WASHINGTON — President Bush’s proposal for creation of a Cabinet-level Department of Homeland Security includes much that is sensible policy and a few ideas that are plain silly. Congress needs time to sort it out.
Bush’s embrace of the proposal to consolidate in a single place the separate agencies that have responsibility for safeguarding our borders — the Coast Guard, the Customs Service, the Immigration and Naturalization Service and the Border Patrol — has been welcomed by former Sens. Warren Rudman and Gary Hart, whose bipartisan commission recommended that step well over a year ago. Linking those units with the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which leads the national response to disasters, makes sense also to Sen. Joe Lieberman and Rep. Mac Thornberry, the bipartisan pair who have been pressing such legislation in the face of White House opposition that has suddenly vanished.
A more generous president might have given credit to these and other foresighted officials, rather than seeking to create the impression that it was his staff who came up with this brilliant scheme. Rudman, a New Hampshire Republican, exaggerated just a little when he told me, "They basically tore the cover off our report and made it a White House document."
Pride of authorship aside, almost all the national security experts I have interviewed said the intent and broad design of the massive reorganization plan is sound in concept — but difficult to accomplish. It can be improved by suggestions from those the White House task force excluded — Cabinet officials, public administration experts and members of Congress. The presidential goal of having the new department up and running by Jan. 1 is less important than avoiding the mistakes that have cropped up in past reorganization efforts.
I.M. "Mac" Destler of the University of Maryland, co-author of a forthcoming article on homeland security for The National Interest quarterly, cautioned that "experience shows that putting things into the same agency does not always coordinate them." Ivo Daalder of the Brookings Institution, his collaborator, pointed out that "25 years after we created the Department of Energy, we still have no national energy policy." That department is notoriously a collection of separate fiefdoms — not a coherent whole.
It is disquieting to some of these experts that, in his belated rush to respond to the growing criticism of intelligence failures before 9/11, Bush put his reorganization plan ahead of the homeland defense strategy Tom Ridge is expected to present next month. It would make sense for Congress to tell Ridge and the president, "We can better judge your organization scheme if we know what your strategy for protecting the nation will be."
For example, if the FBI is to make deterrence of terrorists its main mission, as Director Robert Mueller’s own reorganization plan implies, then should it not be a central part of the new Homeland Security Department? Gary Hart suggests splitting the FBI’s personnel and resources between a new homeland intelligence agency and a smaller FBI within the Justice Department, which would continue to work on bank robberies, drug cases, etc.
Hart would do the same thing with Customs, the Coast Guard and the rest, moving only those functions and people related to homeland security into the new department, while not burdening that department with tasks that do not make the nation any safer. Such a division of labor might satisfy some of the objections forcefully voiced by Rep. David Obey and other Appropriations Committee Democrats, who worry that routine but important government functions will be downgraded in this massive reorganization.
And speaking of massive, the silliest part of the president’s proposal is the claim that a new department can be run with fewer people and less money than its constituent agencies. The Clinton-Gore "reinventing government" initiative lost its focus, and much of its potential benefit, when spurious claims of personnel cuts became its driving force. Bush should learn from their example.
If there is going to be a new department with 170,000 people, accept that it will have a superstructure of its own. The Department of Education, the smallest Cabinet agency, with fewer than 5,000 employees, at last count had a secretary, a deputy secretary, an under secretary, eight assistant secretaries, 12 deputy assistant secretaries and innumerable directors and assistant directors — all with their own staff support.
Reorganization makes sense. But reorganizing and downsizing all at once is certain to fail.
David Broder can be reached at The Washington Post Writers Group, 1150 15th St. NW, Washington, DC 20071-9200.
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