BIENNIAL PROMOTION PROCESS

Mr. PACKARD. One last question. The general expense budget request is up $190,000, which is a 9.5 percent increase. What are the justifications for these additional funds, and how much are they needed?

Chief ABRECHT. In the Capitol Police, we have a biennial promotional process. Every two years we have a promotional process, very common in law enforcement, and since it comes every two years it bumps our budget up every second year.

The promotional process is a contracted-out operation, and we contract a vendor to come in and write the examination so that there can be no impression that they were written, you know, that anybody was leaked any questions or anything of that sort. We hire an outside vendor to come in and administer that process in its entirety.

And that is an expensive proposition, unfortunately, but it is the way we ensure there is absolute fairness for all of our personnel, and in the last process we hired a person to come in and certify that this process was completely in compliance with all equal employment opportunity guidelines and so forth.

Mr. PACKARD. Why can't that just be done within the House, inhouse personnel?

Chief ABRECHT. The experience of law enforcement agencies who do this sort of thing in-house, is that invariably there are complaints that people had access to the test questions or whatever.

When I was with the Metropolitan Police Department, as a matter of fact, they at that time wrote their test in-house and I in fact wrote questions and was an item writer and administered the process. There were constant complaints that people who were friends of item writers got questions, and all of this sort of thing. Even they have now contracted theirs out.

The standard in the industry now is to have outside people do that kind of work, and therefore remove yourself from the possibility of complaints of unfairness or bias, and to hire professionals to do it. It is expensive, there is no question about it, but it is so important to the Members, I would urge that we continue to do it. Mr. PACKARD. Can I go to Mr. Wicker? Do you have any questions?

Mr. Miller?

Mr. MILLER. Mr. Wicker and I are both new to this process. As I said earlier this morning, I may have some dumb questions, but just bear with me.

First of all, my district is in Florida; Sarasota, Florida. I was at a function on Saturday morning, in a ribbon cutting event, and a person who was retired from the Capitol Police force after 25 years came up to me and was talking to me about it. I forget the gentleman's name, but it was interesting, we were talking about the Capitol Police force.

Chief ABRECHT. There are a lot of them down there.

PERSONNEL

Mr. MILLER. I know. Let me start off, how large is the total number of employees under your auspices?

89-935 95-8

Chief ABRECHT. The authorized FTE strength is 1,281 persons. Mr. MILLER. That includes civilian and uniformed?

Chief ABRECHT. Yes.

Mr. MILLER. Civilian, that is the clerical people and such?

Chief ABRECHT. The big blocks of them are basic clerical; communications people, who monitor closed circuit television screens and freight handlers down at the off-site delivery center.

You may not be aware of this, but any item that is delivered to this building or any of the Senate office buildings, and we are hoping also eventually to incorporate the House office buildings, is first taken to an off-site delivery center, down in a warehouse district. The truck is unloaded, all the goods are X-ray inspected and dogs are used to sniff them for explosives.

They are then reloaded on the trucks, the trucks are sealed, and they have a certain number of minutes, which I won't reveal here, to get to the Capitol complex with the seal intact, whereupon the exterior of the truck is checked again with dogs to be sure nothing has been attached to it, and then the goods are unloaded.

Mr. MILLER. I see a set of trucks down by the Rayburn Building. Mr. PACKARD. All delivery trucks with food items, with anything that is delivered to this Capitol building-I went down and saw the facility. It is not a large facility.

Mr. MILLER. How about Fed Ex?

Chief ABRECHT. Every Fed Ex truck must stop at the off-site delivery center. It is unloaded, all the packages are X-rayed. When you get a Fed Ex package in your office, it should say "X-rayed" across it. That is your protection there are no explosives in it.

SECURITY SURVEY

Mr. MILLER. I am impressed.

You mentioned an assessment you are going through. What are you looking for and what are you doing with assessment and where do you expect to go with it, the timeframe, and expectations?

Chief ABRECHT. Mr. Livingood is the expert.

Mr. MILLER. I have been reading about it in Roll Call.

Mr. LIVINGOOD. We are going to look at every entrance in the Capitol, House and Senate office buildings, and possible ways to get things in the building. We are looking at all the technical devices, magnetometers, X-rays, and the latest equipment. Is there something new that should be there that is not there? Is there something there that shouldn't be there?

At the same time, we are looking at the number of people, police posts, at that location, for security reasons and for reading the Xrays, the mags, and so on.

Then we extend it to the Senate side and the House side, all the buildings, and all the properties that the Capitol Police have to get an idea of our security posture, where we are today, maybe where we need to go if it needs more in the future.

And this will take-I am going to give a wild guess it will take a month to two months, I would say.

Mr. MILLER. And you look at it from the cost side standpoint, too, as far as ways to economize and such.

Mr. LIVINGOOD. Exactly. Cut down, whatever it takes. We are going to look at the entire situation. Obviously, the garages, that to me is one of our headaches.

Mr. MILLER. What kind of security threats are there? You may not be able talk about them here. I don't know. But I haven't seen that much in my two years here. Obviously, this is a great security risk, after the World Trade Center. But do you have-I guess, is it that much different than other places? What are your greatest types of threats? Bomb threats?

Chief ABRECHT. This building in which we sit now has been bombed twice in the last 20 years, causing substantial damage on both occasions. In terms of threats for the future, I think we probably would be better off at some point perhaps having a closed hearing, if you wanted to discuss the intelligence that may exist on that subject matter.

Mr. PACKARD. Will the gentleman yield?

That whole subject matter area has peaks and valleys here on the Hill. There are times when we have experienced rather severe security threats. When I first came, or shortly after I arrived, I remember sitting in Members-only briefings on how to deal with bomb threats in your own office.

We cleared the Canon House Office Building on two or three different times within one week because of bomb threats. A bomb went off over on the Senate side while I have been here.

A bomb-carrying person or persons came and got through the security devices, was up in the gallery on the House side during a vote, and was ready to detonate the bomb. He was literally clothed in plastic bombs. It would have been sufficient literally to have gutted the Chamber, the House Chamber, had it gone off. He tried to detonate it, but it didn't go off. And then he started yelling and screaming, and the Capitol Police came in and took him out.

That is while I have been here. That was a very, very serious bomb threat and security problem for the Members of the House. Since then it has settled back to a relatively low profile issue. We hope we can keep it at that, frankly.

But we had the Sergeant at Arms at that time show us types of bombs that they had actually confiscated from people here; and he showed us how to handle ourselves in the event of a problem in our office, how to vacate an office building and so forth.

So it has its peaks and valleys. Right now we are in a valley and we would like to stay there. But nevertheless it is something that we can't overlook.

Any other questions?

Mr. LIVINGOOD. Mr. Chairman, you are exactly right in your assessment. During these times it depends on the world tenor, what is happening in the world overseas and domestically, and also there is some_posture on whatever legislation is going on here in the House. That has an effect on some people out there.

THREAT ASSESSMENT

Mr. MILLER. I remember during the assault_weapons bill last year, some people had their lives threatened. One Congressman, who made a comment, had a threat on his life, and another gentleman said, "I have several of those a year, just get used to it."

Mr. PACKARD. You do in a case like that.

Mr. MILLER. Do you get involved in them at all?

Chief ABRECHT. Absolutely.

Mr. MILLER. Even if they are back in their home State or something?

Chief ABRECHT. We have a unit that does nothing but evaluate threats against Members. If you receive threats you really ought not to just ignore them. I would hope you are not doing that, or any of the Members. You should call us and we will immediately retrieve the information that was received.

We have four investigators whose only responsibility, and they are extremely busy and behind, I am afraid, is investigating threats against Members of Congress.

Mr. LIVINGOOD. Actually, an investigation will be initiated by the Capitol Police and then the FBI comes in and does the further investigation. I said one of the studies, the first study initiated when I came here was a study on the threats against Members, the purpose being to determine if we are doing everything possible that we can to make sure that it is well investigated, and that we, the Capitol Police, have not fallen through somewhere, and are we making a determination whether this is a serious threat as early as possible, so we know whether to provide protection on that Member. Mr. PACKARD. Will the gentleman yield?

To expand on that, when Members' groups go on congressional trips inside or outside the country, what kind of security measures are generally implemented? For the time being, there are much fewer such trips being planned, I think, under the new House arrangement, then there has been in the past. Whether that will continue we don't know. We have been so busy in the first hundred days, we have not had a chance to take any trips anywhere, not even home.

But would you explain briefly how you handle, say, a trip where 8 or 10 or 12 Members go to a specific destination?

I want to welcome Mr. Fazio.

Mr. FAZIO. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Chief ABRECHT. Typically, if security is needed for such an expedition, the Chairman, whoever is organizing it, would ask the Sergeant at Arms and he would then communicate with me the need. We do not do a great deal of that. We have no jurisdiction to do them abroad. The State Department provides that service abroad. We only do them in the United States. And we tend to do the very large ones. The most unfortunate ones tend to be funerals of sitting Members; the ones that I can remember we have done in recent times have been, for instance, or Mr. Nixon was the last one, and I can remember Mr. Natcher, the funeral for Mr. Natcher, we went to that, and things of that nature.

We don't do most of the fact-finding type of trips, although occasionally there have been some hearings in difficult situations where we have assisted, where it was thought there might be some tension at the hearing based on the subject matter or the location. Mr. PACKARD. I will yield back.

Mr. MILLER. You mentioned about going off the Capitol complex area, it sounds like it is done often. How far do you go off the Cap