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How we organize our own homeland defense must be the campaign-finance-reform issue of the war on terrorism: Something that makes all of Washington go atwitter, but prompts a big yawn from the rest of the country. This reshuffling may be vitally important, but then so much of what happens in the nation's capital doesn't beat out the Stanley Cup finals as a conversation priority.
The Bush administration obviously thought this announcement was abnormally important. Yet it is far from clear that the creation of a new federal department — the first since Ronald Reagan approved the Department of Veterans Affairs — will make us any safer. The reorganization does address a serious problem. More than a hundred federal agencies have a role to play in homeland security, from the Department of Defense to the Centers for Disease Control. Tom Ridge, as director of homeland security in the White House, currently doesn't have the ability to order any of them to do anything. "Other agencies can write checks and put people in the field," says security expert Neil C. Livingstone of GlobalOptions — but Ridge has no one to command. He's the director of homeland security, but nobody has to follow his directions, except maybe his secretary. As head of a new department, this will presumably change. (I'm assuming here that Ridge will be nominated for the post, even though there were rumors yesterday that Bush would try to tap a friendly Democrat in the Senate. Memo to the White House: If you must do this, it would be helpful if the senator comes from a state with a Republican governor. Bob Graham of Florida, perhaps?) Bush proposes that the Department of Homeland Security will house four divisions: border and transportation security; emergency preparedness and response; chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear countermeasures; and intelligence analysis and infrastructure protection. The White House insists that building a new department will be "revenue neutral." In other words, the overall cost of government won't go up. "Every person in the new department will be matched by a reduction somewhere else," says Mitch Daniels of the Office of Management and Budget told NRO yesterday. Details about the new department are vague — Daniels wouldn't say, for instance, if its proposed authority over the border means it will grab the Border Patrol from the Department of Justice or the Customs Service from the Department of Treasury. Yet this is the clear implication, and other agencies ripe for moving into the new department include the Coast Guard, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, and the Secret Service. One White House aide says the department's total budget may approach $40 billion and oversee 170,000 employees. All this shifting around will be difficult. If there's another anthrax attack, the National Institutes of Health probably will have some role to play. Yet defending Americans from anthrax is only a small part of what the NIH does. Must it move entirely beneath the umbrella of homeland security, or will only a piece of it go there? And the hope for budget neutrality may be an illusion. One of the ongoing problems with homeland security is the skyrocketing cost, as Kate O'Beirne points out in the current issue of NR. Last November, when Congress quickly passed an airline-security bill, the measure was supposed to add about 30,000 new workers to the federal payroll. By February, however, the Transportation Security Agency was saying 30,000 wasn't enough — it needed 42,000. Then the figure leaped to 68,000. A month ago, it grew again, to 73,000 — bigger than the departments of energy, labor, state, HUD, and education combined. Daniels thinks a new department is the answer to these out-of-control demands for more and more spending. "We've got a lot better chance of controlling the size and activity of government when it's all in one place than when it's spread across a bunch of agencies," he says. There's some sense in that, though the reorganization also will have to survive congressional scrutiny and approval. By one count, there are 19 committees and 48 subcommittees in Congress with jurisdiction over some piece of "homeland security" — and this may even be a low estimate. If the federal government undergoes a massive reorganization, then so must Congress. It means a bunch of committee chairman will have to forfeit their jurisdiction over a piece of the red-hot homeland-security pie. Don't count on them to do this gladly. A huge part of the responsibility for homeland security falls not on the federal government, but on states, localities, and even the private sector. In the days following September 11, it was a local pol — Rudy Giuliani — who ran the show in lower Manhattan. One of the dangers of creating a new department is that this huge array of actors won't appreciate their own duties in this regard. Dave McIntyre of the Anser Institute, a think tank that closely tracks homeland-security issues, says a disturbing number of local officials don't believe homeland security is something they have to worry about. All this hullabaloo about the creation of a new federal department may not persuade them otherwise. Finally, a new bureaucracy won't necessarily solve some of the most vexing security problems. It does nothing to address the dilemma of airport screeners who pat down elderly ladies or pilots who say they want guns in their cockpits — the Bush administration still opposes anything that smacks of ethnic profiling for domestic flights and says pilots shouldn't be armed. And to the extent that bureaucratic failure contributed to September 11 — why didn't the FBI's Phoenix memo about flight schools receive more attention? — the answer surely isn't more bureaucracy. The White House thinks a new department will streamline, but it may simply add to the red tape. Tom Ridge may become the first secretary of homeland defense, only to discover that he doesn't have a much better handle on the situation than he does today. |
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I first heard yesterday that President Bush was going to give a speech
on rearranging homeland defense, I was thrilled — but that's because
I thought he would talk about the long overdue rearranging of Iraq's
homeland defense. 
