More than 560 days have elapsed since President Bush proposed Project Bioshield — a critical measure for providing for the common defense. About 13,500 hours have passed without its passage, hours that terrorists have probably spent attempting to acquire weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and plotting attacks against the United States. As a consequence, a Bronx cheer will be more in order than a round of applause, if, as expected, Congress finally sends the bill to the president this week.
Project Bioshield will allocate $5.6 billion over the next decade to successfully develop countermeasures against WMD. A large part of the money will go to beating probable biological weapons threats such as Ebola and botulinum toxin, but some will also go to anti-radiation drugs and chemical weapons treatments. The funds are designed to encourage the development of countermeasures by guaranteeing a market to the companies that develop them.
It still took the House nearly six months to pass its version of the bill, even though the legislation had near-unanimous support. The Senate passed that disgraceful mark by 10 months. While the Department of Homeland Security appropriations bill that President Bush signed last October carried an implicit authorization, explicit authorization languished in the Senate until May. Much of that holdup was due to Sen. Robert Byrd and a couple of his Democratic colleagues.
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The House has dallied with the legislation until this week. Perhaps the only comfort is that a time-consuming conference will be avoided since the House is expected to simply pass the Senate’s version to the president.
Congressional dithering came close to dooming Project Bioshield and its expected benefits. Earlier this year, one company paused in its research on an antibody-based treatment against anthrax over fears that the funds in Bioshield would never be allocated. As it stands, the delay — the year-and-a-half of squabbling and speechifying — could still take a terrible toll since it will require years for the fruits of the funding to be realized. Research has many hurdles and stumbling blocks; its pace cannot be hurried.
Project Bioshield’s long wait in the legislature is doubly disgraceful because so many lawmakers had personal experience with the terror that such weapons can cause. The anthrax and ricin attacks should have sped passage of the project long ago.
The belated passage of Project Bioshield represents a profound failure of followership on the part of the legislative branch. Had Congress acted with dispatch after Mr. Bush proposed the measure, researchers would be more than 560 days closer to successfully developed countermeasures; terrorists might have been deterred from developing biological weapons for nearly a year-and-a-half. When the president finally signs the bill Congress sends him, Americans will have reason to begin to feel safer against bioterrorism — but they should have felt safer far sooner.
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