Senators grilled administration officials Tuesday about billions of dollars in military equipment and grants given to local police, and officials readily admitted changes should be considered.

The officials faced a unanimously skeptical group of senators at a hearing of the Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee called to consider militarized policing after the well-armed response to protests and looting in Ferguson, Missouri, last month.

Much of the hearing focused on the Department of Defense’s congressionally authorized 1033 program, which since 1990 has supplied cops with $5.1 billion in used military equipment.

“Let me be clear, we, the department, do this because we’re asked to,” said Alan Estevez, principal deputy under secretary of defense for acquisition, technology and logistics. The program, he noted, was established to help cops fight the so-called War on Drugs.

Among the items the Pentagon has provided to police are more than 600 mine resistant ambush protected (MRAP) vehicles.

Estevez said that though the Pentagon approves the items given away, state coordinators of the 1033 program are primarily responsible for vetting local requests.

“The Department of Defense does not have the expertise in police force functions and cannot access how the equipment is used in the mission of individual law enforcement agencies,” he said.

Estevez said the department does “due diligence about numbers” of items given to local cops, to ensure the amount of gifted equipment is proportional to the size of the police force receiving it.

Department of Defense under secretary Alan Estevez, left, and Sen. Claire McCaskill tangled over the 1033 program Tuesday.

Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee

Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., disputed that claim, saying an Oklahoma county sheriff’s office with one full-time sworn officer scored two MRAPs since 2011 and a one-man Michigan police department received 13 military assault weapons.

The rule of thumb is one MRAP per department, Estevez said. He said the Pentagon will reconsider its decision to provide the vehicles - built for the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and unavailable on the open market - to police. "This is one of the areas that we’re obviously going to look at," he said.



The Pentagon retains the titles to certain equipment so it can be repossessed from police, Estevez said.

Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., a forceful critic of militarized policing, insisted on knowing why nearly 12,000 bayonets had been given to local law enforcement, but came up empty.

“I can’t answer what a local police force would use a bayonet for,” Estevez said. “We’re going to look at what we’re providing under the administration’s review of all these programs.”

The target completion date for the Obama administration’s review, initiated after the Ferguson protests, was unclear to Estevez and other witnesses.

In addition to focusing on the 1033 program, senators questioned Brian Kamoie, assistant administrator for grant programs at the Federal Emergency Management Agency, about $41 billion in counterterrorism grants given to state and local officials since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

Kamoie said federal officials are investigating to see if any of the police forces deployed in Ferguson improperly used equipment purchased with the grants for riot suppression, which is not allowed.

Kamoie was unable to answer how many times equipment purchased with the funds was used to combat terrorism, providing just two examples, the apprehension of Boston Marathon bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev in 2013 and the 2010 scuttling of a plot to bomb New York City’s Times Square.

Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., said the Tsarnaev example was likely invalid, as a homeowner reportedly discovered the suspected terrorist cowering in his backyard.

Skepticism of the programs that have allowed for militarized policing was remarkably bipartisan.

Photos: Defining Moments in Ferguson View All 18 Images

Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., suggested that local officials should foot the bill for advanced equipment and Sen. Tammy Baldwin, D-Wis., sought answers on whether there are restrictions on forces being probed for civil rights violations.

Assistant Attorney General Karol Mason of the Department of Justice’s Office of Justice Programs also testified. Mason oversees $2 billion in annual funding to aide local criminal justice programs. The administration officials conceded there's room for improvement.

“We need to do a better job in coordination, let me start off there, there’s probably a failure in coordination across the interagency regarding what we’re providing,” Estevez said. “Coordinating on what police forces could use, that could be better.”