Excerpts from the complete article at http://www.tnr.com/docprint.mhtml?i=20040315&s=crowley031504
BUSH'S DISASTROUS HOMELAND SECURITY DEPARTMENT. Playing Defense by Michael Crowley of The New Republic Post date: 03.04.04
Issue date: 03.15.04
Last December, I called the Department of Homeland Security's (DHS) main line. "Thank you for your interest in the Department of Homeland Security," a recorded voice responded. "Due to the high level of interest in the department all lines are currently busy. ... We encourage you to call back soon." A beep was followed by a click. It was a good thing I wasn't calling to report an anthrax attack, because I'd been disconnected. As advised, I tried calling back "soon"--and got the same recording. Just a bad week, perhaps? Apparently not. A few weeks later, a Roll Call reporter had the same experience.
Unanswered phones are a small but telling example of how DHS is faring one year after the department opened its doors last March. Far from being greater than the sum of its parts, DHS is a bureaucratic Frankenstein, with clumsily stitched-together limbs and an inadequate, misfiring brain. No one says merging 170,000 employees from 22 different agencies should have been easy. But, even allowing for inevitable transition problems, DHS has been a disaster: underfunded, undermanned, disorganized, and unforgivably slow-moving.
And, yet, George W. Bush can't stop praising it. His January State of the Union address hailed "the men and women of our new Homeland Security Department [who] are patrolling our coasts and borders," whose "vigilance is protecting America." In a September 11 anniversary address at Quantico, Virginia, Bush mentioned DHS no less than twelve times, saying, "Secretary [Tom] Ridge and his team have done a fine job in getting the difficult work of organizing the department [sic]." And, at an event celebrating the department's one-year anniversary this week, Bush declared that the department had "accomplished an historic task," and that Ridge has done a "fantastic job" of making the United States safer.
That's nonsense. DHS has failed to address some of our most serious vulnerabilities, from centralizing intelligence to protecting critical infrastructure to organizing against bioterror. Many a policy wonk who has evaluated the department has come away despondent. Zoe Lofgren, a senior Democrat on two House committees that oversee DHS, puts it this way: "We are arguably in worse shape than we were before [the creation of the department]. ... If the American people knew how little has been done, they would be outraged."
...Redmond was only running IAIP to begin with because the best man for the job had been passed over. That man was John Gannon, formerly a top official at the CIA. Gannon had run IAIP's transition team and was expected to become its director. "If there was anyone in government qualified to do that job, he was the guy," says a person familiar with the IAIP. But the administration didn't turn to Gannon--some suspect because he was a Clinton appointee. Unfortunately, the Pentagon official who was the administration's first choice to fill the position said no. So did the next candidate. And the next. In all, more than 15 people turned down entreaties that they apply for the job, according to The Washington Post. "When [the administration] finally realized there was nobody but Gannon to offer the job [to, Gannon] was so pissed off he went elsewhere," says Rand Beers, a former administration counterterrorism official now advising John Kerry. (Gannon is now staff director of the House Homeland Security Committee.)
It's not just the department's weak leadership that's causing problems. DHS has also been hamstrung by the forced assimilation of rival agencies. "[M]any of the agencies and employees subsumed by the integration continue to have no identity with or 'buy-in' to their parent organization," the Gilmore Commission warns. Nowhere is this more true than in DHS's new Border and Transportation Security (BTS) directorate, which combined the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) with the old Customs Service. The basic idea made sense: INS and Customs had lots of overlapping duties. And, for years, INS had been a reform-resistant organizational disaster. But combining the two has pleased neither agency. Customs officials complain they were forced to incorporate many of the INS's worst management elements into their relatively efficient culture, especially at the Immigrations and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE), which is BTS's investigative arm. "The INS has not been abolished," says a mid-level ICE worker in a Northeastern city. "It's alive and well, and running ICE." Customs had a good computer system but was forced to inherit INS's notoriously "horrible" one, this worker complains. He adds that the INS-based system in his office is so baffling that he needs a new staffer "basically full-time to operate [it]." Some Customs officials have even had to revert to pen and paper for record-keeping.In some cases, however, dueling government agencies were never merged in the first place--even though Bush had explained that "ending duplication and overlap" would save money and coordinate anti-terror efforts. Take the array of offices within DHS that manage grants and training for local first responders. The White House had initially intended to combine programs run by the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the Department of Justice's Office of Domestic Preparedness (ODP). But, after protests from both agencies--and members of Congress who have come to love ODP as a useful pork-delivery mechanism--they were kept separate.
Poor planning has led to confusion throughout DHS. "There are some people over there who still don't know what's going on," says a state homeland security policy expert. "It's not that they're not smart. They literally don't know where they fit in." One official I spoke to recently wasn't sure of the current name of her office. Bio-expert Tara O'Toole says such disorder has very real consequences. "I don't know who's in charge of biodefense for the United States. And, given that I do this all the time," she says, "that's very alarming to me."
B-grade talent and organizational confusion would be less of a problem if the department were showing better results. But, so far, there's been little progress. In many areas it seems that, in the race against the terrorists, DHS is wearing boots of lead.
Take the department's failure to create a consolidated terrorist "watch list." When it was discovered that the CIA had been watching two of the eventual September 11 hijackers as early as 2000 but never notified other agencies that might have stopped their entry into the United States, no task became more urgent than combining the government's twelve separate rosters of suspected terrorists. Outside experts, including the Markle task force, said that merging the watch lists could take as little as six to twelve months. The task initially fell to DHS, which claimed last year to be making progress. "I think we're fairly close to finalizing the consolidation itself," Ridge told a Senate committee last April. Five months later, a DHS press release assured that all federal agents would soon be working "off the same unified, comprehensive set of anti-terrorist information." Six months later, the lists are still not merged--and responsibility for the job has been transferred from Ridge's hapless department to the FBI.
Assessing the nation's thousands of vulnerable industrial sites, railways, electric grids, and so on is supposed to be central to the DHS mission. But 30 months after September 11, almost nothing has been done. Last year, an impatient Congress asked DHS to produce a plan for its nationwide risk assessment--not the actual assessment, just a plan for devising it--by December 15, 2003. The deadline came and went. Two days later, the White House quietly issued a directive giving DHS an entire year to develop a "plan" explaining its "strategy" for how to examine infrastructure. An actual infrastructure analysis, one DHS official told Congress last fall, could take five years. No one says it is easy to inventory the vulnerabilities of all 50 states. But DHS looks curiously slow when you consider that, by last summer, a George Mason University graduate student had used publicly available data to map every commercial and industrial sector in the country, complete with their fiber-optic network connections. And, as DHS struggles with devising an infrastructure-assessment plan, it is doing nothing to oversee critical facilities, like the hundreds of chemical plants nationwide--most of which still have little or no security.
Ultimately, perhaps we shouldn't be surprised. The president, after all, never wanted this department in the first place. The original idea came from Joe Lieberman--and Bush only embraced it when it looked like Lieberman's plan might pass without his support. But Bush certainly does like using DHS as a rhetorical weapon. His 2002 battle with Senate Democrats over union provisions in the DHS bill--during which he said the bill's opponents were "more interested in special interests in Washington and not interested in the security of the American people"--helped Republicans win back the Senate that November. No doubt Bush will be telling voters this fall that it was he who championed the department, implying that a Democrat couldn't be trusted to run it.
Bush may have inadvertently revealed his real motives a day after calling for the new department in June of 2002. Sitting in the Cabinet Room of the White House, flanked by his GOP allies, Bush declared that the new department would "enable all of us to tell the American people that we're doing everything in our power to protect the homeland." In the case of the Department of Homeland Security, Bush seems to prefer the telling to the doing.