BONNER, RIDGE ENDORSE BUSH PLAN FOR SECURITY ADMINISTRATION

BONNER, RIDGE ENDORSE BUSH PLAN FOR SECURITY ADMINISTRATION    Two Bush administration officials tried to assure trade executives that the president's proposal to create a new Department of Homeland Security of 22 federal agencies would not allow security to overshadow trade facilitation.
   In a conference call Wednesday, U.S. Customs Service Commissioner Robert Bonner and Homeland Security Director Tom Ridge talked with more than 50 trade executives nationwide to address the issue.
   Ridge said Customs’ current role of trade facilitation and border security would be overseen by a department for Border and Transportation Security within the larger agency. Ridge said this is a dual role that is greatly needed to keep legal trade moving in a nationally secure environment.
   “We see them as inseparable,” Ridge said of trade facilitation and border security. “If you compromise your economic security, then you have given the terrorists a partial victory.”
   Ridge predicted that Congress would approve of such a move, but coalescing all the agency's smaller branches would take time. “There’s going to be a year (long) period at best,” said Ridge, speaking from the Roosevelt Room in the White House.
   Bonner said Bush, who sent a detailed legislative proposal to Congress for a Department of Homeland Security on Tuesday, intends 'that the U.S. Customs Service be transferred intact and in its entirety to the new Department of Homeland Security.”
   Lee Sandler, a member of The U.S. Treasury Advisory Committee on the Commercial Operations of the U.S. Customs Service (COAC), asked Bonner, Ridge and Bush to consider trade input when undertaking the restructuring.
   Sandler said Customs’ openness to trade input, as displayed in its structuring of the Customs-Trade Partnership Against Terrorism, is “critical.”
   Peter Powell, chief executive officer of C.H. Powell Co. and chairman of the National Customs Brokers and Forwarders Association of America, said agency officials involved in this process have sufficiently included trade during the reorganization discussions.
   Powell said that past trade input from such groups as COAC and the Trade Support Network, a forum for design efforts for Customs’ import system, the Automated Commercial Environment, have pushed effective government-industry interaction. He said he expected the sharing of information to continue as the administration forms the proposed new agency.
   “They are going about it the right way,” Powell said.