00:00Look forward to seven minute rounds. It is the practice of the committee to swear and witnesses. Secretary Noem, please stand and raise your right hand.
00:10Do you swear the testimony you will give before this committee will be the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth? So help you God.
00:30Secretary Noem, thank you for appearing today. As you know, I've been concerned for a long time about gain-of-function research. I commend the president and the administration for having an executive order to stop it. Some of the problems are in the definitions of it. Anthony Fauci said, if it's an animal virus, it cannot be gain-of-function. And yet animal viruses can be trained to infect humans. And we think that's what happened ultimately with COVID-19.
00:58We think some of the dangerous research is going on at the lab controlled by DHS. Have you begun to look into this? I know Secretary Kennedy said that you and he will be going out, and I've requested permission to attend that as you go out to look at these labs. Have you looked at these labs yet to get a feeling for what gain-of-function?
01:18Mr. Chairman, are we going to have opening comments from the Secretary, or are we skipping that as well?
01:21Oh, I've neglected that. I went right into questions without doing that.
01:26It's your committee, Mr. Chairman.
01:28Let's start again.
01:29Secretary Noem, you are right.
01:35Well, great. You've got a preview of my questions since I went out of order.
01:38But the NBAC, the National Biodefense Analysis and Countermeasures Center out there by Fort Detrick, we're concerned they're still doing some dangerous research out there and it needs more oversight.
01:49Do you have any update for us on that?
01:50I do, and I want to thank the chairman for bringing a lot of history, to my knowledge, of this lab and the work that it was doing, and I appreciate Secretary Kennedy's input as well.
02:03Yes, we do have a visit planned in the future here in the next 10 days to two weeks with Secretary Kennedy to look into the work that this lab is doing and if it is appropriate for the Department of Homeland Security to be engaged in that.
02:16I think your concerns have created some oversight that is very helpful and will be helpful in making sure that they're doing correct research that actually is beneficial and not research that's been abused in the past.
02:29So the president has banned gain of function, and as you and I have discussed, it's important that someone can simply come forward who disagrees and says, well, this doesn't meet the definition of gain of function.
02:40This is essentially what Anthony Fauci did when everybody said the research in Wuhan was gain of function.
02:46They were taking an animal virus, they were running it through an animal model with human lungs over and over again and adapting it to be infectious in humans.
02:53That is gain of function.
02:55So the people and personnel make a difference, and so what I would ask is as you ask the career people out there who've been doing the experiments, you realize that their natural tendency is to want to keep doing what they've been doing.
03:06So I think it's going to take scrutiny, new people, new scientists, consultants to look at each one of these and say, don't just tell me you're not doing it.
03:14Give me a list of 20 or 30 experiments.
03:17What are you doing?
03:18And as an example of that, you know, we've been sending records requests for three years and we got nothing until you came into office.
03:24And I hope that you will be looking at our records requests.
03:27They're all dated in time, some of them by five Republicans, some of them by Republicans and Democrats, and they were just routinely ignored.
03:35Have you had a chance to look at the chain of questioning here to see if there's anybody that was actually purposely obstructing us?
03:43Yeah, so I thank you for asking those questions and talking about the follow-up to members of Congress, senators and representatives.
03:51My predecessor didn't respond to anybody.
03:53It didn't matter if you were a Republican or a Democrat.
03:55He didn't respond to your letters and your oversight.
03:58And I've tasked all of my people with changing that about our Department of Homeland Security, that we will be responsive to Congress.
04:05We've given you about 50,000 pages, I think, so far of information.
04:09We continue to get and gather more data and facts that we can return to you so you can conduct oversight.
04:15What I would say is between NIH and the Department of Homeland Security, there are no research projects ongoing right now today or that we've been able to find as far as projects they were doing together.
04:26We did have a couple of employees that were contracted for their specialty backgrounds that have done work over at NIH before, but that kind of oversight needs to happen.
04:37And I think it's important that we have an independent outside source that also is reviewing the work that they do.
04:42As you're collecting the records, I would just ask that you ask the people why wasn't it given before and see if you can find where the chain of command ended.
04:49Were there people purposely not giving us the records because they really shouldn't be employed by government?
04:55Secretary Mayorkas told us repeatedly that there was no censorship going on, the CISA wasn't doing anything, they weren't involved with speech.
05:03We know from the Twitter files they were.
05:06Have you uncovered any internal communications or activities that contradict their testimony with regard to the government being involved in censorship?
05:14Yes, sir, we have literally found thousands of documents that have proven that they were involved in censorship and policing speech.
05:22So we will be unveiling these to this committee and making sure we're exposing what CISA was doing with a vast majority of its time of certain employees.
05:33And some of the discussion I think we'll have here today is about getting CISA back on mission and some of the reductions in staff that have been over there.
05:40And that's reflective in the fact that many of them were doing work that they shouldn't have been doing.
05:44And I hope you'll look at our bill, the Risky Research Review Act.
05:48Administrations do a lot of things and a lot of good things, and then they go away when the next administration comes in.
05:53The good thing about this legislation, it would be a presidential commission of scientists to define in a continual basis what is or isn't gain of function, to rule on that.
06:03It's been voted in a bipartisan way.
06:05It was a unanimous vote out of this committee.
06:06It's one of the few things in Congress we actually, I think, have bipartisan support for.
06:10So we hope the administration will look at that and consider making a public endorsement of that.
06:14That way we can make permanent the things you're trying to do to constrain gain of function.
