Additionally, the Administration continues its commitment to the Promoting Safe and Stable Families Program by requesting to $505 million to assist States in coordinating services related to child abuse prevention and family preservation. This important program also promotes adoption and provides post-adoption support to families.

Child Support Enforcement

The President's FY2004 budget will build on the considerable success of the Child Support Enforcement program. Legislation will be proposed to enhance and expand the existing automated enforcement infrastructure at the Federal and State level and increase support collected on behalf of children and families. When combined with the opportunities to increase child support outlined in the President's FY2003 budget (expanded passport denial, offset of certain Social Security benefits, optional pass through of child support to families on TANF, among others) these proposals offer an impressive $7.5 billion in increased child support payments to families over 10 years. The budget also recognizes that healthy families need more than just financial support and increases resources for the Access and Visitation Program to support and facilitate non-custodial parents' access to and visitation of their children.

President's Management Agenda

I realize that as we work to improve the heath and well-being of every American citizen, we also need to improve ourselves. I am committed to improving the management of the Department of Health and Human Services. The FY 2004 budget supports the President's Management Agenda and includes cost savings from consolidating administrative functions; organizational delayering to speed decision making processes; competitive sourcing; implementation of effective workforce planning and human capital management strategies; and adoption of other economies and efficiencies in administrative operations. We have also included savings in information technology (IT) which will be realized from ongoing IT consolidation efforts and spending reductions made possible through the streamlining or elimination of lower priority projects. The IT infrastructure consolidation will further reduce infrastructure expenditures for several HHS agencies and should be fully implemented by October 2003.

Improving the Health and Safety of our Nation

Mr. Chairman, the budget I bring before you today contains many different elements of a single proposal. What binds these fundamental elements together is the desire to improve the lives of the American people. All of our proposals, from building upon the successes of welfare reform to protecting the nation against bioterrorism; from increasing access to healthcare, to strengthening Medicare; all these proposals are put forward with the simple goal of ensuring a safe and healthy America. I know this is a goal we all share, and with your support, we are committed to achieving it.

HHS COMMAND CENTER

Secretary THOMPSON. Let me discuss a couple of things I think are interesting and important to this committee. The first is bioterrorism. Because of the incidents of last evening and the fact we are going to war, everybody has some degree of concern about their communities and what is happening as far as bioterrorism is concerned.

I would like to extend an invitation to all of you to come over and see our command headquarters at the Department of Health and Human Services. If you come over, what you would see would allay a lot of fears you might have. In this new command headquarters, we have a computer system that is huge, very fast and has probably the best database of any database in the country and possibly the world. We have all the hospitals listed in our database, all the highways, all the streets in your cities, all your fire stations, all your police stations and all the first responders. We know on a daily basis how many hospital beds you have in a hospital, how many vacancies you have, what kind of hospitals. We are able to develop models for just about any kind of chemical in any community depending on the wind and atmospheric conditions. We also have a meteorologist on duty and we are open 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

We have teleconferencing capability and I have been involved internationally with the World Health Organization due to the new illness. I would like to talk to you about that in a couple of minutes.

We have the country divided into ten regions, with approximately 8,000 medical personnel, doctors, nurses, morticians as well as veterinarians. We are able to activate them. We have three of our DMED Level 1 teams, our most highly sophisticated ones, 28 of those teams, 2,800 individuals we can call on short notice and be able to direct them to any community in the country.

We have 600 tons of medical supplies and equipment distributed in 12 strategic locations in America which require nine semi-truckloads to haul or one KC-135 but we can make sure they can be transported to any city in America within seven hours. We have Level 1 chemical kits that we have distributed to the major cities and are asking them to put them in their ambulances as well as their fire departments so they can be used immediately if there is chemical exposure.

We also have the capacity that no other place in the world has to hook up to any one of 4,000 local television stations in America. We also just got hooked up with El Jazira in Pakistan. I think this is the only place in the country that has that, so we watch El Jazira, Pakistan and we also have the capacity of hooking up and being able to tap into any one of 4,000 local television stations. If something happened in Topeka, Kansas, we are able to call up local TV stations and watch them while we watch the national news and be able to respond. Our teleconferencing capability gives us the capacity of dealing with ten different groups at the same time and be able to respond immediately.

SEVERE ACUTE RESPIRATORY SYNDROME (SARS)

In regards to the disease that all of you are concerned about, we are observing 264 cases right now, 11 of which are in the United States, none of which we have confirmed is the SARS disease. There was an individual from Guangdong Province who became sick when he stayed at the Metropole Hotel outside of Hanoi. There were seven other individuals who became sick on the same floor. They were the eight individuals who fanned out into Hanoi, Singapore, Bangkok and Canada and became sick. It was all traced back to this one hotel. We don't have the common source yet but we are getting it down to that hotel. It was a place where all eight individuals became deathly sick and were on the same floor of the Metropole Hotel which is somewhat interesting.

So far we have not confirmed, and Dr. Weldon you will appreciate this, that it is a virus but it appears from our preliminaries that it may be the paramyxo virus that also is part of the family of viruses that causes measles, mumps and pneumonia. We are not certain about that. I should have confirmation of that some time today. We will give that to Chairman Regula and he can distribute it to the members of the committee.

Mr. REGULA. Mr. Secretary, I think you have a lot to cover so we are going to come back to your statement when we get back. We have three votes. Let me suggest to the members, if you haven't, make an opportunity to go down and see the war room he just described to you. It will be anything beyond what you can imagine as far as an information and control center. It is terrific. Wouldn't you love those 4,000 TV stations when you were governor? Secretary THOMPSON. I would have.

Mr. REGULA. We will recess to vote.

[Recess.]

Mr. REGULA. Mr. Secretary, we look forward to hearing more about the activities of your department. You have a lot of exciting challenges.

Secretary THOMPSON. It is exciting, Mr. Chairman.

Mr. REGULA. Yes. America depends on you.

Secretary THOMPSON. I know that and I have a great team. I think America is blessed by having some of the best doctors and researchers and scientists in the world working for the Department, NIH, CDC, FDA and HRSA. My personal staff have been wonderful and dedicated individuals. I am really blessed.

Mr. REGULA. I think you would be an inspiration to them. The captain of the ship makes a difference, a big difference. The floor is yours if you would like to add anything.

STRENGTHENING STATE AND LOCAL INFRASTRUCTURE

Secretary THOMPSON. I have a couple other things I would like to bring up. I want to thank you, Mr. Chairman, for your tremendous leadership and passion on these issues. I want to thank you for being such a good friend and advisor to me. I personally want to thank you and thank you for inviting me to be here today.

We are facing the increased risk of terrorism this week. I thought I would begin by assuring you that the department is doing a lot of things. I mentioned several already. We have also in

creased both human and food surveillance. Being a farmer, you know how important that is because of potential biological attacks. Through the Food and Drug Administration, which I know is not in this jurisdiction, we are taking aggressive steps to increase examinations of imported food and surveillance of the domestic food industry. We have alerted State and local health departments, hospitals and health care providers to report any unusual patterns or treatment of unusual illnesses.

I would also like to make an announcement this morning. We are providing the $1.4 billion to State governments that you and other members of Congress have appropriated to help them continue preparations against terrorism and other health emergencies. I am also happy to announce we are going to allow State governments to immediately obtain 20 percent of the 2003 grants in order to support the current preparations including the cost of smallpox vaccinations for selected health workers and emergency responders. As you know a lot of States are having severe financial trouble and we are asking them to have the smallpox vaccinations in their States and this is grant money they can use to help defray that expense. I think it will be well received at the State level. I wanted to make the announcement here at your committee because you have been so instrumental in getting this.

Of the $1.4 billion, $870 million is going to support the enhancement of the State public health agencies. States will use the rest of the money to help their hospitals prepare for possible bioterror or other mass casualty incidents as part of our planned Statewide response network. I want to add parenthetically the States are not drawing down the money as fast as they should. In fact, the States have only drawn down about a quarter of the money from last year and we are sending out another $1.5 million.

Mr. REGULA. Is there a match?

Secretary THOMPSON. There is no match at all. It is just money and the money is there. They may have obligated it but is still a little disconcerting to me to tell you that they haven't done it. Even in your home State of Ohio, they have only drawn down about $11 million of the $30.3 million they have.

Mr. REGULA. How would the State use that money? I want to call the Governor and put a burr under his saddle.

Secretary THOMPSON. They have a plan. We asked them to develop a State health preparedness plan for communications, for getting their hospitals and laboratories more secure, being able to expand their laboratory capacity, getting their metropolitan medical assistance teams up to par, education for their emergency doctors, so on and so forth. There is just a whole plethora of issues they can spend the money for.

Mr. REGULA. Do they have to bring a plan?

Secretary THOMPSON. They have to get a plan, which they have submitted.

Mr. REGULA. They have the plans in?

Secretary THOMPSON. The plans are in. The plans were submitted as of April 15 last year. They could have obligated the money and just have not drawn down the money.

Mr. REGULA. I understand.

Secretary THOMPSON. It seems a bit strange to me. Everyone is complaining about the need for money and we have them drawning down on only an average of about 20 percent out of the $1.1 billion. We are ready to send out another $1.5 billion. They can use this 20 percent we are sending out now immediately for defraying costs on smallpox.

I bring this up so hopefully congressional representatives can contact their governors and say, this is some money and take advantage of it.

Mr. REGULA. Absolutely.

Secretary THOMPSON. We want them to start building the infrastructure of the State and local health departments.

Mr. REGULA. Do you think it is because they are not getting applications, that the local people don't realize this?

Secretary THOMPSON. I don't know. We keep checking. They keep saying they have obligated the money but we still have 80 percent of last year's and we are ready to send out another huge amount of money.

Mr. REGULA. Do you have that chart there?

Secretary THOMPSON. Sure.

Mr. REGULA. Let us make a copy of that for our members.

INFLUENZA PANDEMIC

Secretary THOMPSON. To summarize the area of bioterrorism, we are much better able to respond to a biological attack. We cannot prevent one but we are much better prepared to respond than I think the Congress and the vast majority of Americans believe.

As I indicated, we have constructed the state of the art command center which you have been over to see. I would like everyone to come over and see it and I make that invitation. The new tracking and plotting technology that we have also allows us to take our response activities, including our DMATS and DMORTS and the strategic national stockpile for better flexibility and better efficiencies.

We are monitoring, as you know, one situation as we speak. Right now, researchers are working to identify the cause of what has been called the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome. We have no reason to think the syndrome is related to influenza. The appearance of similar symptoms in scattered locations reminds us all that we should be concerned about the possibility of an influenza pandemic and how it might start.

At the request of our department, I have been very concerned about having pandemic flu outbreak. We haven't been prepared for it and we have no way to develop new vaccine to be able to stockpile new flu vaccine. We have to wait until January or February to make a determination what we think the flu is going to be that year and then we have to have the fertilized eggs in order to grow the virus. That is a very poor way because the influenza pandemic may be avian flu which could destroy the eggs which is the only way we would know how to prepare a vaccine right now which really puts us in an embarrassing situation. I want to change that and get us ready to develop a whole new flu vaccine system and have it grown out of a cell culture which is much more efficient and we could stockpile it. So the President, at the request of the depart