It's true, but far too easy, to make the point that the new Department of Homeland Security is coming to us way too late, kind of like closing the barn door after the horse has escaped. A more useful notion would be to view President George W. Bush as opening the barn door and trying to herd a pack of assorted loose animals into a single stall, while the horses romp outside. The "sweeping changes that will strengthen our homeland" unveiled by the president in his June 6 speech -- in which he envisioned the creation of a new cabinet department to unite elements of the government responsible for homeland security -- are both less and more than promised.
Initial impressions may be misleading, but it appears the department will advance security in just one way: By unifying border controls at entry points to the United States and combining this activity with aviation security and emergency response. At the same time, the plan threatens to weaken U.S. security in at least three other ways: by establishing a new agency that will compete for the homeland defense mission; by drafting disparate offices and services and combining them willy-nilly into a new entity; and by creating fresh crosscutting competition among elements of the U.S. government.
Whether or not Tom Ridge heads it, the new Department of Homeland Security will not actually control its titular function. The naval forces that are the real defense for America's sea frontiers, the air forces capable of defending our airspace, the FBI security services that can apprehend terrorists -- all will be outside its purview. This falls far short of the goal President Bush articulated of protecting the American people. Homeland Security will only be able to consolidate its protection function at the expense of long-established military services and other agencies, none of which it has much hope of besting in a rice-bowl fight.
Meanwhile, the operational arms of the department -- the Coast Guard, Border Patrol, and Secret Service -- all have substantial roles outside the homeland-security framework, and, thusly, significant purposes to distract them from the department's mission. The intelligence work of the department, which again does not supplant either the FBI's or the CIA's analytical arms, will create yet another source for competing reporting, something that is sure to cause confusion sooner or later. If the new agency is truly to end the "enduring vulnerability" of America, as Tom Ridge put it in a commentary to NBC News following the president's speech, it should really command the forces commensurate with that mission.
The project of melding many disparate elements of government into a new entity also promises massive confusion and dissipated effort. Early reports suggest that this consolidation involves no fewer than 153 entities, to be shrunk into 29 offices with 176,000 employees and a budget of more than $37 billion. That doesn't just sound difficult -- it is. For example, how will Lawrence Livermore Laboratory reconcile its homeland-security radiological research with its responsibilities in the nuclear weapons field? How will the Army's Chemical Corps divide its work between homeland defense and germ-warfare preparedness for forces in the field? How can the Centers for Disease Control designate some of its elements for the new agency given that the same labs and doctors are needed in public-health work? Finally, creation of the border transportation and security branch of the new agency requires bringing together major services of at least four existing cabinet departments and elements of another. The task of activating the Department of Homeland Security will be a huge enterprise, and the potential for major loss of efficiency while accomplishing that task will be enormous.
In his address calling for this new agency, President Bush spoke of a reorganization of government greater than anything attempted since Harry Truman proposed what became the National Security Act of 1947. This is true in the sense that immense work will be necessary to bring all the different animals together into one stall. But it is not true in the sense that the revamped U.S. government will have equally increased its scope or capability. The United States enjoyed an exponential growth in capabilities with the establishment of a Pentagon, the codification of law for the Marine Corps, and the creation of an Air Force and Central Intelligence Agency. By comparison, the new Department of Homeland Security offers only improvement at the margin, attained with great difficulty, and crafted under emergency conditions. Dangers lie here that the authors of this proposal have hardly begun to think through.
