Bush's new budget proposes eliminating the Environmental Protection Agency's $8.2 million research program on how to decontaminate buildings terrorists have attacked with toxic substances. The budget symbolically was released on the same day that the ricin attack on the Senate was discovered.
Bush seeks to end research program on bioattacks Boston Globe (AP) 02/07/04
Buried in documents justifying the Environmental Protection Agency's budget plan is an acknowledgment that Bush's proposed research cut "represents the complete elimination of homeland security building decontamination research."
In the documents, the agency said losing the research money would "force it to disband the technical and engineering expertise that will be needed to address known and emerging biological and chemical threats in the future."
Two toxin attacks, first anthrax and now ricin, have caused serious disruptions in Congress.
This week the EPA joined the FBI and 100 Marines from the corps' Chemical Biological Incident Response Force to investigate, clean up, and collect the mail from all the congressional offices as a precaution.
That's $8.2 million, compared to well over $100 billion that has already been allocated to the Iraq War, with ten of billions more to come soon. The Bush Administration definitely has its priorities.
1 comment:
The timing boggles the mind!!!
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