Of all the measures outlined in the President’s latest state of the union address, the three measures below are the most likely to pass the Republican controlled Congress.

 
1.     Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF)

























During his address, President Obama asked the Congress to pass an AUMF specific to combating ISIL in Iraq and Syria. The President has been in consultation with members of Congress with respect to a new AUMF since late December of 2014, and  Speaker of the House John Bohner has indicated a vote will be held on the AUMF by spring of 2015 (Bennett, 2015). A point of contention between Congressional Republicans and Democrats in negotiating an AUMF is the level of discretion the bill will afford to the President, particularly the measures that would prohibit the deployment of ground troops.

The ISIL related AUMF will greatly augment the President’s legal justification for Operation Inherent Resolve, which has been previously justified by the nearly 14 year old AUMF passed after September 11th 2001. Since combat operations in late 2014, the US has launched over 1,800 airstrikes in both Syria and Iraq at a total cost of $1.2 billion. 

The House Subcommittee on Cybersecurity, Infrastructure Protection, and Security Technologies & the Subcommittee on Research and Technology recently held a joint hearing on the potential re-authorization of the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) Science and Technology (S&T) directorate. S&T’s objective is to develop new technologies for agencies under DHS such as the Transportation Security Administration, Coast Guard, Federal Emergency Management Agency, etc. to better protect the homeland from a wide variety of threats. Representatives from both committees were concerned on the level of redundant research programs within S&T’s $1.2 billion budget across DHS; Chairman Lamar Smith highlighted a government accountability office report which described S&T’s R&D management approach as “fragmented and overlapping.”

Undersecretary Brothers responded by providing an overview of S&T’s current R&D priorities, which are guided by the quadrennial homeland security review and the direction of DHS Secretary Johnson:

The proliferation of low cost, disruptive technologies coincides with a dramatic decrease in publicly funded defense Research Development Test and Evaluation (RDT&E) spending from the DoD: the FY 2014 budget allocated just $63 billion to RDT&E, compared to the nearly $80 billion allocated in FY 2009. Additionally, US private sector RDT&E defense spending has fallen dramatically in terms of percentage, as well, with the largest US Defense contractors reinvesting only 1-2% of sales back into R&D. In response, senior DoD leadership has developed new initiatives to foster innovation and maximize reduced budgets through new technological offset strategies, cost sharing between close US allies, and acquisition reforms.