The White House suggested Tuesday that it would only be able to support legislation requiring the government to review visa applicants’ social media accounts if the legislation includes more money to help the government carry out those new duties.
Many Republicans have said the government should be required to scrub social media accounts for visa applicants, after one of the San Bernardino terrorists was discovered to have entered the country on a visa after leaving a social media trail indicating her support for the Islamic State. The Departments of State and Homeland Security have said social media screening is not a requirement today.
But White House spokesman Josh Earnest indicated Tuesday that the Obama administration could only accept that additional responsibility if it were given more money.
“The other thing to keep in mind here is that, if there are members of Congress that have some new ideas for work they believe the Department of Homeland Security should do, ostensibly that is paired with an increase in the kind of resources that would be necessary to fulfill those work requests,” he said.
Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., proposed a bill Tuesday, and Earnest said that proposal and others like it should include more funding for DHS.
“If Sen. McCain were under the view that this was important enough for him to pass legislation on, then surely he would believe that this would be important enough to fund, but I haven’t looked at the entirety of his proposal,” he said.
McCain’s bill, however, is one page long, and provides no funding. It simply says that DHS “shall search all public records, including Internet sites and social media profiles,” when running background checks on foreigners applying for admission into the U.S.
Earnest said he doesn’t think legislation would be needed to set up a tougher screening requirement for visa applicants. But he admitted that so far, DHS has only undertaken a pilot program to start that process.
McCain said the administration isn’t moving quickly enough.
“It is unacceptable that Congress has to legislate on this, and that it wasn’t already the Department of Homeland Security’s practice to take such commonsense steps when screening individuals entering this country,” McCain said. “This is just the latest, unfortunate example of this administration’s refusal to proactively address very real threats to our national security.”
