Washington ? Six lawmakers who have been pushing creation of a Homeland Security Department for months praised the thrust of President Bush’s new proposal at a hearing Tuesday, even as they added to a growing list of questions about the plan.

At the initial House committee hearing since Bush released his plan last week, there was bipartisan agreement that creation of the new Cabinet department out of 100 existing federal entities should be the top congressional priority for the rest of this year.

“Delay in passing this bill helps the terrorists because it means we are unprepared that much longer,” Rep. Mac Thornberry, R-Texas, told the House Government Reform subcommittee on national security.

Sens. Joseph Lieberman, D-Conn., and Arlen Specter, R-Pa., each mentioned the arrest of “dirty bomb” suspect Jose Padilla as evidence that America remains at risk of attack. Lieberman, lead sponsor of a Senate domestic security agency bill, said rapid passage could avert future terrorist disasters.

“I, for one, do not accept as inevitable that there will be another Sept. 11-type attack,” Lieberman said.

Yet Lieberman raised a new question about Bush’s plan, suggesting federal employee unions are concerned parts could undermine their collective bargaining authority. And Specter said it’s not clear that Bush’s proposal would be strong enough on coordinating information from the intelligence agencies and addressing their problems.

“There’s going to have to be a real authority to dig down and find out what is going on,” Specter said.

Other criticism came from Rep. Dennis Kucinich, D-Ohio, who said the Bush administration should have first finished a planned national counterterrorism strategy now expected in early July before proposing the new department.

“The White House has it exactly backwards,” Kucinich said. “They came out with the reorganization first, and said let’s worry about strategy later.”

Those questions followed a list asked by senior House staffers at a private briefing Monday by White House chief of staff Andrew Card.

Card acknowledged short-term costs arising from the security consolidation, but he insisted there would not be significant longer-term increases in spending or personnel, according to a participant in the meeting. Card also repeatedly urged lawmakers to move the plan quickly, said the source, speaking on condition of anonymity.

Democrats on the House Appropriations Committee said the White House does not plan to request money for the new agency until fiscal year 2004 which begins Oct. 1, 2003. A statement from Rep. David Obey, D-Wis., said that could stall implementation of the plan.

Questions are also being raised by some Republicans and Democratic lawmakers about plans to have the new department sift through intelligence gathered by the CIA, FBI, National Security Agency and others. Intelligence analysis will not improve unless the new department has more direct authority over these agencies, they said.

Seeking to allay these concerns, Homeland Security Director Tom Ridge said Monday that the new department would provide a critical missing piece by synthesizing all the intelligence, checking it for threats and then acting on those threats.

“Basically, the department will be able to put together all of the pieces of the puzzle,” Ridge told a National Association of Broadcasters meeting.

The House and Senate intelligence committees, meanwhile, were meeting behind closed doors again Tuesday to look into lapses in intelligence sharing by U.S. officials prior to Sept. 11. They were to hear from their first outside witness, Richard A. Clarke, Bush’s adviser on cyberspace security. Clarke was President Clinton’s coordinator of anti-terrorism efforts.

Another flash point over Bush’s Homeland Security Department plan is his proposal to move the Immigration and Naturalization Service to the new agency from the Justice Department.

Some lawmakers object to combining the agency’s duty to process legitimate immigrant visas with the job of border control under “homeland security,” Thornberry said, adding that “it could send the wrong message, that it’s anti-immigrant or something.”

Plans to move the Secret Service out of the Treasury Department present more problems. The agency is best known for protecting the president and other top administration officials, but it also investigates counterfeiting, credit card fraud and Internet fraud.