Hearing of House Subcommittee on Telecommunications and Internet- How Internet Protocol-Enabled Services are Changing the Face of Communications...(1)

HEARING OF HOUSE SUBCOMMITTEE ON TELECOMMUNICATIONS AND THE INTERNET - HOW INTERNET PROTOCOL-ENABLED SERVICES ARE CHANGING THE FACE OF COMMUNICATIONS: A VIEW FROM GOVERNMENT OFFICIALS

APRIL 27, 2005

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Mr. Cummings. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. And certainly we welcome Mr. Higgins to our side of the table.

Mr. Chairman, I want to thank you for holding this very important hearing on the President's proposed drug budget for fiscal year 2006. I would like to extend an appreciative welcome to our two distinguished witnesses, the Director of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy and principal advisor to the President on drug policy, John Walters; and certainly to Dr. Peter Reuter, the founder and former director of the RAND Drug Policy and Research Center and now professor of public affairs in criminology at the University of Maryland School of Public Policy.

As we meet today to discuss the President's proposals for Federal drug control programs and the process by which the Federal drug budget is formulated and defined, drug abuse, addiction and a corrosive and often violent drug economy continue to ravage communities throughout the Nation. These communities are urban, rural and suburban, rich, middle class and poor; and the drug threats they face vary greatly along geographical and demographic lines. It is clear that disadvantaged populations in our Nation's cities are disproportionately affected, however, and nowhere in America are the tragic consequences of drug abuse and drug violence more evident than in my own city of Baltimore, including the neighborhood I call home.

It was just today in the Sun paper the Federal prosecutors took over a State case where a woman had been fire-bombed out of her house because she decided to cooperate with the police with regard to some drug activity, and, Director Walters, you will recall we dealt with the Dawson case where seven people were incinerated to death because they simply wanted to cooperate with the police with regard to drug activity. And so we see it up front and personal in the 7th Congressional District of Maryland.

The Office of National Drug Control Policy plays an important role in shaping our Nation's response to the drug problem, and I am thankful to Director Walters for demonstrating his concern and compassion for the plight of my neighbors in Baltimore City. And I will say it, Mr. Chairman, that--and I say it to the world--I think John Walters has done an outstanding job; he has been fair; I've never felt one moment of bipartisanship. I feel that you deal with things in a very professional way, and I am glad that you are where you are.

Because the drug problem is so multifaceted, the agencies that address its various aspects are located throughout the government. ONDCP was created in 1988 for the primary purpose of coordinating drug control policymaking among these various agencies.

The ONDCP Director's authority to certify the budgets of the agencies that perform drug control functions is among the statutory tools that ONDCP has at its disposal to ensure that those budgets reflect and advance the President's priorities and goals in the area of drug control. The Director also oversees the formulation of the National Drug Control Strategy, which places the drug budget request and policy objectives in a narrative framework and evaluates the effectiveness of drug control initiatives for the prior fiscal year.

Beginning in fiscal year 2004, ONDCP undertook a restructuring of the Federal drug budget that affects what costs and functions are included in the collection of agency budgets that we call the drug budget for purposes of evaluating and formulating policy. We will look at the implications of that restructuring today, in addition to looking at the drug budget itself.

Although we have yet to see either the President's 2005 strategy or a detailed accounting of the Federal drug budget, the proposed funding for all Federal agencies involved in drug control is set forth in the overall budget request submitted to Congress this week. From that, we can draw some conclusions.

The fiscal year 2006 drug budget is more heavily weighted toward supply reduction than to demand reduction, and to a greater extent than in years past. The fiscal year 2006 budget allocates approximately 39 percent of drug control funding to demand reduction versus 45 percent in fiscal year 2005. Sixty-one percent of the drug control spending is devoted to supply reduction activity, much of it based in source countries.

The total $4.8 billion allocated for demand reduction fiscal year 2006 is not just a smaller percentage of the drug budget, it also represents a net reduction of about $270 million compared to the level appropriated by Congress in fiscal year 2005. The most severe program cut in the area of prevention is elimination of $441 million in funding for grants to States under the Safe and Drug-Free Schools Program within the Department of Justice, and the consequences will be felt in classrooms across the country where States cannot fund drug education on their own. The Drug-Free Communities Grant Program is funded at $10 million below the authorized level, and the budget of the new Community Coalition Institute is slashed by more than one-half.

In the area of treatment, there are substantial increases for drug courts and the Residential Substance Abuse Treatment Program, but the Substance Abuse Prevention and Treatment Block Grant, the backbone of the Nation's drug treatment infrastructure, and Targeted Capacity Expansion grants are merely level-funded. Within the Center for Substance Abuse Treatment, only the President's Access to Recovery voucher initiative, a new program, that serves only 14 States currently, receives a significant increase.

With regard to domestic law enforcement, the President's budget increases support for the Drug Enforcement Administration, but proposes not only to cut the HIDTA Program by more than $128 million, more than half its fiscal year 2005 budget, but also to move it to the Department of Justice. This would sharply curtail joint antidrug efforts by Federal, State and local law enforcement, and change the flexible nature of the HIDTA Program that makes it so effective and valuable in the Baltimore-Washington region and elsewhere. At the same time, we are increasing funding for supply reduction activities that have yet to fulfill their purpose of affecting the price, purity and availability of dangerous, illicit drugs like cocaine and heroin in the United States.

Although marijuana use among the 8th, 10th, and 12th-grade students has dropped significantly, according to the December 2004 Monitoring the Future survey, the very same survey shows use of cocaine and heroin increasing in the same population subgroup. Thus, while the data allows the President to claim victory in meeting his goal of reducing overall drug use by 10 percent over 2 years, there is a disturbing trend going on with regard to cocaine and heroin, and our Nation's drug policy must be responsive to it.

Mr. Chairman, the significant shifts in drug control funding priorities at the beginning of the President's second term will be attributed in part to the deficit, but the apparent de-emphasis of demand reduction is disconcerting even in that context. The deficit has many effects, but eliminating the unmet need for treatment capacity is not one of them.

I'm also troubled by what drug policy experts outside the administration believe is a rather arbitrary approach to deciding what agencies and functions are included in or omitted from the restructured drug budget. Both of these developments concerning the drug budget raise questions about how ONDCP's statutory authorities are being exercised that we should address today and in the coming months.

I'm really looking forward to a healthy discussion among our colleagues and our distinguished witnesses, and I yield back the balance of my time.

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Mr. Cummings. Thank you very much. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

I want to just piggyback on some of the things that the chairman has said.

When, say, for example, the President and his Cabinet, and you, I guess, propose to eliminate the Safe and Drug-Free Schools grants to States, and to cut the HIDTA budget by $100 million, I just want to know, were you for that?

Mr. Walters. Yes, sir.

Mr. Cummings. Were you for that? And how does that process work?

Let me tell you why I'm asking. I'm not trying to--I just want to know, because this affects a lot of people. And I think that when you've got employees who--I mean, I've sat and talked to some of these wonderful, brave folks that work in HIDTA, and a lot of them are putting their lives on the line every day. And one of the things that they like to feel is that the people who are at the top are supporting them; I mean, that is just good for morale. And I think what I am trying to figure out, for my sake and for theirs, is how does that process work? And then I would like to hear specific comments about HIDTA and about the Safe and Drug Free Schools programs. I'm just using those two.

Mr. Walters. Well, if you want--the general background is, in terms of the construction of the budget, we send out guidance in springtime essentially to all the drug control agencies, following the enactments of the previous year, the current fiscal year; or in the proposals, the policy that we are contemplating, what we think works and doesn't work, we give them general guidance about their programs' directions and futures. We receive program-level submissions in the summer as they are submitted through the agencies--actually, sometimes before they're submitted through the agencies--through OMB. We continue discussions with the departments about priorities and directions. We receive sometimes information on evaluations and data during the year. We work then with the departments, with OMB, and then for those--where there is a dispute, there is an appeal process right up to the President on critical budget matters.

In the case of the two programs you raised specifically, Safe and Drug Free Schools, I am aware, I have travelled around the country, that there are a number of people doing important work in schools that is partly or significantly funded by this program. I am also aware--and we have said for some time, we have had discussions with Members of Congress--that the problem with this program is there also is a significant amount of money here that you can't show whether it's producing any results. And the program has been broadened; and, in fact, you are allowed to transfer money, as some school districts have done, out of drug programs into other education programs.

Now, again, we can have a variety of flexible programs. I'm responsible for saying what works in drug control. This program, after several years of working with the program staff, does not have the demonstrable results, and there is some indication that we have difficulty building those into this format. That's not helping a lot of the kids that need the help. It's holding the place of a program that should, but it's not being restructured.

We're proposing to put more money into national programs and education that can be targeted. We're proposing to expand and sustain things like drug treatment, things like community coalitions, things like drug testing that we believe will help to expand and effect reductions in both prevention, and those who have begun to use, by cutting off that use early or by treating it.

In the case of HIDTA--which I recognize is a subject of some concern, we knew that when we made the decision--the program has important needs to focus on disrupting the market of the drug trade. There has been criticism of the program that too much of the money goes to Federal agencies. We have put more money into FBI and in DEA to back-fill some of the positions that were taken because of needs with regard to terror, and to construct an intelligence that would then allow us to target both further and the State task forces better; the Fusion Center that is being set up now through congressional appropriation in the Justice Department, a total of almost $90 million in those three categories.

The $100 million for the HIDTA Program that we are offering to transfer to--or proposing to transfer to Justice would allow us to do two things: one, put the program in the context of other Justice programs and management under the Deputy Attorney General where task forces exist. We know these drugs, the drugs that come to your city, are not made in your city, they come from other places; they come from other cities on the east coast, they come from other countries, they come from organizations that market at various levels. And in order to effectively cut those off we need better focus and intelligence and coordination; and where we're doing that will make a difference.

We have been trying to put this into the structure of law enforcement from Federal to State and local task forces. The effort will be to maintain the State and local focus of the HIDTA Program, but put it under a consolidated management and direction that can work more effectively with State and locals to cutoff the drugs and the organizations that are marketing the poison at the higher levels that make a difference.

The 400 metric tons of cocaine I talked about seizing has happened without an increase, significantly in interdiction assets because of other pressures in the Caribbean and in the eastern Pacific. The reason is we've had better intelligence. When we do it smarter, as we do with terror, when we can identify individuals, and when we can coordinate pressure on key elements, we can make a difference.

If the Federal Government, on the other hand, however important local law enforcement is, and it is important, obviously, but when all those resources are drawn in a way to the largest number of potential sellers or the largest number--we're not cutting off the head of the snake. We start this process, which you and I have talked about, of taking generation after generation of young men, especially poor, minority young men, in our cities and putting them in jail. And I think citizens rightly say, can't we stop this? Lock the people up the chain that if we focused on wouldn't allow this business to continue.

That's what we're all trying to do, and the way to do that, we believe, is by using the intelligence tools which you have given us and which we have worked with law enforcement to get, by focusing--and I recognize for some people this change is going to be painful, but the reason we're doing it is not to cut the budget; the reason we're doing it is to cut the drugs. And we believe that the record here will show that we have been able to strengthen OCDETF, strengthen the task force structure, and put this program in the context of other coordinated law enforcement programs to do the jobs we're trying to do to help HIDTA around the world find the key elements, incapacitate them, keep them off balance, and to help reduce the terror and ravages they put in our cities.

Mr. Cummings. We have had--and I appreciate your response. We have had a number of people from DEA and others come in and talk about how the fight on terror, against terror, has yielded some significant results with regard to drugs; in other words, we tighten up on the borders, we, like you said, using our intelligence more extensively, and in that net sometimes you come up with some drugs, findings or results.

And I guess when you were talking about the 400 tons, I was saying to myself, well, maybe it's true that a portion of that 400 tons came--that we were successful there because of our efforts with regard to terror. But let me give you the other side of it that concerns me.

The chairman and I worked very hard on trying to get--we were worried that when we moved to dealing with terrorism, that the new Department of Homeland Security would not have--would not put the emphasis on drugs that we were hoping that hey would. We were worried about that, so we had--we were able to create a position--what was the name of that position?

Mr. Souder. The counternarcotics officer.

Mr. Cummings. Yeah, the counternarcotics officer. And I'll tell you, the chairman--we had the counternarcotics officer in here 1 day for a hearing; and it was one of the saddest things I've seen, because he was temporary, he had to beg for his budget from different people. It seemed almost like he had been--become a step-child in the whole process. And I will never forget that day because I remember the chairman and I looked at each other and said, is this what we created? I mean, we were looking for somebody who had some real authority, somebody who did not have to go around asking different people could they get money. And the chairman can correct me if I'm wrong, but it was kind of a disturbing moment because it seemed to go against the very thing that we were trying to do.

And I guess as I--you know, as I listen to you, I just wanted to make sure that, see, with the HIDTA, they would definitely--they had their eye on drugs. That was their thing. I just wonder when you move things around a little bit and you say, well, we're going to now have them coming under Justice, and Justice is going to do this and do that, I don't want our efforts to combat the drug problem to get lost in the process. That's what concerns me.

And, you know, I think that--it's not just that I'm concerned about these employees that go out every day and put their lives on the line, I am very concerned about that, but I am also concerned about what you're concerned about. I am concerned about the mission, because as I've said to you many times, you know, I've got terrorists in my own neighborhood----

Mr. Walters. Yes.

Mr. Cummings [continuing.] That people are much more afraid of, believe it or not, than they are of somebody coming from--you know, sending a bomb over to this country and harming somebody, because they deal with it every day, they see it every day. They see their relatives destroyed by it every day; they see their property values going down every day. And so--they see that they can't come out of their houses every day. So it's not like some foreign person over in Iraq, they're worried about what's going on in their neighborhoods.

And I think--and he can speak for himself--I think the chairman had the same kind of concerns, that we want to make sure we deal with terrorism--we've got to do it, no doubt about it--but we also have to balance it and make sure that we deal with the problems that we have here right at home.

Mr. Walters. And we could not have a stronger point of agreement on that.

I also think of it as, for those people who die serving in the Armed Forces in Iraq or Afghanistan or in other places where is it less visible, they don't give their lives to allow young people to be eaten up by drugs. They don't give their lives to have our new neighborhoods destroyed. It's a failure to keep faith with them and the sacrifices they and their family make to not make this problem small as fast as we can.

We agree. And the issue here is not about caring. Now, do I think we could make some continued management improvements? Of course I do. I think the intelligence fusion that we're talking about is critical. I know people like to say, well, there's too much talk about intelligence and various centers, and are they really working. The key to doing this is intelligence, and I believe the battle on terror is not an obstacle, but a lesson. This is a small number of people, small quantities of poison sent to our cities to kill our citizens. We need to be--we can't turn ourselves into a police state. We need to be able to go after the structures that provide that, and we need to obviously prevent citizens from being addicted and from starting this path, who draw that, through their dollars, into our communities. We believe in that balance.

Now, again, people may differ about what level, what program, what contribution. We have made decisions that we believe are right. I recognize that people can have other opinions about the apportionment, but the key that I think that we can't reasonably disagree with is we want law enforcement pressure against the critical elements that will break down the system, the higher the better. The frequency of operations against high-level structures in trafficking have to be accelerated. We have to break down, as we do, the ability of these networks to continue to operate when we take one or two people out in working with the Justice Department. Two-year investigations, however great and dedicated people are, and take down somebody and charge them with 600 years of violations is something that we're trying to change.

We have created the first consolidated target list of potential--or of known major traffickers, and we want to accelerate taking them down, identify and remove them as rapidly as possible to begin to cause breakdowns. We have not had serious breakdowns except for two examples. It looks like the largest decline you see on teenage drug use is in two categories, LSD and ecstasy, over the last 3 years, where, in addition to the overall 17 percent reduction, you see reductions in over 60 percent. It is apparently because we have significantly disrupted the supply, in addition to getting our prevention messages on ecstasy.

And on LSD we certainly disrupted supply because we took down a major distributor who had, in abandoned missile silos, made or who had material to make 25 million doses. The consequence is we did not realize how centralized that was.

The goal is to expand that so that we accelerate both prevention and demand reduction and supply reduction. Again, can we do that? Many people think it can't be done, but this is a business that is infinitely capable of resisting damage by law enforcement or by interdiction or by operations. We don't believe that. We believe people are making a difference every day. We believe 400 metric tons of cocaine that doesn't come from the United States saves lives. We all want to begin, though, to say people are having trouble getting drugs to harm themselves, they're getting into treatment, they're getting away from the temptation. And that's, I think, our common goal.

Mr. Cummings. Just one more question, if you will, Mr. Chairman.

I can't ask you, because asking would be too cheap. I am begging you to help us deal with this issue of witness intimidation. I'm telling you, we cannot have thugs going around killing people because they want to testify and cooperate with the police. We can't have that.

Mr. Walters. I agree.

Mr. Cummings. Anywhere.

Mr. Walters. I agree.

Mr. Cummings. And I cannot tell you how much this bothers me, because what that means is that we will have a lawless society.

Now, I don't know how bad it is in other places, but when you have a situation in Baltimore that 30 to 35 percent of your cases can't go to trial because witnesses are being threatened, and killed sometimes, and harmed, and they disappear--we had murder case--not a murder case, some fellow comes and shoots up a school, shoots into a crowd of students. They couldn't even go forward with one of the cases because nobody would testify because of what we think to be witness intimidation. And you know the Dawson case. All I'm saying, I mean, I just--we need help.

Mr. Walters. I will talk to the Attorney General, who has recently been confirmed. I've had brief discussions with him, but we're going to sit down and we're going to review the full range of programs. I'll talk to him, and we will get back to you on what we can do.

Mr. Cummings. Thank you.

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Mr. Cummings. Can you explain what data goes into OMB's program assessment rating to how HIDTA and the Media Campaign were rated? Do you know?

Mr. Walters. Yes. The principal data that goes into it are the reports that are part of the GPRA process, the government results and--the accountability statute that each program is supposed to provide. The quality of the design of those plans and objectives for the program. And then the quality of the measurement of achievement of those. In other words, if the program has a certain purpose but the operation of the program is not aligned with that purpose or is not able to carry out that purpose or the data shows that if it is aligned properly it is not achieving that purpose, it gets a lower score than one that is. Again, this is a tool. It is a tool for the decisionmaker. It is not the decisionmaker.

Mr. Cummings. From a very practical standpoint, let's say the budget goes through as it is right now as proposed. What appens to the HIDTA offices?

Mr. Walters. We are proposing--again, we have proposed this as a starting point. We have not proposed this as a decision in all detail. I will work with the Justice Department. We will work with people in the field to realign the program under the principle of integration and coordination, focused on State and local support. I presume that means that some of the structure may continue as is. Some of the structure obviously would change. But we have not made--we have not decided that in advance. When you obviously meet with a program this involved, with the partnerships involved, we are going to need to work not only with Justice Department but obviously the people in the field.

Mr. Cummings. But it could mean and it is reasonable to assume and you may have said this in what you just said, that some of those offices actually, the locks will be put on and the program itself is gone, will be gone, some of these 25 at least.

Mr. Walters. Sure. Everything is on the table at this point.

Mr. Cummings. I was listening to some of the chairman's questions. It was my understanding that back in the fiscal year 2006 budget scores, there was a $300 million increase for the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement as drug control spending. But when my staff looked at the ICE Web page, they saw items describing ICE's efforts in the war on terrorism, investigations into Canadian telemarketing fraud and child sex abuse cases, to extradition of a double murderer to Honduras, but not a single item explicitly relating to drug control. How is it that ICE is scored as a drug control while the costs of prosecuting and incarcerating defendants for drug crimes is excluded from the restructured Federal drug budget?

Mr. Walters. You are asking that question because I think we have kind of touched on this topic, and I am glad to have a chance to respond. As you know, in the first strategy that we released in 2002, we announced our intention to restructure the budget. The goal of this restructuring was to focus the program array on the things we are doing and managing to make the drug problem smaller, not just the cost of the drug problem. There had been in the past, beginning when I actually served in the Reagan administration, when this problem began, is to try to also capture, how much does the government spend on the drug problem? On many of those that were arrayed, part of them were arrayed to show what the costs were. Part of them were arrayed to show, if you spend a lot of money, you care a lot, which sometimes is true, sometimes is not true. So, for example, programs like Head Start, because a small number of the people who came in relatively might have gotten referred to treatment or prevention, there was a good faith effort to estimate that, and that small percentage arrayed against a small program created a large number. So you had a large budget.

But the problem was, I believe that was fundamentally dishonest and certainly was not good management because we were scoring parts of things that we could not manage and we could not work with you at managing. So we reduced the budget to the managed programs that are designed to make the problem smaller, so we could, for the first time, take money across supply and demand, prevention, treatment, interdiction and international programs. There are pressures on those programs that have to be kept in mind but we could look at these things and really do them in a comparative way. For some agencies, a small number, for example, some DHS programs, Veterans Affairs, this is modeled on what happened at the Department of Defense, you have multifunction programs that do not pull out a single component like DEA or like the block grant for treatment. What did we do in that case? We issued a series of circulars asking those departments, once they got their appropriation and on the basis of the appropriation we represented, to give us a financial expenditure plan that they would manage those dollars for drug control purposes. For example, we made a change in this year's budget with regard to Veterans Affairs. Veterans Affairs had scored not only the treatment, and as you know they are the largest single hospital system in the country, and they spend a lot on treatment. In addition to that, they were scoring related health care costs for people who come into treatment. Sometimes those health care costs are a result of your addiction. We know there are diseases. But what that happened to do is capture roughly a half a billion dollars as treatment funds connected to this budget.

As we refined these numbers in the process, we took those out. I could inflate the treatment number and the demand reduction number today by half a billion dollars just by not making that change. What I chose to do is to focus on, what are we really spending here and to talk about what--not what the drug problem costs, because you know the cost. A large portion of mental health costs are connected to substance abuse. A large portion of dependency and welfare costs, child endangerment costs as well as a variety of other costs, prison costs, prosecutorial costs; those are not managed costs. Those are consequences of the drug problem, and we are not going to not give somebody health care and Medicare and Medicaid that may be because the disease is related to drugs because we did not fund the drug portion of it. We are not going to not incarcerate people that are convicted because we did not score this.

Again, we provide information on cost. We provide a report which we just released again on the cost of drugs to the society. The specific institutional costs, incarceration, problems in their jobs, health care costs, missed opportunity costs. We provide that report in a separate publication that covers all those costs. So we are not hiding any of those costs. What we are doing is providing a budget that really shows you what we are spending and so, when you make choices as legislators, you can say, I think this ratio is wrong or I think this program makes sense, and this does not make sense, and you are not getting a scored array of money that does not mean anything.

It also allows people to say, we are spending $80 billion on drugs, and how can we show it is effective? I recognize $12.5 billion is a lot of money. I have not been in Washington so long that I do not spend that. But I like to point out to people, for those who think it is a lot, it is a big country, a country that spends $25 billion on candy a year. So I think this is a responsible budget that focuses on the responsible programs that work, and we need to make sure that is what we are focused on and not about accumulating costs for reasons that really confuse the central debates we need to have.

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Mr. Cummings. One of the programs that we have been able to move enthusiastically under this subcommittee was the Drug-Free Communities Program. It is a program that we embraced because it is a way of empowering the everyday citizen who wants to address prevention and drug problems in their neighborhoods to do something. There are so many people who are probably watching us right now who are sitting there just feeling helpless. And so that is a program that I like. I am sure--and it is just based upon conversations with my colleagues, not only on this subcommittee and committee but in the Congress. I get a lot of inquiries about it. People want to try to help their communities help themselves. You talked about the effectiveness of using taxpayer dollars. I just was wondering, what is your assessment of the Drug-Free Communities Program? And then we had to call this an institute, and now I see that their budget has been cut by half. I am just wondering, where are we on that?

Mr. Walters. Let me make it clear. We have level funded the Drug-Free Communities Program. We have requested the same funds in the various components that we requested last year. In this budget environment, we did that because we think it is an important program. It is a measure--as you can see, we have made sometimes painful decisions on programs we do not support, and we made those recommendations. We have doubled the number of Drug-Free Communities during the first term of the Bush administration. There are now 714. We have worked with your office on one of those coalitions in your district. We believe this works. It is in the process, though, as a new program of a complete evaluation. It has been reviewed under the hard structure, but we are in the process of creating an evaluation mechanism that will allow us to tell whether those communities are effective. I have instructed my staff to accelerate that process to the maximum extent possible because I think what we want to do is to see as clearly as we can what the contribution is of those communities in reducing drug use. We believe it allows us to bring together, as you know, faith communities, treatment, law enforcement, private sector, government, schools, parents, public officials in those communities, because we know that when they all play a critical role in this problem, we make more progress. We think that is the way to go. The program is designed to, as you know, help to form coalitions, help to stand them up, give them a number of years, if they are working to be able to be supported and to then get them supported by the community. So we are hoping to be able to continue the process of growing that program. But the goal is, I think, certainly reflected--the goal of increasing those communities, the number of communities we have met, we continue to push the program.

Mr. Cummings. The reason why I raised the question is that there is $10 million on the authorization, but I guess your argument would be is that if it is level funded, considering all the things that are happening to other parts of the budget, that is considered a victory. I am not trying to be facetious.

Mr. Walters. Yes. Look, would you make some of these decisions in another environment? Maybe. Maybe. Again, I think this program is strong. Also, I think it would be useful to us to have the evaluation. Again, I think people feel very good about the program. I think it has done some remarkable things. I have visited a lot of these communities. It gives hope. I agree with you. My staff, I am instructing to actively try to recruit more in areas that we identify where there is a drug problem. This is a tool that is relatively inexpensive that allows us to help organize people, in our cities, in Native American areas that have been hit by substance abuse, in rural areas where people feel isolated. We have all kinds of examples of these that work. We have created mentoring coalitions to help start other coalitions. We have a lot of things going on. We have people who--yet we are also being rigorous and say where coalitions fail. We want to be able to replace failing coalitions with new coalitions that have an opportunity to work and allow failing coalitions to have an incentive to make themselves work. We went through this, I think, with some of the folks in your district where they had trouble getting themselves organized, and now they are there, and now they are moving, I think.

Mr. Cummings. They are. That is what I was trying to get to when I was talking about the coalition piece being cut in half. It seems to me that, if we really want to maximize our dollars and try to guarantee as much progress as we can, you want to buildup your coalition. It seems like your institute, if you build that institute up, have that cooperation using best practices and things of that nature, then you would have a better opportunity of maximizing effectiveness.

I know it is a small amount of money but I am talking about the coalition piece. But I think, for that small amount of money, the dividends are just huge, or have the potential of being huge. So the last thing I think I would want to see done is cut the coalition institute piece in half. Do you follow me?

Mr. Walters. Yes. Again, I understand this as we are not only supporting the community coalitions program, we are supporting the institute. We are not supporting it at the same level Congress appropriated last year. You added $1 million. We believe that, under those circumstances, our request last year is the right request this year. People will have other views. We are not trying to cut the effectiveness of the program. We are trying to make sure we support the program and continue that effort and in this environment, again, I think this is a measure of our seriousness in support and not a measure of criticism here. There may be a difference about how much money you put into the institute versus--look, my own view is I want to keep that million dollars in the base of the program to start more coalitions. It is $100,000 a year; $1 million is 10 more coalitions. Maybe somebody thinks that $1 million in the institute is a better way. I guess my view is, I want to keep that $1 million in the coalition program. You could say, well, why don't I just ask for another $1 million? Because I also have to worry about the technology transfer program and C tack and the Media Campaign. So we are trying to make an environment that is responsible decisions about proportionality which I recognize reasonable people could differ over. That is the thought process. I am being honest with you.

Mr. Cummings. Let me just ask you this. I think you said--correct me if I am wrong--you said that when--I guess when Clinton first came in, you decided you wanted to leave. Is that what you said?

Mr. Walters. That was too brief. I am sorry. At the end of the President's father's administration when I was working at the drug office, there was a request for individuals, political appointees, I was actually a deputy for supply reduction at that time, to stay on in each of the agencies to transfer the agencies to the incoming administration. I was asked to be that person at the Office of National Drug Control Policy. There were 146 FFEs in the office at that time. Following the inauguration, I was in there, it was February 9, I believe, I was there till that point. I was working with the one person that was there for transition. The administration announced that it was going to cut the office from the 140-plus positions, and we had already removed political appointees, so it was below that a bit, to 25. I did not believe that there could be a serious transition to 25 people, and so I resigned at that point before Mr. Brown was nominated and confirmed which I would not have done, but I just felt that, and that is why I maybe was too defensive when the chairman suggested that my office was being gutted. I have been there, and I have strong feelings about the office.

I think the country is certainly stronger than any single bureaucratic office, but I think it playsan important part and so maybe I reacted a little more strongly than I should have. But I watched a lot of destruction. I watched a lot of what we had built up because the office just came into existence in 1989, and I think, while the office does not simply make for the national effort, I do think it exists to coordinate things that need to be coordinated and when it is broken, things start falling apart. As long as I am here, I am only going to be here as long as I think things are not falling apart, and I do not think that is what is happening here and I maybe reacted a little too strongly to the hint that the chairman thought they were. Again, I recognize that we are all in the same agreement on this, but there was some painful history there.

Mr. Cummings. Let me just ask you this. I hate to put you on the spot, but I am curious. When you look at the cuts, is there anything, any of these cuts that bother you personally? I believe in you. But I am just wondering, is there anything here that bothers you? That you look at and you say, well, you know, maybe we have gone a little bit too far here? Or maybe this is not going to get it? Is there anything here? Or that you lose a little sleep over?

Mr. Walters. I think that the array of programs that we are talking about here are, and not just because I am in the administration, are the things we need to do. The places that we have increased funding I believe are critical places. Would I if I had a free hand do more? Last year, we asked for $200 million in the President's Access to Recovery Program. Congress gave us $100 million. I believe and the President believes we need more money in treatment. We believe we need to provide it in a flexible way. We believe we need to provide it to more of the people who are seeking treatment and do not get it. If we came back and asked for $150 million, I recognize in this budget it is going to be hard to get the additional $50 million. I certainly know that both of you care very much about this, and we are going to need help again to try to get that. I would like to see more of that. The other large cut that you have brought up, look, I believe the HIDTA program will work better or the purpose of HIDTA by restructuring in focus. I sense there is a disagreement among us about what we should be taking our bearing from and so forth. I believe that we can change the face, and we can only change the face of supply reduction systemically by coordinated intelligence-based Federal, State and local enforcement. We are partly moving there. We need to accelerate that as rapidly as possible.

Maybe we should have some discussions with you and maybe some of your key staff about what tools we think we are bringing to bear and why we think that so that you can have a full understanding of maybe why it is not just a matter of, somebody says yes and somebody says no from the executive branch. You have many things you have to be concerned about. I understand that. We should be fair in making sure we are making you fully aware of what we are thinking so you can judge whether or not we are right.

The other area is obviously in the Safe and Drug-Free Schools Program. I understand that this is certainly a serious cut, and I also understand that it affects the apparent balance in the program. And I certainly appreciate the many people who are working in schools to be effective. The problem with the program is that in this environment, the program is not focused effectively and demonstrably on reducing drug use and prevention. We believe that we can better support that by working in community coalitions, by nationally targeted programs where we put more money into the national program part of the education account to allow accountable grant programs to reduce substance abuse. We also believe that, frankly, as we have talked, the other areas of support that we are trying to foster are building into the health care system a better ability to screen for drug problems early, doctors and pediatricians and hospitals in the screening brief interventions programs, in the effort to bring drug courts. We are trying to double the drug courts program. There were 400 more drug courts last year alone, up to over 1,600. Everybody knows these work and they are critical for people who start down the path to stop and to get them early. We also believe that drug testing is the most powerful and potentially far-reaching and lasting program. If we can get over the
misunderstanding that it is going to be used to punish--that it cannot be used to punish--it allows us to connect the understanding of addiction as a disease with the tool of public health that has changed the face of so many childhood diseases.

We cannot give people the treatments we have for HIV/AIDS if we do not test them to find out whether they have HIV. We do not treat people for tuberculosis if we do not test them as to whether they have tuberculosis. And when we do, certainly we have to worry sometimes about the stigma, but in this case, we know testing works for adults in major parts of our, not only the military and transportation safety, but when I go to schools, I see kids who are afraid. I am sure they are the same kids that you see in Baltimore, the same kids I see in other cities and places. Middle school and high school, they see what is happening to some of their peers and some of their families. They do not understand why adults do not do more to stop it. It is because, in part, in addition to prevention, it is a game of hide and seek. Kids start, they bring this behavior back, they encourage their friends to use with them. They are an example. Drug use is fun and it does not cause any consequences. Look at me. That is an ad for drug use. What testing does is it gives those kids the ability to say, I cannot use, I get tested. It is an amazingly powerful prevention tool, and in the schools, that have it, kids feel safe.

Mr. Cummings. I have to tell you, if I extracted a part of the argument you just made, it would fit very nicely with justifying keeping the Safe and Drug-Free Schools piece. I am just telling you, what you just said. As you were talking, I could not help but think about--and then I will finish up. I am finished, Mr. Chairman.

When I think about Safe and Drug-Free Schools, I think about the fact that with our kids, it is not always the deed. It is the memory. It is a memory that we impart with them that lasts with them for a long time. As I was sitting here listening to you, I could not help but think about my daughter who is now 23 years old. I will never forget; she came home when she was about 6 years old, and she says, ``Guess what I learned today, dad?'' I said, ``What is that?'' She said, ``I learned the fire department came in and told us to stop, drop and roll.'' I had never heard of that, believe it or not. The reason why it came into my mind is because, as we were talking about it, I was kidding her about it the other day.

But what I am saying is I am just wondering. I heard your testimony about the Drug-Free Schools. It seems like the problems that you talked about, in other words, trying to measure, making sure the money actually goes into efforts to stop our kids, prevent our kids from using drugs, it seems like there would have been a better way than, say, eliminating the program even if you had to reduce the funds, I do not agree with that, but if you had to, but to zero in a bit on those specific concerns. I am sure you may have had more than you did not mention. But what I am saying to you is sometimes I think we need to--the same reasons you just gave are the same reasons that I think it is important that we send those messages as early as possible, and hopefully, when that young person gets in that environment, whether they are in the 10th or 12th grade, 11th grade or whatever, and they are around drugs that they can hearken back to a time when there was some program in their school where Ms. Brown said something about not using drugs. It may sound very simple, but it is very real.

I think one of the things that Americans are asking for, I hear all this stuff about moral concerns in the elections and all that, but you know what people really want? They want to make sure that government helps them raise their kids in a safe environment, in an environment that is healthy, and so that they can grow up and be productive citizens. I think that those kinds of programs like the safe and drug-free schools is one of those things, because all kids go to school. We have a captive audience. Just something that I just wish you would consider.

Mr. Walters. Thank you.

Mr. Cummings. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

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Mr. Cummings. You heard the testimony of the Director, did you not?

Mr. Reuter. Yes.

Mr. Cummings. When I asked him--and I assume that you are familiar with the programs of Safe and Drug-Free Schools?

Mr. Reuter. I am.

Mr. Cummings. You heard his comments with regard to that, we are now basically eliminating that program. I mean, did you have any opinion on that?

Mr. Reuter. Yes. Actually, about 4 years ago, I coauthored a study commissioned by the Department of Education, published by RAND, evaluating the Safe and Drug-Free Schools Act. And I must say, it was fairly negative about it.

That is to say that we felt the evidence suggested that money was very broadly used and not focused on drug programs, and many ineffective programs, certainly of unknown effectiveness and implausibly effective, were being funded.

Mr. Cummings. So you would have been, I guess, generally in agreement with Mr. Walters with regard to--because it sounds like you are saying almost the same thing he said, that money was being spent on things that were not directly to address drugs used in drug prevention, and that it was very difficult to measure its effectiveness; that is, these funds' effectiveness in that program?

Mr. Reuter. That's correct. This was money that was treated almost like a formula grant, and the result was that, you know, money was given in very small amounts to schools and the costs of trying to evaluate, even keep track of what the schools were doing with these funds, was simply unjustifiable.

And the Clinton administration proposed a rather, as I remember, a rather clumsy restructuring in which there would be lots of evaluation. But if you take evaluation seriously, that really chews up a lot of money; and there was a question about whether you couldn't come up with a different way of distributing the funds that focused the funds more on high-risk schools, you know, the forces that tend to get money, distributed more evenly into almost a formula grant that go against that. But you could certainly design a program which did two things: one, focused on higher-risk schools; and, second, made better use of what is known about effective prevention programs.

Mr. Cummings. Now, it is interesting that you said what you just said, because one of the things that Mr. Walters said during that discussion on Safe and Drug-Free Schools was that he found that one of the more effective uses of funds was to be able to, I guess for lack of a better term, search lockers and things of that nature, as I recall correctly. I mean, have you found that to be ineffective?

Mr. Reuter. I am not the person to sort of get to what are effective programs. I am a reader of the literature--and not much to go around.

Mr. Cummings. I understand.

Mr. Reuter. Let me give you an example of the limits of what we know here.

Mr. Cummings. OK.

Mr. Reuter. About 4 or 5 years ago, a panel of the Department of Education was asked to assess what were known to be effective and promising prevention programs. And about 150 providers of programs offered their curricula for judgment by that panel. At the end of the day, they identified nine as proven effectiveness and only, I think, two or three of those nine were broad-based drug prevention programs. Some were very focused, like those on steroid use amongst athletes.

The simple truth is that we don't have much basis for giving schools directions about what are good programs to use. That isn't to say there aren't good programs, but we do not have an empirical basis for making judgments of effectiveness.

Mr. Cummings. Does the restructured budget stand in the way of formulating sound drug policy, do you think?

Mr. Reuter. Yes, I believe it does. I mean, not, I think, with the precise matter that we are talking about here. I mean, I think that could be fought in terms of the existing drug budget.

But I think the omission of the prosecutions and incarceration--I mean it's terribly specific--but that's a huge item. We are talking about $4.5 billion there, and so discussing the Federal effort without including that is discussing sort of the--discussing the land area of the United States but sort of skipping Alaska. I mean, it just gives you the wrong view about what the Federal Government is doing.

As I said, for ONDCP's purposes, I fully understand the Bureau of Prisons' decision. Prosecution was a little more difficult, but I understand the logic.

But if you are then talking about Congress as a decisionmaker, surely it's important to know what it is that is being spent on the enforcement side in the full, aimed at reducing drug use, not merely the consequences; and the prisons and prosecution are a very important component of that.

Mr. Cummings. Shall we--I'm sorry, please.

Mr. Reuter. No, go ahead.

Mr. Cummings. One of the things, when you mentioned prisons, one of the things I always found fascinating is how people's drug problems could become worse when they went to prison.

Mr. Reuter. Prison has always been a school for worsening of problems. I mean, it's not that nobody gets better in prisons, but rehabilitation is not what prisons tend to do. It's more like dehabilitation. I used to do work on organized crime, and I was talking to a low-level Brooklyn Mafia associate, and he got talking about people in Chicago, and I said how on Earth--I mean, he had hardly gotten to Manhattan; I mean, this is a guy, very local. He was talking about Chicago. He said, well, we are in Atlanta too. And you just sort of realize that these are, in fact, ways of both forging networks and improving skills, I am afraid, that happen and have happened over many generations.

Mr. Cummings. Would you have liked to have seen more money, or would you have liked to have seen more money going into prisons to address drug problems?

Mr. Reuter. I mean, I think it's important to remember that the Federal Government is only a moderately important player in terms of prisons for drug offenders. I think the U.S. prisons have about 60,000 or 70,000 persons in them for drug offenses, probably more like 250,000 in State prisons. And if you include local jails, that probably adds another 150. So if you are sure the Federal Government should be locking up more prisoners and more people for drug offenses, you really want to take it in the context of the total incarceration that we impose on----

Mr. Cummings. That wasn't my question.

Mr. Reuter. I'm sorry.

Mr. Cummings. My question was the prisoners that they do have.

Mr. Reuter. Yes.

Mr. Cummings. Should part of our policy be to make sure that Federal prisoners get drug treatment?

Mr. Reuter. Oh, I'm sorry. It's not a particularly high-risk population.

Mr. Cummings. I guess a lot of these people on that level, on the Federal level, may not even be using drugs.

Mr. Reuter. State prisons have a much higher high-risk population, so I have no judgment about exactly how many, and the Federal prisons are sort of better served than State prisons are. But if you had treatment resources for prisons available, it would be State prisons that are in most need of it rather than Federal prisons.

Mr. Cummings. Let me ask you this. You heard my questions on Immigration and Customs Enforcement?

Mr. Reuter. Yes.

Mr. Cummings. Can you comment on that, please?

Mr. Reuter. In the late eighties and early nineties, agencies were eager to show how much they were doing to deal with drugs, because it was the leading crisis at this time.

The drug crisis--the drug problem is an important problem now, but clearly not seen as anything like the leading crisis. Agencies understandably think that other missions have higher priority, and I think, very plausible, that at the margins they divert resources that had the drug label on them to other things. But I certainly am in no position to judge that has occurred.

Mr. Cummings. And so if you were--and I know you are not trying to--but if you were to give some advice to us within your own parameters, as people who sit here trying to use the taxpayers' dollars effectively and efficiently and as persons who see methamphetamine use destroying people, and crack cocaine, powder cocaine, heroin, so on and so on destroying people and communities, and if you were to give an opinion or give advice as to things we need to concentrate on as legislators, what would that advice be?

Mr. Reuter. OK. I teach in a public policy school. We take advice seriously. That is to say, I don't particularly value my opinions about things. I am much more comfortable saying what are the consequences of choices than saying which you should make. There are no----

Mr. Cummings. Well, why don't we do that? Why don't you give me the consequences of proceeding the way we are proceeding with the budget? You are familiar with the budget situation here.

Mr. Reuter. I----

Mr. Cummings. The proposed budget. And I want you to tell me what you think the consequences will be if we proceed down that road, the road we are going now, as opposed to some other road that might take us in the more positive direction.

Mr. Reuter. OK.

Mr. Cummings. How about that?

Mr. Souder. May I add a supplement to that to reinforce your question?

Mr. Cummings. Sure.

Mr. Souder. For example, were you here for the last----

Mr. Reuter. The whole thing, yes.

Mr. Souder. Director Walters clearly stated over and over--and you could hear us fencing--that he sees nationalization and some of these programs, as opposed to the dollars going to State and local agencies, giving them resources, giving the prosecutors, for example--there is a very particular thing; what would be the consequences of that substantive change?

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