Federal officials from the Department of Interior told lawmakers that they have limited powers to block applications for permits on protests on public land — even if the people applying for such permits, such as pro-Hamas protest groups, have histories of violent activity.

The testimony came at a hearing on the pro-Hamas protest that defaced Washington, D.C.’s Union Station during Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech to Congress. The revelations about the National Park Service’s procedures are particularly notable given that the ANSWER Coalition — the same group that organized that demonstration, which created tens of thousands of dollars in damage to public property, included assaults on police and has resulted in four arrests — is also organizing a protest of the presidential inauguration in January.

Charles Cuvelier, the associate director of the National Park Service, said that the Department of the Interior had “no actionable intelligence” that would have allowed it to deny the permit application submitted by the ANSWER Coalition prior to the Union Station protest.

And he said that the National Park Service is only permitted under law to deny permits based on the information groups provide in applications — if, for example, they are not providing a sufficient number of marshalls for the group gathered — or “actionable direct intelligence of a contemporaneous nature” to the application.

The National Park Service is not allowed to collect or maintain intelligence files about groups, their organizers or including whether their protests have resulted in violence, destruction of property or other issues in the past, Cuvelier said.

“There’s nothing in the regulation that indicates prior conduct would be a cause for [denying requests] for future permitted events,” Cuvelier said. “We consider each permit on its own individual application. We don’t retain records. We base [it] upon each applicant as it is submitted… Our intelligence gathering must be contemporaneous with the event.”

Those applications, he noted, often must be processed on short notice. Unless permits are denied within 24 hours of submission, he said, they are “deemed approved.”

Cuvelier added that it’s largely incumbent on the permittees to enforce rules and order at their protests, and to communicate to those attending the protests the regulations and restrictions that the government has laid out for their events.

Witnesses who testified at the hearing also said that there’s no automatic process to force groups to pay for damages to public property during protests — any restitution must be pursued as part of criminal cases against the individuals involved by the Department of Justice. They said changing such provisions would be difficult or impossible given First Amendment protections.