Lawmakers Pleased 'End in Sight' for CBP's ACE, Budget Cuts Remain a Concern

Capitol Hill appropriators and the House Ways and Means and Senate Finance Committees are "pleased there's an end in sight" and are supportive of CBP's effort to deploy the long-discussed Automated Commercial Environment (ACE), said Brenda Smith, executive director of the ACE Business Office. Smith met with reporters Aug. 8 to discuss movement on ACE. Still, some lawmakers are "a little skeptical," she said. Continued cuts under sequestration or otherwise would "be a risk for the program," she said. The ACE program lost about $10 million as a result of the sequestration order and related furlough mitigation in FY 2013, she said.

The Department of Homeland Security recently gave its okay to CBP's deployment strategies, controls and testing plans for ACE, allowing the agency to make some beginning strides toward more widely implementing the long-discussed system (see 13080819). CBP expects to use about $140 million per year over the three-year plan and has so far spent more than $3 billion on ACE, said Smith. "A lot of money has been spent on ACE, and we will continue to spend money on ACE," she said. That's why DHS was interested in closely overseeing the implementation plans, she said. DHS "wants to support us, but asks us a lot of tough questions to make sure we were going to get it done right." The DHS approval now gives CBP the ability to "proceed and build," said CBP Cargo Systems Program Office Executive Director Phil Landfried, who also met with the reporters.

CBP is continuing to focus within its "single window" effort on the other seven or eight government agencies that have the ability to delay or stop cargo, she said. "The idea is that when we require mandatory transmission of cargo release data by November 2015, anybody who needs data to make a release decision, has to be on board a couple months in advance," said Smith. "So, we're working through that and making sure those agencies can actually accommodate that." After those agencies, CBP will start to work with the agencies that are "interested in the transaction itself" and finally CBP will develop interoperability with agencies that are largely only interested in the statistics, she said. While additional memorandums of understanding will need to be signed before the actual sharing of data can begin, CBP can deploy the technological side of the single window without allowing any data sharing, said Landfried.