health Affairs, said that although big challenges remained, particularly in gaining the cooperation of the dozen federal agencies involved the detection program, he was optimistic the problems could be overcome by the Sept. 30 deadline.

The center, which is housed in DHS’s Nebraska Avenue headquarters, is charged with rapidly identifying and tracking disease outbreaks, integrating and analyzing data on human, animal, plant, food, and water sources, and disseminating alerts and relevant information to allow for a rapid response — a synthesis of capabilities that has never been tried before, Hooks said.

While final details of interagency agreements have to be resolved, the departments are contributing to the overall mission, Hooks said. He added the center had established an interagency working group and oversight council of member agencies to discuss interagency collaboration and provide guidance, and he said he thought the additional agreements would be worked out before the deadline. “Eventually it will include state local, tribal, international and private stakeholders as well,” he said.

Asked by Langevin if this seemed like a realistic expectation, Jenkins said the last interagency memoranda were signed in January 2007 and that operational agreements were more complex than these, making the goal “fairly ambitious.”

“From our perspective, I wish them luck, I hope they’re right, I hope they’ll achieve it,” he said. Among the remaining issues to be resolved were disagreements over staffing levels and financial arrangements and concerns about data privacy.

“Those tend to be the kinds of things that hold up agreements, and they vary from agency to agency,” Jenkins said.

Ranking member Michael McCaul of Texas said the center was an ambitious but critical one-stop shop and had worked through many of the challenges it faced. The center’s response to a recent salmonella outbreak, which provided a detection picture that isolated the outbreak in tomatoes, served as a good first test, he said.

DHS’s BioWatch program, another early warning system, has also suffered delays in the development of new detection technology.

Under the current system, biological samples are manually collected in 30 cities around the nation and taken to laboratories for analysis, a process of identification that takes anywhere from 10 to 34 hours. The improved technology will take samples automatically and do so for a broader array of pathogens than currently provided.

The automatic sampling is expected to cut down the time it takes to identify biological agents by anywhere from four to as many as 30 hours — a critical time lapse in the case of highly contagious diseases. But operational testing of the new technology is expected to take place in April 2009, about a year later than originally anticipated because of revised operational requirements, with replacements beginning in 2010 and continuing through 2013, according to the GAO.

In the meantime, DHS is developing an interim solution that will automatically analyze air samples but for the same number of biological agents as currently allowed, the evaluation of which will begin in November. If the tests are successful, DHS plans to buy 100 of the interim detectors.

According to Frances Downes, director of the Bureau of Laboratories of the Michigan Department of Community Health, DHS has failed to provide support to the state for serving as a host laboratory since 2003, including the need to deal with increasing space demands for supplies and equipment, and has failed to clarify roles and responsibilities between DHS, its BioWatch contractor and state and local laboratories. Communications, including the transmission of performance data, also have suffered.

DHS witnesses said they were unaware of some of the issues Downes raised but would look into solving any problems.

Asked after the hearing whether he thought it met the goal of Homeland Security Committee Chairman Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., of smoothing the transition to the next administration, Langevin said he thought the testimony and questioning would help officials “not to lose sight of the things that are left undone.”

While the department has made progress on the areas examined, he said he came away concerned that more needs to be done.

Caitlin Webber can be reached at cwebber@cq.com. Matt Korade can be reached at mkorade@cq.com.