McCaskill urges against funding cuts to terrorist response teams, stresses need to protect election infrastructure with DHS secretary

After President Trump released his FY2018 budget, which called for cutting the number of Visible Intermodal Prevention and Response (VIPR) teams from 31 to just eight, U.S. Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-MO) publicly urged Secretary of Homeland Security John Kelly to maintain VIPR funding at current levels.

McCaskill said she was concerned that the President’s budget cuts to VIPR teams were coming at a time when we could not afford to let up security measures. If enacted, the budget would cut approximately $43 million from the teams.

“A large portion of this cut is taken from the VIPR teams…which are deployed all over the country, to provide critical assistance with securing airports, subways, and bus terminals, some of the most attractive soft targets for terrorists in our country,” McCaskill said to Kelly in a Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee hearing. “I don’t think that any of us believe that the threat of a terrorist attack is less today than it was 15 years ago, and I hope funding is maintained for these teams.”

McCaskill also took the opportunity to discuss the need to protect election infrastructure in the wake of mounting reports that actors within the Russian government attempted to hack election-related hardware and software during the 2016 election cycle.

“I like that our elections are decentralized—I don’t think the federal government should be telling each state how to run their elections or what vendors to use,” McCaskill said.

Prior to the election season, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) designated election systems as “critical infrastructure,” which allowed individual states to voluntarily request cyber assistance from DHS in order to ensure that their election systems are secure from intrusion.

McCaskill currently serves as the ranking Democratic member of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee.