U.S. Rep. David Price is meeting this afternoon with new Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano.

Price holds the purse strings for the Homeland Security agency as chairman of the spending subcommittee with jurisdiction over the department. He plans to talk with her today about his priorities within the department, said his spokesman, Paul Cox.

Those include focusing enforcement efforts on criminal illegal immigrants, and ensuring that the Federal Emergency Management Agency has a strong connection with local and state governments.

The meeting also could be helpful to Napolitano as she shapes her budget request for next fiscal year. She will go before Price’s panel this spring to ask for funding for the agency.

The Triangle's representatives in Congress are tackling some bureaucratic giants today.

As previously noted, U.S. Rep. David Price of Chapel Hill is using his chairmanship of a homeland security subcommittee to take on FEMA.

U.S. Rep. Brad Miller of Raleigh is using his chairmanship of a science subcommittee to take on the EPA.

Miller today criticized the environmental agency for closing regional and research libraries around the county. He said the actions have reduced public access to environmental information.

"The most generous possible explanation is that EPA managers were stunningly incompetent," Miller said in a statement. "But it is possible that the explanation is more sinister.

"The EPA ignored their own careful plans and abruptly closed libraries, limited access to the public and EPA employees, and just threw away documents that may be irreplaceable. The EPA's ability to protect the environment and public health is badly compromised as a result."

U.S. Rep. David Price took FEMA to task this morning as he opened hearings before the homeland security subcommittee that he chairs.

Price, a Chapel Hill Democrat, noted that FEMA wants an additional $46 million to modernize its information technology and "strengthen its disaster workforce."

"I do not doubt this funding is needed but, again, I am concerned about how you plan to evaluate whether these funds are productively used," Price said, according to a release from his office.

Price then listed several problems he sees at FEMA:

- FEMA is 11 months behind in providing a plan to improve its workforce.

- FEMA has, or will soon have, "big holes in senior leadership," including the chief financial officer and the heads of the Offices of Acquisition and Information Technology.

- FEMA is seven months behind in providing a plan to address findings by the Centers for Disease Control of "elevated levels of formaldehyde" in emergency housing in the Gulf Coast.

U.S. Rep. Brad Miller has accused the Federal Emergency Management Agency of hiding and manipulating science on the harmful effects of a chemical used in trailers after Hurricane Katrina.

Miller, a Raleigh Democrat, said FEMA got the scientific results it wanted only after skeptical scientists were excluded from the studies at the emergency management agency’s behest, Barb Barrett reports.

A House science oversight panel, which Miller chairs, has discovered e-mail exchanges between officials in FEMA and a public health agency indicating that studies on formaldehyde were steered in a direction that would have downplayed the chemical’s dangers.

Formaldehyde is used in the particle board of travel trailers, such as the tens of thousands used by FEMA to house homeless families in the wakes of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, which slammed the Gulf Coast in 2005. More than 40,000 families still live in the trailers.

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