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House Homeland Security Committee Chairman Andrew Garbarino, R-N.Y., remembers exactly where he was when the World Trade Center was attacked on Sept. 11, 2001.
"I was a senior in high school. I was in Mr. Ponzi's government class. And that's when the first plane hit. And one of the other teachers came in and was telling Mr. Ponzi about it," he told Fox News Digital. "We all thought it was a little plane. And then we went to the next class. And then the second plane hit, and everybody realized that stuff was wrong."
Twenty-five years later, Garbarino leads a congressional committee that oversees a Cabinet department created explicitly after the terror attack. He's warning that Congress needs to change how it deals with potential threats to avoid another tragedy of that scale.
"Being chairman of the committee, being a New Yorker, it's one of those things you focus on, and you want to make sure another 9/11 doesn't happen, and doesn't ever happen again. And that's my goal. That's my priority," he said.
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"Congress is very good at being reactive... We don't want another 9/11. So if I could leave my fingerprints on something here, it's the fact that the focus, Congress' focus on national security, Congress' focus on homeland security or safety, is that we address an issue before something happens."
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He said Congress needed to get into the habit of passing laws ahead of time, "instead of being like, 'Oh my God I can't believe this happened, how did this happen, let's fix it now.'"
"That's why 9/11 happened. 9/11 happened because our intelligence agencies, they were siloed, they were not sharing information. I don't know if it was a complacency or whatever, but there were a lot of problems," Garbarino said. "I don't want to fall into that same complacency."
Garbarino represents New York's 2nd Congressional District, part of Long Island's south shore. As a suburb of New York City, its residents are deeply attuned to that tragedy 25 years ago.
"We have people that lost loved ones that day that are still dealing with it 25 years later," Garbarino said. "So the scar is still there."
His district and others are also still dealing with illnesses stemming from that day, including first responders who bravely rushed to the collapsing twin towers.
"There are now more people that have died from 9/11-related illnesses than died on the actual day. So it's a day that keeps taking people away from us," Garbarino said.
"You have firemen who, 9/11 was their first call. They were 21, 22 years old. They're now 47... And a lot of these, some of these cancers, they take a while to take hold, and they're now just getting sick."
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Earlier this year, President Donald Trump signed legislation led by Garbarino and others to address a projected funding shortfall for the World Trade Center Health Program, which helps survivors pay for their medical treatment.
He said nearly all congressional districts across the country have at least one person participating in the program, a testament to how widespread the tragedy's effects are.
"People moved out of New York, people who came from all over the country after 9/11 to help, they all went back home, they also got sick. So this does affect the entire country," Garbarino said.
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