Enhancing Stakeholder Support and Outreach for Preparedness Grants Act
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Rep. Goldman, Daniel S. [D-NY-10]
ID: G000599
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Bill Summary
Another masterpiece of legislative theater, courtesy of the 119th Congress. Let's dissect this farce, shall we?
**Main Purpose & Objectives:** The Enhancing Stakeholder Support and Outreach for Preparedness Grants Act (HR 4058) claims to improve outreach efforts for two grant programs under the Department of Homeland Security: the Urban Area Security Initiative and the State Homeland Security Grant Program. The bill's sponsors, Mr. Goldman and Mr. Thompson, must have thought they were being clever by using words like "stakeholder" and "outreach." How quaint.
**Key Provisions & Changes to Existing Law:** The bill adds new subsections to sections 2003 and 2004 of the Homeland Security Act of 2002, requiring the Administrator to provide ongoing stakeholder outreach, engagement, education, technical assistance, and support. This includes conducting annual surveys to collect feedback from state, local, tribal, and territorial stakeholders. Oh, joy! More bureaucratic busywork.
**Affected Parties & Stakeholders:** The usual suspects are affected: state, local, tribal, and territorial governments; the Department of Homeland Security; and, of course, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). But let's not forget the real stakeholders – the lobbyists and special interest groups who will inevitably benefit from this bill.
**Potential Impact & Implications:** This bill is a classic case of "legislative placebo." It creates the illusion of action while doing nothing to address the underlying issues. The added bureaucracy will only serve to further entrench the existing power structures, ensuring that the same old interests continue to receive funding and support. Meanwhile, the actual effectiveness of these grant programs will remain unchanged.
In medical terms, this bill is akin to prescribing a patient a sugar pill while ignoring the underlying disease. It's a Band-Aid on a bullet wound. The real disease here is the corrupting influence of special interest groups and the lack of accountability within government agencies.
Diagnosis: This bill suffers from a severe case of "Legislative Attention Deficit Disorder" (LADD). Symptoms include:
* A complete lack of meaningful reform * Excessive use of buzzwords like "stakeholder" and "outreach" * Failure to address underlying issues * Increased bureaucracy
Treatment: Apply a healthy dose of skepticism, followed by a strong dose of reality. Recognize that this bill is nothing more than a smokescreen designed to obscure the real problems plaguing our government agencies.
Prognosis: Poor. This bill will likely pass with flying colors, and the public will be none the wiser. The disease of LADD will continue to spread, infecting future legislation and ensuring that meaningful reform remains an elusive dream.
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Rep. Goldman, Daniel S. [D-NY-10]
Congress 119 • 2024 Election Cycle
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Project 2025 Policy Matches
This bill shows semantic similarity to the following sections of the Project 2025 policy document. Higher similarity scores indicate stronger thematic connections.
Introduction
— 169 — Department of Homeland Security 19. U.S. Department of Homeland Security, Office of Inspector General, Management Directive No. 0810.1, June 10, 2004, https://www.dhs.gov/xlibrary/assets/foia/mgmt_directive_0810_1_the_office_of_inspector_general. pdf (accessed March 15, 2023). 20. H.R. 5005, Homeland Security Act of 2002, Public Law No. 107-296, 107th Congress, November 25, 2002, https://www.congress.gov/bill/107th-congress/house-bill/5005 (accessed January 18, 2023). — 171 — 6 DEPARTMENT OF STATE Kiron K. Skinner The U.S. Department of State’s mission is to bilaterally, multilaterally, and regionally implement the President’s foreign policy priorities; to serve U.S. citizens abroad; and to advance the economic, foreign policy, and national security interests of the United States. Since the U.S. Founding, the Department of State has been the American gov- ernment’s designated tool of engagement with foreign governments and peoples throughout the world. Country names, borders, leaders, technology, and people have changed in the more than two centuries since the Founding, but the basics of diplomacy remain the same. Although the Department has also evolved throughout the years, at least in the modern era, there is one significant problem that the next President must address to be successful. There are scores of fine diplomats who serve the President’s agenda, often helping to shape and interpret that agenda. At the same time, however, in all Administrations, there is a tug-of-war between Presidents and bureaucracies— and that resistance is much starker under conservative Presidents, due largely to the fact that large swaths of the State Department’s workforce are left-wing and predisposed to disagree with a conservative President’s policy agenda and vision. It should not and cannot be this way: The American people need and deserve a diplomatic machine fully focused on the national interest as defined through the election of a President who sets the domestic and international agenda for the nation. The next Administration must take swift and decisive steps to reforge the department into a lean and functional diplomatic machine that serves the
Introduction
— 163 — Department of Homeland Security The old practice of relying on Executive Secretary taskings to pull documents for congressional requests does not work: It is slow, the metrics for what documents are gathered and how are unclear, and the components do not gather responsive material in an efficient manner. Document gathering should come from the Office of the Chief Information Officer or a relevant technological element within the department that can pull responsive communications quickly. OFFICE OF LEGISLATIVE AFFAIRS (OLA); OFFICE OF PUBLIC AFFAIRS (OPA); AND OFFICE OF PARTNERSHIP AND ENGAGEMENT (OPE) DHS’s external communications function should be consolidated and reformed so that the President’s agenda can be implemented more effectively. The Office of Partnership and Engagement should be merged into the Office of Public Affairs. In many Cabinet agencies, outreach to companies and partner organizations is similarly performed by the Office of Public Affairs. This would also accomplish a needed DHS organizational and management reform to decrease the number of direct reports to the Secretary. Both public and legislative affairs staff in the components should report directly to their respective headquarters equivalent. This would help to avoid a failure by the department to speak with one voice. It would also allow the component staff to perform more efficiently, overseen by expert managers in their trade. This would also allow DHS to respond to crises effectively by shifting staff as needed to the most pressing issues and better use underutilized staff at less active components. Only political appointees in OLA should interact directly with congressional staff on all inquiries, including budget and appropriations matters. To prevent congres- sional staff from answer shopping among HQ OLA, the DHS OCFO, and components, DHS legislative affairs appropriations staff should be moved from MGMT OCFO into OLA. Regarding components, budget/appropriations staff should move from component budget offices into component legislative affairs offices. Because dozens of congressional committees and subcommittees either have or claim to have jurisdiction over some DHS function, DHS staff from the Secretary on down spend so much time responding to congressional hearing and briefing requests, letters, and questions for the record that they are left with little time to do their assigned job of protecting the homeland. The next President should reach an agreement with congressional leadership to limit committee jurisdiction to one authorizing committee and one appropriations committee in each cham- ber. If congressional leadership will not limit their committees’ jurisdiction over DHS, DHS should identify one authorizing and appropriations committee in each chamber and answer only to it. To focus more precisely on the DHS mission, OLA staff should also identify outdated and needless congressional reporting requirements and notify Congress — 164 — Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise that DHS will cease reporting on such matters. For other congressional reports, OLA should implement a sunset date so that Congress must regularly demonstrate the need for specific data. In both OPA and OLA, a change in mission and culture is needed. The clients of both components are the President and the Secretary, not the media, external organizations, or Congress. OPA and OLA should change from being compliance correspondents for outside entities airing grievances to serving as messengers and advocates for the President and the Secretary. OFFICE OF OPERATIONS COORDINATION (OPS) OPS was originally conceived by then-Secretary Jeh Johnson as an entity tasked with coordinating cross-DHS assets on an as-needed basis using a joint operations approach. This role is particularly challenging because of the disparate nature of mission sets across DHS. OPS should absorb a very small number of tactical intelligence professionals from I&A as the rest of I&A is shut down. Such intelligence officers would be a subordinate element within OPS placed within the National Operations Center. The intelligence officers would provide tactical intelligence support for upcoming or ongoing opera- tions in addition to liaising with their agency/component counterparts. There would be no strategic intelligence analysis done as part of OPS or its new I&A sub-element. In addition to facilitating all-of-DHS coordination on a task-by-task basis, OPS would be responsible for ongoing situational awareness for the Secretary and Deputy Secretary. In addition to long-term staffing, OPS would have cycling billets from each of the major agencies and components to facilitate its most effective working rela- tionships across DHS. OFFICE FOR CIVIL RIGHTS AND CIVIL LIBERTIES (CRCL) AND PRIVACY OFFICE (PRIV) The Homeland Security Act established only an Officer of CRCL, not an office. The only substantive function Congress then assigned to the officer was to review and assess information alleging abuses of civil rights. Since then, Congress and CRCL itself have significantly expanded CRCL’s scope and size well beyond its original intent or helpful purpose. CRCL now operates and views itself as a quasi- DHS Office of Inspector General. This results in a considerable waste of limited component resources, which are routinely tasked to address redundant, overly burdensome, and uninformed demands from CRCL. It is therefore important to recalibrate CRCL’s scope and reach. The organizational structure of both CRCL and the Privacy Office should be changed to ensure proper alignment with the department’s mission. The Office of General Counsel should absorb both CRCL’s and PRIV’s necessary functions
Introduction
— 566 — Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise Consistent with appropriations from Congress, the OJP dispenses approxi- mately $7 billion in various grants. Block grants are given to a state to be awarded pursuant to federal regulations. Some funds to support law enforcement and victims of crime are awarded pursuant to block grants. But most OJP funds are awarded through discretionary grants—specific programs written into the budget by Congress. Although Congress dictates the way in which many grant awards are to be made, federal staff enjoy a tremendous amount of discretion in adding “conditions” and “priority points.” Grants operate with a carrot and a stick. To receive grant funding, a recipient must agree to certain conditions, which in many instances include the President’s priorities. For instance, under an anti–human trafficking grant during the Obama Administration (approximately $110 million in 2020), an awardee had to show a partnership with an LGBTQ organization and always have an interpreter on site. These conditions worked to change culture and overlayed President Obama’s priorities: support for the LGBTQ community and for more of the funding to go to areas with large immigrant populations. During the Trump Administration, a condition added to grants stated that an awardee had to comply with all federal law (stock language), including federal law regarding the exchange of information between federal and local authorities about an individual’s immigration status. This condition prevented law enforcement in “sanctuary cities” from receiving grant awards. While the Trump Administra- tion suffered a series of setbacks from several hostile courts, it obtained from the Second Circuit Court of Appeals a decision upholding the department’s authority to impose these conditions.92 To ensure that taxpayer-funded grants are prioritized and distributed properly, the next conservative Administration should: l Conduct an immediate, comprehensive review of all federal grant disbursals to ensure not only that the programs are being properly administered by the department, but also that the grant funding is being received and used properly by recipients. l Order an overhaul of the DOJ grant application process, to include more rigorous vetting of state, local, and private grant applicants and inclusion of more pre-application criteria to ensure baseline fitness and eligibility for federal grant dollars. This long-overdue enhancement of the grant application and issuance process will ensure that hard-earned taxpayer dollars are going only to lawful actors who support federal law enforcement and demonstrate the ability and willingness to engage in lawful activities. — 567 — Department of Justice Ensuring Proper Enforcement and Administration of Our Immigration Laws. Although its role has changed over the years, most notably following the passage of the Homeland Security Act of 2002,93 the Department of Justice plays a crucial role in the enforcement and adjudication of our immigration laws.94 Its leadership and energy, however, have not always reflected the importance placed by Congress on the execution of that crucial mission. With a few notable exceptions, successful fulfillment of the department’s responsibilities with respect to immi- gration was largely neglected until the Trump Administration. The Department of Homeland Security may be the largest federal department with immigration responsibilities, but successful fulfillment of the responsibilities prescribed by the immigration laws is not possible without bold and dedicated action by the Department of Justice. The DOJ and its leadership must intentionally prioritize fulfillment of the department’s immigration-related responsibilities in the next conservative Admin- istration. This will be no small task, as these responsibilities play out across nearly every DOJ office and component. If they hope to fulfill their responsibilities as assigned by Congress and deliver results for the American people, the department and the Attorney General should: l Issue guidance to all U.S. Attorneys emphasizing the importance of prosecuting immigration offenses,95 and immigration-related offenses. The brunt of these offenses is born by districts along the southwestern border with Mexico, but the simple fact remains that immigration and immigration-related offenses are present in every district across the country. Successfully pursuing the priorities outlined in this chapter will require creative use of the various immigration and immigration-related authorities in close partnership with the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of State, and other appropriate federal entities depending on the situation. l Pursue appropriate steps to assist the Department of Homeland Security in obtaining information about criminal aliens in jurisdictions across the United States, particularly those inside “sanctuary” jurisdictions. l Examine and consider the appropriateness of withdrawing or overturning every immigration decision rendered by Attorney General Garland (and any successor Attorney General during President Biden’s term). The Attorney General should pick up where the Attorneys General under President Trump left off and exercise his or her authority to adjudicate cases and provide guidance in appropriate cases to
Showing 3 of 5 policy matches
About These Correlations
Policy matches are calculated using semantic similarity between bill summaries and Project 2025 policy text. A score of 60% or higher indicates meaningful thematic overlap. This does not imply direct causation or intent, but highlights areas where legislation aligns with Project 2025 policy objectives.