Staying On Track

Asa Hutchinson likes to joke about the time he had 30 days to spend $350 million. It was the end of August 2003, and Hutchinson was the first undersecretary of Border and Transportation Security at the newly formed Homeland Security Department. His directorate's most pressing priority was meeting a congressional mandate to install by the end of the calendar year a system to track the entrance of foreign nationals through the nation's 115 international airports and cruise ship terminals at 14 seaports. The system was called US VISIT. And not only did DHS need to have US VISIT up and running by the end of the year, but it had to spend its 2003 appropriation for the program - which actually totaled about $362 million - by the end of the fiscal year, Sept. 30. "That was a tight deadline," recalls Hutchinson, now a partner at the Washington law firm Venable LLC and chief executive officer of the Little Rock, Ark.-based Hutchinson Group. "We had a lot of detractors who said it couldn't be done." (Government Executive story)