support this year $70 million. we're going to preserve flexibility to assess out year funding levels and our out going or out year support for iron dome. >> george little, the pentagon spokesperson on the announcement from the defense secretary leon panetta requesting an additional $70 billion for this iron dome which is used to protect israel, part of its overall security and one side note, time magazine out today with its cover story, the reporting and analysis of richard s ti ngall called king bb. will benjamin netanyahu make praes or war? you can learn more by logging onto time.com. are you listening to washington today on c-span radio. other news today on wall street the dow fell for the 11th time in 12 days. today it was down 156. the close was 12,442. nasdaq was down 16, s&p down 19.

even as the house republicans press to cut programs, they are leaving their own office expense accounts unchanged. draft legislations support by republicans and democrats on the house appropriations committee would freeze the budget for lawmaker staff travel and office expenses at $574 million. well, businesses may be concerned about the cost of regulations, a new study suggesting enforcing workplace health and safety rules can save lives without compromising the company's bottom line. the findings come from decade-long look at hundreds of california work sites subject to random safety inspections and researchers found that inspected companies reduced their injury claims by about 9.5% with no impact on profits. the u.s. chamber of commerce says inspections and principle are not a problem and it complains about a gotcha mentality under the current

administration. the study was done and published in the journal of science. the white house ordering federal, state and local prisons, jails and detention facilities to step up the fight against prison rape issuing mandatory screening and enforcement and prevention regulations in hopes of reducing victimization behind bars. the regulations have been in the works for years and the announcement comes on the heels of a justice department survey of former state and local prisoners that showed almost 1 in every 10 said they were sexually victimized at least one in prison by prison staff or other inmates. states that do not follow these guidelines could face a loss of 5% of their justice department prison money unless the governor certifies the same amount of money is being used to bring the state into compliance. finally, this from bright bart news that that organization has obtained a promotional booklet produced in 1991 by barack obama's then litterary agency

which touts barack obama as, quote, born in kenya and raised in indonesia and hawaii. the booklet was distributed to business colleagues in the publishing industry and includes that brief biography of barack obama among biographies about 90 other authorize represented by that agency and breitbart says this was used, this description, born in kenya was used until 2007 when it was changed to born in hawaii. back in a minute with more washington today.

replays of the sunday morning talk shows brought to you as a public service by c-span and the networks,s nbc, abc, fox and cnn, sunday afternoons starting athe noon eastern on c-span radio. >> and welcome back. this is the thursday may 17th addition of washington today on c-span radio and in hop durs in a predominantly indian mosquito coast region burned down government offices and demanding that u.s. drug agents leave the area, officials saying they are reacting angrily to an antidrug operation in which a local mayor saying police gun fire killed four innocent people including two pregnant women. now, it is reported by the

associated press that animosity is aimed at the hon during an government and usdea which confirmed on wednesday that some of the agents were in a u.s.-owned helicopter wipolice officers when it happened last week. officials saying that only the police officers on the antidrug mission fired their weapons and at issue was a mission of trying to track down cocaine leaving honduras for south america and today victoria noo lan getting a lot of questions on this issue. here is more. >> can you tell us exactly what the state department's role in the incident in the honduras dea was. >> as you know, we support counter narcotics interdiction not only in honduras but throughout the central american area. we do this through our program

caeca and under the prom we strictly adhere to u.s. law. in this particular operation on may 11th the u.s. dea was involved only in a supporting role and we did not use force. no u.s. personnel fired any weapons. we were involved purely supporting and advising the units that we support are comprised primarily of host country in this case hon duran law enforcement officers. they were trained. they were vetted as part of this program we work on together. >> does that mean that they advised them to open fire on a canoe carrying civilians including a pregnant woman? >> i highly -- >> in an advice and support role. what did they advise and support? did they say, hey, this looks like a good target, shoot it? >> well, first of all, as i

understand it, the honduran authorities are doing a broad investigation of this incident to evaluate what exactly happened and how it happened. so i think we need to let that go forward. with regard to the precise actions in an advisory role that the u.s. folks played, i can't speak to that. i will send you to dea for more on that. the point i wanted to make here is that our guys don't fire in these operations, they didn't in this one with regard to the preplanning of the particular operation i am going to send you to the agency that was in the lead. >> there were state department personnel or equipment involved, yes or no? >> state department personnel involved in this particular -- >> department helicopters or some kind of or some type of state department aircraft in honduras and i don't know, i am

asking if they were at all involved in this? >> we do have two helicopters supporting the hon duran national police tactical response teams. the helicopters are titled to the state department as part of our narcotics and law enforcement program, our inl program. they were piloted, they're piloted by central americans, in this case my understanding is they were piloted by the guatemala military and contract pilots temporarily deployed to honduras. again, this is part and parcel of a program that we do bilaterally with each country and also regionally constructed across central america. >> let me get this straight, then. the helicopter or helicopters that were involved in this incident are owned by the state department? >> correct. >> they were being flown by gaut ma la. >> correct, and contract pilots. >> and with dea gt as and

honduran police as passengers? >> i can't speak to who the passengers were. i will send you to dea. >> victoria taking questions from the associated press. let me share with you how the ap describes what happened in honduras as, quote, bullets playing with u.s. helicopters swooping towards a river boat, police re pelg to the ground and locals scattering after loading close to 1,000 pounds of u.s. bound cocaine and reverberations that left civil yab yan killed as the dea, the drug enforcement administration supporting the predawn raid on the bank of a remote river and the involvement of u.s. and honduras officials and we'll have more on the story as it develops here in washington. meanwhile, a house subcommittee holding a hearing examining ethical standards and in some cases finding them repeatedly

violated. the concern from congressman michael mccaul, a republican from texas and chair of the house homeland security subcommittee that held today's hearing points out that a number of border parole agents, as many as 130 have been chrjed with corruption dating back to 2004 and one of the questions is whether or not the polygraph test used to determine whether to hire some of these individuals are appropriate and doing what the department wants them to do. here is michael mccaul with thomas wynn cow ski, the acting deputy commissioner for the customs and border protection part of homeland security. >> you know, i worked in the public integrity sections, department of justice. i served now on the ethics committee. i have always believed public service is a public trust. while the vast majority of your employees are honest and hard working, unfortunately the actions of a few bad apples taint the entire organization. the purpose of the hearing is

not to take the overall organization at all but rather to look at the specific abuses and determine how can we fix the problem? i will go with each agency. i will start with you, mr.. the allegations of border parole agents, cv preponderance agents working with drug traffickers to assist their business is uncon shonable and you know the threat from a national security standpoint and how they're trying to infiltrate our organization. i want to ask about the polygraphs you conduct with employees prior to employment. if you can elaborate on what some of your findings have been in terms of these preemployment screenings. >> yes. thank you very much, mr. chairman, for that question. as i mentioned in my oral interview, we have begun doing

polygraphs in 2008 and we have done about 10,000 polygraphs, about 400 a month, and come january of 2013 under the antiborder corruption act that we're mandated to do, all law enforcement officers, and we will meet that mandate of 2013. as a matter of fact, we'll meet that sometime this summer, so this summer we'll have 100% of our law enforcement officers undergoing a polygraph prior to coming on board as a law enforcement officer. so of those 10,000 polygraphs that we have done, we have discovered a whole host of individuals that apply to be the border parole agents or customs and border protections and the polygraph was able to identify individuals that had a very, very questionable past and let me just give you several examples, mr. chairman. we had a case where between 2002

and 2009 applicant smuggled several bundles of marijuana within the united states which was paid $200 on at least three occasions the applicant personally unloaded duffle bags of drugs from vehicles and stored them at his residence and the applicant also accepted $1,000 in exchange for allowing vehicles loaded with marijuana to be stored at his home, so the polygraph was able to identify that and obviously the employee was not hired for a law enforcement position. another example in march of 2009, the applicant and a friend became involved in transportation of cocaine and marijuana. the applicant's friend profited an unknown amount of transportation and he profited from $3500 for the transportation of the cocaine. we have these individuals and in

some cases i believe the sole purpose of wanting to become a customs and border protection officer, border parole officer is to infiltrate us and the way in which we have robust background process, while we have systems that i talked about in my oral reply and data mining and looking for anomolies, we really believe the polygraph is going to be a real game changer for us. so we're ready for that. we have been doing polygraphs but come this summer everybody will undergo one. i think one of the things also that both you and the ranking member has talked about with the national security positions. i view the cvpos and the border parole agents as national security positions. and as such, i think we need to take a different view of that position, so, for example, while we're starting the polygraph

prior to their employment and weeding out those individuals that are deceptive, our data indicates that really an officer goes on the other side, about 8.8 years into service, so the question becomes while we have data mining and we're doing amp and looking for anomolies and have the periodic reinvestigations every five years, i think we need to be looking at polygraphs throughout the employees career. i think that is very, very important and we'll work with the office of personnel management towards that end, but i couldn't agree more with what you said and mr. keating said about the national security positions. >> the acting deputy commission testifying on capitol hill before a house subcommittee

chard by michael mccaul, republican of texas, looking specifically at ethics inside the department of homeland security and specifically in the customs and border protection office and some of the issues involving polygraphs, both during the hiring process and during employment. a report last month on the future of social security and the trust fund with this headline from the "new york times," it will run out of money sooner than expected by 2033, three years sooner than projected by the obama administration and medicare and its hospital insurance trust fund will be depleted by the year 2024 and the social security disability insurance program will run out of money sooner than that in 2016. that is two years sooner than originally projected. the social security commissioner michael was on capitol hill talking about this issue and whether or not there is an increase in claims abuse for social security disability payments and the ranking republican on the senate and

finance committee orrin hatch of utah. >> it disbursed close to $130 billion in 24re67b and is the fastest growing of all of our entitlement programs. in just over a decade aggregate payments in the dichlt i program have risen about i 135%. it doesn't take a rocket scientist to recognize that this type of growth is unsustainable. according to the social security trustees, the d.i. trust fund will be exhausted by 2016 and beneficiaries will face benefit cuts of 21%. a back to the greenspan commission and suggest that is we solve the problem by simply pouring funds from the oesi trust fund into the d.i. trust fund and that simply robs peter to pay paul in my opinion and does not involve any of the structural problems. one cause of the rapid expansion of di. costs is some researches have point to stems from 1984

reforms to d. i have screening that red to rapid growth in the share of recipients suffering from back pain and mental illness. two researchers affiliated with the national burrow written that the d.i. screening procedure but in place by congress hinges to a significant extent on an applicant's employ ability, not just personal health, causing the program to function much like a long-term unemployment insurance program for the unemployable, unquote. of course, anyone that is eligible and has a bona fide disability is entitled to d.i. benefits but d.i. benefits paid to anyone not truly disabled takes resources away from those that are truly disabled. i have i think my time is up. can i ask these two questions. i have two questions related to the d.i. program. first, do you agree that the sometimes difficult to diagnosis conditions related to back pain and mental illness accounts for some of the most rapid expansion

of the d.i. beneficiary population and secondly, to what extent are the opinions of those making d.i. benefit decisions with local or national labor market conditions determine eligibility for d. benefits and that is has d.i. become an unemployment benefit provider of last resort? >> senator hatch, let me say i think that d.i. is a rapidly growing program. i think that there have been some analyses i have seen recently that misunderstand the nature of that. most of that has been predictable and has been predicted by the actuaries for a long time. if you simply compare the growth in d.i. to the growth in population, you would think, okay, the program is growing faster than it should, but when you factor in people like me at 25 who are perfectly healthy,

not so much at 55, that the actuaries say that almost all the growth in d.i. is consistent with what they have been predicting for a long time based on the baby boom going through its disability prone having said that, if you look at or a more granular basis, some of the causes of growth. i certainly say with mental illness, you are correct. that we, as a society, are diagnosing mental illness more frequently. we are prescribing treatments for mental illness much more frequently than in the past. it's certainly a significant factor in the growth. i'm less sure that the back pain and muscular damage is as much of a factor but we'll go back and give you information on that for the record. in terms of being a backup employer for unemployment, other nations, england, for instance, quite consciously did that, regretted it and is pushing back

in the other direction. i think that there's a fair amount of evidence from how the agency has handled cases during this recession to indicate that that's not true. i think that we're calling cases squarely for the most part exactly as we have been. but our allowance rates have dropped at the dds in the odar level to the low nest a very long period of time. at odar the last few months, 50% allowance rate. we haven't seen that since i had my first job in the senate in 1978. the ddss, you have to go back to, i think, 1997 until you've seen an allowance rate as low. i don't think it's because we've become tougher and changed our standard. but what happens during recessions is that economically desperate people apply. and the vast majority of them get rejected because we adhere to the statutory standard. we don't want to -- we don't feel that we're supposed to turn it into exactly what you're

concerned about. now when you have 650,000 more applications in a year, are we perfe perfect? are there some people that slid through that were allowed for benefits that probably shouldn't? probably some. but for the most part, we've administered the program with integrity and tried to do exactly what the congress has told us to do and not take it upon ourselves to move the standard -- move the needle in one direction or the other. >> thank you very much. >> michael astrue on the sobering report about the future of social security. he was asking specifically from questions from orrin hatch it social security disability. he is the chair -- the commissioner of the social security administration. and he testified on capitol hill not only about the fact that the disability fund will run out by the year 2016 but also the future of the trust fund for

social security overall, which is also quickly running out of money. the report that was issued last month and reported on by "the new york times" saying unless there are systemic changes to social security, this will speed up the process of running out of money for these key trust funds, including, as we said, the disability fund. cnn has some dramatic photos of what's been going on in the west coast, including in arizona after a record-breaking amount of wildfires in 2011. cnn reporting this year is going to be a scorcher as well. some of the largest wildfires taking place in arizona, new mexico and southern california. congressman ben quayle is a republican from arizona and was asking the question, why wildfires are more threatening now than ever before? among those testifying, jim krichley with the tucson, arizona, fire department as the chief. he's also the police of the western fire chiefs association mean was joined by ernest mitchell from the u.s. fire administration and john hall from the national fire protection association.

>> there's been a lot of discussion about resources, and i understand that over the course of a number of different years that the authorization level has been up to $70 million for the usfa and then the appropriations actually came in much lower than that. and i think in the 2013 house funding bill, basically it provides $42.46 million, which is right about the same level that the request from the president in his budget. i know that that's not the level that you would like, but i do think that this hearing has been very informative to see what the priorities of the usfa and how we can support your endeavors in very tough budgetary times. i think that providing an authorization level that is much higher than when really we can afford, i think is a little bit irresponsible. but i do want to continue to go down and see what priorities and what we can do to make sure that

we are giving the support that's necessary, even though we might be not getting to the levels that you would like. so i do appreciate everybody's testimony. and i want to go to chief krichley. chief mitchell was talking about how wildfires are becoming a more significant threat. arizona is currently battling four wildfires in the central and eastern part of the state. and we had the wallow fire last year. and we continue to see this. can you say -- kind of give me insight on why are wildfires becoming a more significant threat? is it forest management policies such as ensuring we are keeping fuel loads low and trees thinned to a healthy level? or patterns of development because people are moving closer to forests? or is it a combination of both? >> thank you. i would say it's a combination of both. i'm not as well versed on the fuels management program that they have, but i can promise you that as we grow as a community,

we're reaching out into areas that were never designed for fire trucks to get in to take care of. so as we expand the size of our cities or the movement out into the urban interface area, we just increased the number of buildings that are going to be hurt during a wildland fire. so i believe it's both, but primarily it's the way that we're managing our growth. >> okay, thanks. chief mitchell, do you have any thoughts on why they are becoming more significant? >> again, i'm not as familiar with the fuel management part of it, although there's -- we are engaged with other agencies now and studying fuel management and how fuel management versus fire response and prevention all interact. but coming up in the fire service in the southern california, i know a large part of the problem was based upon

more building and living in the interphase zones. the lack of fire resistive construction in those areas and some of the other preventative and mitigation measures that could and should be enacted to prevent loss. >> okay. thank you. >> dr. hall, it's been described that one of usfa's training challenges is reaching out to all firefighters across the country and the increase in online classes and distance trainings. has the nfpa performed any research to try to quantify the impact of training programs? and as the nfpa measured the effectiveness of remote training? >> thank you, mr. chairman. the analysis that we have conducted is not at that level deaf tail. we have results that indicate that the training situation for the fire service has improved to a limited degree between the

first of our need assessment surveys and the more recent survey. but we have not been in a position to look at specific data about people reached -- or the efficiency of particular methods of delivery. >> okay. thank you very much. >> a story that is getting a lot of attention across the country, but especially out west. the questions from congressman ben quayle, republican of arizona, as he questioned officials from the tucson fire department, the international association of firefighters and the u.s. fire administration on the increase in firefighter -- in wildfires out west and what needs to be done about all of this. well, you can't get away from the discussion on cable, online and social media. the ipo of facebook and congress weighing in today. senator chuck schumer trying to go after one of the co-founders of facebook who was to renounce his u.s. citizenship and proposing legislation that would get back some of the money he would forgo if he does no longer

remain a u.s. citizen. but in menlo park, california, julia poor stin who -- boorstin following this for cnbc says it's the most anticipated ipo. we talked to julia boorstin. she described what's going to happen tonight into tomorrow before the ipo is officially launched. >> there is a lot of excitement. there are about 2500 -- 3500 employees who are face bassed he -- based here at facebook's headquarters. they are doing a hack-a-thon that starts at 7:00 p.m. and it's going to go all night long until tomorrow morning when facebook starts trading on the nasdaq. so it's going to be an exciting night. if you've never heard of a hack-a-thon, it means that facebook's employees, about 1,000 of them have rsvp'd. they'll hang out, eat food, there will be a dj and they'll all be