A total of 72 employees working for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) were found to be on the terrorist watch list.
Democratic Rep. Stephen Lynch also disclosed that security screening at eight major airports in the U.S. failed, WGBH.org reported.
Lynch said last August, the Inspector General did an investigation "and they had 72 individuals that were on the terrorist watch list that were actually working at the Department of Homeland Security. The director had to resign because of that."
He said they had staffers go to eight different airports to test the DHS screening process.
"They had a 95 percent failure rate. We had folks—this was a testing exercise, so we had folks going in there with guns on their ankles, and other weapons on their persons, and there was a 95 percent failure rate," Lynch revealed.
Lynch joined other congressmen in backing a Republican bill that would increase screenings of Syrian and Iraqi refugees who want to go to the U.S.
"I have very low confidence based on empirical data that we've got on the Department of Homeland Security. I think we desperately need another set of eyeballs looking at the vetting process," he said.
Lynch said he has "lower confidence" that the DHS is conducting vetting in places like Jordan, Belize, Syrian border, Cairo or Beirut.
He said there are weaknesses in the system including having "very low-paid TSA [Transportation Security Administration] and DHS workers" that result in huge turnover.
"When [president George W.] Bush created this system, I think it was 700,000 employees, he basically stripped away their right to join a union," he said.
Lynch said the problem lies on both the refugee issue and the U.S. visa waiver programme. "In the Paris example, you had somebody go into the stream of legitimate refugees and then perpetrate acts of violence upon the civilians in Paris," he said.
But he said the visa waiver programme is "the one that we should be looking at" more closely.
"At the end of the day, obviously the visa waiver programme is the one that we should be looking at ... where you've got 20 million people coming in, versus the [refugees] coming in, 10,000? Perhaps?" he said.
