"I know you appreciate the enormity of the task ahead of you," Sen. Joseph Lieberman, top Democrat on the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee, said Friday at the opening of confirmation hearings for Tom Ridge. He is nominated to lead a department that represents the largest federal reorganization since the Defense Department was set up in 1947.
Lieberman, D-Conn., said that since Sept. 11 the administration's response to the threat of terrorism has been "too weak, its vision has been too blurry and its willingness to confront the status quo, including with resources, has been too limited."
Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, in her first assignment as the new chairman of the committee, praised Ridge, the president's current chief adviser on domestic security, as "an extraordinary leader" up to meeting the extraordinary challenge.
She asked Ridge not to overlook the 2 million state and local officials around the country on the front line of the war on terrorism, noting that the legislation creating the agency "offers no assurance that the new department will coordinate and communicate effectively with state and local first responders."
Aides said only a one-day hearing was expected, and a vote to send the nomination to the full Senate could come Friday afternoon.
The former Pennsylvania governor was named by Bush in November when he signed the legislation creating the department. It will combine nearly 24 agencies with 170,000 employees in an attempt to better coordinate anti-terrorism efforts at home.
Folded into the department will be the Secret Service, Coast Guard, Customs Service, Immigration and Naturalization Service, Transportation Security Administration, Federal Emergency Management Agency and the General Services Administration's federal protective services.
Ridge, 57, winner of a Bronze Star for valor in the Vietnam War, was elected to Congress in 1982 and served for 12 years. He was elected governor in 1994. After the Sept. 11 attacks, Bush asked Ridge to head the new White House Office of Homeland Security.
In that job, Ridge won praise for improving communication between Washington and local governments. He got mixed reviews for devising of a color-coded national warning system to help Americans understand the seriousness of terrorist threats.
Senate Democratic leader Tom Daschle said Ridge's experience qualifies him for the new post and it was likely that Ridge would be confirmed by a large margin.
But Daschle, D-S.D., said he first wanted Ridge to set out "a definitive set of goals that we can gauge progress against as time goes by" and an update on anti-terrorism efforts.
"There is an anxiety, an anxiousness in the American spirit right now," and Ridge can address that anxiety by explaining what progress has been made, Daschle said.
Daschle said he wanted Ridge's assessment of the financial resources needed for the department to organize and carry out its mission.
On Thursday, Senate Democrats, arguing that the administration had failed to provide the funds needed to meet the nation's increased security needs, unsuccessfully tried to add $5 billion for security-related programs to a $390 billion spending bill for this budget year.
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