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“ACDA DIRECTOR HOLUM GOES TRICK-OR-TREATING” mentioning the U.S. Dept of State was published in the Senate section on pages S16916 on Nov. 9, 1995.
The publication is reproduced in full below:
ACDA DIRECTOR HOLUM GOES TRICK-OR-TREATING
Mr. HELMS. Mr. President, I suppose that I am supposed to be discouraged, or at least surprised, that the Director of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency overspoke himself--again--on Halloween by calling me an isolationist and by falsely asserting that I am holding both the Chemical Weapons Convention and this country's national security hostage. Perhaps he was playing trick-or-treat, and if he had stopped by our house, Dot Helms would have placed several pieces of candy in his bag.
Seriously Mr. President, I had assumed that Mr. Holum had better control of himself than that--but I suppose he is so concerned about losing his place on the Federal bureaucratic totem pole that he is suffering a case of nervous jitters.
His holding hostage outburst on Halloween is ludicrous on its fact. The Chemical Weapons Convention was first submitted as a treaty in the 103d Congress, and Congress refused to ratify it at that time because a number of questions on issues such as verification and cost had gone unanswered. They are still unanswered, and any reasonable prudent American is likely to agree that the convention's approval must wait until the Senate can be certain what it will cost and the degree of risk in premature approval of it.
Mr. President, I also find very sad Director Holum's strange assertion that the effort to consolidate ACDA's functions within the Department of State is what he called an isolationist attack on arms control. That one, as the saying goes, is off the wall--and Mr. Holum knows it.
The first suggestion about abolishing ACDA was proposed by the Clinton administration in 1993; the State Department even drafted a comprehensive plan to absorb ACDA personnel and funds. Unfortunately, that proposal by Secretary of State Christopher was debated and defeated--not on its merits, but by the same kind of bureaucratic obstructionism that has impeded S. 908, the Foreign Relations Revitalization Act of 1995, every step of the way.
So it comes as little surprise, Mr. President, that the plan to reorganize arms control has stirred up a hornet's nest. In testimony before the Foreign Relations Committee, one of ACDA's previous Directors, Dr. Fred Ikle, endorsed the plan to abolish ACDA, but warned that:
Any effort to trim, or to abolish, a bureaucratic entity hurts the pride and prestige of the affected officials, jeopardize job security, and mobilizes throngs of contractors, captive professional organizations, and other beneficiaries of the threatened agency.
When you get right down to it, at the heart of all these protestations regarding the plan to eliminate ACDA are, in fact, no more than a host of self-serving, bureaucratic interests. While nearly every aspect of government is being downsized and streamlined, ACDA's budget request for fiscal year 1996 was increased by 44 percent over the 1995 fiscal year budget. Director Holum's ACDA crowd, you see, proposes to spend fare more of the taxpayer's money and to hire more people. They even tried to commandeer one of the Department of Defense's radar systems in Alaska.
Mr. President, when faced with possible elimination, there's nothing the ACDA crowd will not do or say. It is incredible that anyone will try to argue, with a straight face, that arms control will suffer if ACDA is eliminated. Nonsense, there are today more than 3,100 arms control experts working in more than 25 offices scattered throughout the Federal Government. ACDA employs about 250 of the 3,100, only 8 percent of the total number of arms control experts in the Federal Government. Even the Commerce Department has more people assigned to nonproliferation and arms control. Simply put, arms control is big business, and ACDA is small potatoes, and almost irrelevant. That prompted ACDA Director Holum's outburst on Halloween.
The truth of the matter is that the State Department and the National Security Council are responsible for arms control policy coordination and negotiation, not ACDA. One of ACDA's inspectors general put it best a few years ago, stating that:
Once arms control became important presidential business .
. . Secretaries of State and Defense and national security advisers became the dominant figures in arms control.
Implementation and verification of arms control are conducted by the Department of Defense and the intelligence community. Since 1989 it has been the on-site inspection agency, not ACDA, that had performed on-
the-ground verification for all major arms control agreements. Of all the personnel involved in START inspections so far, fewer than 1 percent were supplies by ACDA. In short, abolishing ACDA will not hurt the conduct of this Nation's arms control one iota. It is not an obvious anachronism--and it is time to bid farewell.
By incorporating ACDA's handful of experts in a new, more efficient State Department, Congress can give arms control a comprehensive purview. After all the effectiveness and desirability of arms control depend upon its consideration in the broader foreign policy context. Just as importantly, doing this will save U.S. citizens at least $250 million over the next 10 years. Consolidation makes good business sense and will reduce waste, duplication, and silly bureaucratic turf battles.
Finally, any plan that has been endorsed by five former Secretaries of State, from Henry Kissinger to James Baker, can hardly be labeled isolationist. Director Holum should dispense with is schoolboy name-
calling. Let the issue of consolidation be debated on its merits.
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