Bennie Thompson Peddling GE Product

Politicians regularly push products for government procurement, but it's rare for a chairman to peddle namebrand wares from the committee dais.

That's why it caught some folks off when House Homeland Security Chairman Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.) pitched a General Electric monitoring devise Tuesday during a subcommittee review of the law Congress passed last year establishing new regulations for cargo coming into the U.S.

Thompson showed up to blast the Department of Homeland Security for its failure to implement some of the changes required by the SAFE Port Act last year.

The chairman focused his complaints on the department's struggle to create a verifiable credential system for dockworkers and anyone else who handles cargo coming into the U.S.

The department unveiled the certification program in October, five years after it was initially mandated, andThompson complained that agency officials have grossly underestimated the number of workers who will require these new credentials and remains "years away" from installing the electronic readers to verify whether the badges are legitimate.

The chairman also made a special note toward the end of his brief remarks about the department's failure to develop a security device for each of the estimated 12 million shipping containers that flow into the U.S. each year.