Congressional oversight of Nuclear Security and arms control. Speakers included representatives from the Arms Control Association. The Hudson Institute in washington posted this two our event. Two hour event. Thank you. Lets begin. Toant to welcome everyone hudson. My name is richard price. Talk, we are honored to about an important report and an important subject, that is congressional efforts to oversee the u. S. Nuclear security efforts. We are specifically going to talk about a report, copies of which are outside, by the partnerships to secure america and the Arms Control Association , blueprints for a new generation. I want to particularly welcome the cspan audience for joining us. To make everything easier, if people could silence any cell phones you have now, that would be helpful. The report and other work we have been doing with partnerships to secure america and the Arms Control Association has been continuing over years. It is an independent project, but we collaborated with these two organizations, doing two events on the hill, congressional briefings, the Nuclear Threat and tools of the trade, how do we encounter the threat, and Global Security architects . And the report presentations we gave in congress were supportive of the Macarthur Foundation. The agenda today, we will have three presentations that will discuss the importance of congressional Nuclear Oversight in general, the key findings and recommendations summarizing and , and morethem on what needs to be done, what initiatives we could pursue as we go further. Thefirst speaker will be chairman of the board of directors at partnership for secure america, which is a nonprofit founded by former representative lee hamilton. For policy challenges since january 2008. He has also been a private consultant at aks consulting. Before that, he was the assistant secretary of state for nuclear operations, and has had a lot of impressive positions before that. Kingston reef, the director of disarmament and Threat Reduction policy at the arms control organization. His work focuses on nuclear preventsnt, which Nuclear Terrorism and other issues. S is theis expertise legislator progress and congressional actions on this issue. He is very smart, a former marshall scholar, and. Independent of the two aganizations, we have had guest with an extensive career on energy policy. She is currently the member of the board of the Defense Nuclear facility safety board, and this is an independent organization in the executive branch that is publicsible for health and safety issues in the departments and Nuclear Facilities. Before that, she worked in various national labs, in the department of energy, and served on the National Security council. No views are solely her own, endorsement by the border the u. S. Government, and in fact, all of us as independent think tanks, we are not taking an institutional position on these issues. A just want to contribute to discussion today on what we consider to be a really important topic. Do you want to go ahead . I am a little out of breath because we hustled down here, sorry. I apologize for being late. Two things before i Start Talking about the report. I want to introduce, we have two other fellow members of the partnership for america, rachel and jack brought rachel price and jack osman. I want to point about for the work that they have done. The second thing i want to mention, in supremely great as some of morning, us know that congressman panetta and choice in introduced a piece of legislation that is study, it is our enacted, past and enacted, would ask and require the gao to give the congressman and and report on budget and spending and in both nationalized domestic Nuclear Security programs, for greater security. This is one of the recommendations in the report, of those members are of the nuclear Scrutiny Working Group on a bipartisan piece of legislation. About thel do is talk study that we did, why we did what sort did it, and of generalization, what principle findings we derive from it. When i say we, i mean the actual survey that we did excuse me among Congressional Staff. Way we started on this issue, we wanted to get some greater clarity about what is Nuclear Security . What is the Nuclear Security issue area . Whole ofsee with the congress thinks about this issue, what its Knowledge Base is, how it feels about it, what its priorities are and so forth. Congress has a bit of history, bipartisan history in some cases , other actually coming up with good, interesting initiatives that have not only moved this otheration, but legislation. The cooperative reduction act Bipartisan Legislation that was passed in the early 1990s. So congress is an important player in the government and more. What we did was set out to focus our attention on Congressional Staff. Congressional staff in part, because Congressional Staff are accessible, they are willing to produce a paper this the members are, and Congressional Staff plane Important Role in the entire legislative process. In terms of writing legislation, oning up with ideas, being top of legislation and so forth. I think no other country in the world rivals the role, as far as i know, that staff play in our legislative process. Know that legislators play a large role with the Congressional Staff in our legislative process. Haveership for america, we sort of a running start on some of this. How did we do this . Our database composed of three different components, and i will give you the numbers on the first part of the database. We actually did facetoface, personal interviews with about 20 Congressional Staffers. Most of whom are what we call a involved or heavily involved on this issue in Nuclear Security. These were personal interviews in their offices, personal interviews have the advantage of being able to get clarity on some of the responses, a followup or things like that. Datawas one subset of the that we were able to gather on it. One, we sent out a survey to Congressional Staff and received 107 responses on that. It is not exactly what we call a random sample, but a large sample, giving us some credibility in making inferences from those data. These were directed from staffers who have some broad engagement on Foreign Policy, National Security, homeland security, intelligence. That sort of thing. We had two groups of individuals , which is about 127 samples, if you want to call it, 127 data sources. The third part of this methodology was to have a small focus group. Kingston and i were there. We invited another 10 or so staffers who were in it, and to simply sort of go over them, go over with them what we thought our findings were. And have a discussion with these staffers. Most of whom had not participated in the survey itself. Some of them did, some of them didnt. This was a way to enrich our understanding of the data we were able to collect and to give us some more texture, i think. Arehose three components kind of the core methodology. The data was collected some time ago. I think it was the fall and 20172018, so it was obviously before last years midterm elections, which changed the composition of congress in a remarkable way. It was before the Nuclear Posture review was released, so anyway, before that was released. There are a number of findings let we have in the report, me talk about four or five of them that were the most interesting to us and hopefully to you. What did we learn . The first thing we learn is probably the most important thing we learned, and the least surprising to those of us who have either been on the hill for ago, backor some time before this thinking of the battles this sinking of the battleship maine. So this is the first important thing i think we learned. We asked the question to elicit some responses. Question, when someone raises the issue of Nuclear Security in congress or talks about the threat of Nuclear Security, what comes to mind . Our findings provoked a variable scattergram of responses. The single largest response we developed a word cloud for the report. Words in thehe responses elicited, according to their frequency, the words would appear larger and so forth. , what we saw,d basically, in response to this, there was no consensus on what this issue area of Nuclear Security is or was at that point. No disagreement, there was no understanding i might point out what this term, what this area was. Any of the responses, i should say, pointed out that Nuclear Security was statebased threats. That is to say, many staffers pointed to north korea, the nuclear program. Russia, china, some sprinkling of pakistan and other countries. Nd their countries in there nuclear responses, and so forth. Congressional staffers viewed nurse in a security viewed Nuclear Security as threats enacted by other states. And the interviews and in the digital questionnaire that we sent out, we had this definition of Nuclear Security, securing Nuclear Materials and the facilities that house them, basically. The generic definition. Responsesnow if those go back to that time, but the of time in that period was around the north Korean Nuclear program and offers. So this was more statebased threats. This was a very important finding. The second major finding was derived from the first, and that that staffers that we to view thetended issue of Nuclear Security according to their work requirements. End up depends upon where you sit, that phrase we use in academic literature. Efforts work on defense or defenserelated issues, on services, defense appropriations were some of the examples that onhad, they focus more command and control, Weapons Development and the like. Those of the staff who worked on energy or energyrelated issues, the Energy Committees and appropriations, etc. , tended to see the solution along energy terms. Storage, waste management, sabotage. Those that focused on the more traditional Foreign Policy areas , the Senate Foreign relations committee, tended to see it more in traditional terms of proliferation, new start, the iaea, things like that. The responses to this question tended to break down along internal institutional lines, depending on what the work individuals of these sessions are. They cut across all of the work requirement issue areas. Had more years of experience, and people we describe our as more directly engaged on the issue tended to make this area a higher priority in the realm of our Foreign Policy and National Security, and those with less experience on the hill. , butarticularly surprising now we have an empirical base to say that is true. Our findings, as we come back to this, there needs to be more crosscutting contact and communication, working together these areas,across cross committees, caucuses, and so on. Fastt to get through this and other finding pertains to the sources of information thats half utilized that staff utilize on understanding the Nuclear Security issue. Who do you look to when you want to more fully understand Nuclear Security issues . And nongovernment organizational think tanks were cited as the most reliable sources for most of the staff. Those staffers who we called engaged more directly on the issue on a much more frequent basis, tending to lean towards think tanks and ngos for insights, while those we described were much less directly engage, looking at the crs congressional resource service, and personal staff, and the like. Skepticism about reliance on the executive branch and on the media. Another interesting finding was how staff assessed the role of congress as a whole. The Work Environment in which they were, for dealing with Nuclear Security issues. We asked two questions. The first one was, how much of an impact do you think congress can have on this issue area . Nuclear security . The followup question, how much impact do you think congress should have on improving u. S. And global Nuclear Security programs . And the issue of Nuclear Security . The results were somewhat intriguing, having worked on the hill. The staff tended to say that congress should have mor more staff said congress should have a greater impact and influence on policy and programs on nuclear sit purity Nuclear Security then they said congress can have. There is some disappointment over what congress can do and there is hope over what congress should be doing. This might suggest that congress is underperforming on this issue, at least in the sample that we took. Staffers doubted that congress could take a larger role, [inaudible] we interpret this to the fact that there was a loss of expertise, there has been a loss of expertise among members and staff on the hill, and at the time that we interviewed, there was no Major Nuclear terrorist incident that galvanized interests and attention. And there was very little constituent interest among the constituents of congress. By the way, on these issues, we found, much to our interest, that there were very little differences between democrats and republicans. No big significant difference between the house and the senate. Perhaps the size of the sample might be a reason for that. Staffers about constituents very quickly, and we found very quickly that among mostonstituents, constituents, this is not a high , notity, not a big concern of interest to members. There are some exceptions for members who had a car plant in their district or state, or a Nuclear Facility of some sort that might engender greater interest. But not much constituent concern. And this issue gets lost in the flood of so many other things, there is not something to catalyze and draw interest. Asked deciding standpoints for congressional leadership, we wanted to know what knowledge they had about the facts as past as predictors of the present and future, and what they might do legislatively. Mentioned a few members that were part of a Nuclear Security working group that has been created in congress in the recent few years. A concurrent response among those with longer tenures, more than eight years in service, was the reduction program, which is a bipartisan piece of those two guys [no audio] cooperation with other Nuclear Risks had remain limited. HasTrump Administration prevented any National Security priority at least, it is rhetoric. 2018, it isruary of one of the most mexican threats and the United States. However, the attention is far less and it did not propose any new Nuclear Material. To reduceproposed and nonproliferation programs for the administration which comprises a leading edge of Nuclear Security work. I should note that this trend [no audio] request for these programs during the last year of the Obama Administration. The proposal is more than 200 million less than projected. In addition, a recent story in the Los Angeles Times found that the administration has scaled tok and edit programs denied combat radiological and Nuclear Threats. In our view, the work that merits to be done increased funding, not less for the vital programs and an absence of highlevel programs and welldefined vision, funding will continue to undermine, critical expertise will address the revolving threat. Even Lisa Gordon Hagerty suggested the Budget Commission a insufficient, telling Congressional Committee that she would gladly take additional funds of the budget quest to secure materials from the world because those are materials that are less likely to all in the hands of terrorists or adversaries. Asking what they could do with an additional 80 million, the administrator said the agency would require additional training around the world and help other countries. Over the years, but us and support has been a critical feature of u. S. Leadership and continuously improving Global Security. Ofres a long legacy bipartisan