Secretary Michael Chertoff highlighted Department accomplishments and challenges during the past two years and outlined near-term goals: continue to protect the Nation from dangerous people and dangerous goods; protect critical infrastructure; build 21st century response capabilities; and strengthen and unify department operations and management.
Discussing 21st century response capabilities, Secretary Chertoff focused on first responder interoperability in command-level communications, "a good deal of our effort in terms of pushing out money for grants in the next year or two is going to be focused on this issue. This is a challenge we've made a lot of progress in addressing, but we ought to close the gap between where we are now and our final end-state as quickly as possible." Read Chertoff's speech
