This morning the Washington Post's Susan B. Glasser and Michael Grunwald delivered an article which blasted the Department of Homeland Security - pointing out that it began with a branding exercise, and has descended into a hopeless morass of incompetence and
cronyism:
Nearly three years after it was created in the largest government reorganization since the Department of Defense, DHS does have a story, but so far it is one of haphazard design, bureaucratic warfare and unfulfilled promises. The department's first significant test -- its response to Hurricane Katrina in August -- exposed a troubled organization where preparedness was more slogan than mission.
Simply put the DHS is a giant pork factory, and is a fraud. It is that it is not potentially a good idea, and we are stuck with it for the time being since rearranging more deck chairs won't help. But it is a visible monument to the corrupt and unaccountable Republican Congress and Executive, and a symbol of a government that is "vast, loose and out of control".
The reality is that Homeland Security is not Bush's creation, it is the creation of Congress, and particularly Joe Lieberman. Those people who have a high regard for Senator Lieberman should look at DHS, and ask themselves whether someone who can't even design a department should run all of them from the oval office. Stances aside, the Department of Homeland Security is ineffective because it has insufficient information gathering powers and insufficient planning and coordination. The Pentagon exists, because that is how much real estate it takes to keep the US military organized, even with all of the problems that it has. To create a department with a scope which is only somewhat smaller, and which has the disadvantage of unifying dozens of sub-departments, where as the DoD only had to fuse the Army, Navy, Marine Corps and what is now called the Air Force - without a similar vision of how it is to accomplish this role, is to court disaster.
Appointing empty suit Tom Ridge was even more a disaster, as it has become clear that Ridge was concerned with image, and not action. Once he had colour coded the threat level, it seems that the rest of the time his job was to manage upwards in keeping Bush happy, and go on television to intone how wonderfully well everything is going.
"Creating a new cabinet post doesn't solve the problem"
In one of the few times where the Bush executive was being honest, Ari Fliescher warned that DHS was not going to be a solution. However, this is also a self-fulfilling prophecy. Bush did not want DHS, but instead wanted to take over existing organizations - military intelligence, NSA, CIA, FBI - and bend them to his will. Smaller departments are easier to lean on, where as DHS, by being big, visible and diverse, created its own constituency.
At this point the stream of lame excuses from the executive and the Republican Congress - they are saying "it's entrenched bureaucracy's fault!" - begs the question - creating a department, as Congress did, and pouring huge sums of money into it, as the executive did, creates a problem of managing the result. The bottom line is, once the lapel pins were handed out, the people at the top thought their job was done, and it shows.
The lacadasical attitude began before 911:
Before Sept. 11, a host of blue-ribbon terrorism commissions had recommended new bureaucratic alignments, culminating with the May 2001 finding by a panel chaired by former senators Gary Hart (D-Colo.) and Warren B. Rudman (R-N.H.) that the nation had a "fragmented and inadequate" homeland defense apparatus. In response, Vice President Cheney ordered a "national preparedness review," focused on the catastrophic possibility of an attack employing weapons of mass destruction. "They knew the government was not well configured to deal with this," former White House aide Frank J. Cilluffo recalled.
And it continued as the pervasive paranoia and secrecy of the Bush executive took over:
The lesson his staff took away was the need for secrecy: When bureaucracies were informed of potential threats to their empires, they tended to resist. "Everybody realized the agencies were not going to look at mission first, they were going to look at turf first," recalled Bruce M. Lawlor, a National Guard major general working for Ridge.
The way to deal with turf wars is to produce win/win - not by sneaking around. Sneaking around leads to meltdowns, and yet, that was Ridge's first response when frustrated even once.
The political pressure - Congress wanted someone to question, the Republicans wanted a talking point for the campaign trail, and Bush wanted budget authority - came together in a vast blue elephant abortion department. A department with no teeth, lots of tail, and no brains. Rice scoffed that it should not be like "the German Interior Ministry" - a department that works relatively well. Heavan forbid that working models be used.
The reality is that it was not "bureaucracy" but internal turf wars at the top - Card, Ashcroft, Thompson - which doomed the department, as ambitious men jockeyed for position and fiefdoms, it was not the civil service appointees that were crafting the department's swiss cheese structure, but the Bush executive branch and its apparatchniks.
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DHS' "successes" are minor - armoring cockpit doors and the TSA, tasks which would have worked without DHS. More over, it is an admitted failure at its border mission - the current Republican hysteria over immigration is an indictment of their own handling of their own issue. While the Republicans are busy attacking states for giving undocumenteds tuition, the reality is that without porous borders and poor security, there wouldn't be people to give tuition and driver's licenses to.
It's failure in the Katrina disaster is so manifest that even the executive branch admits it. While the sordid history documented in the article puts the final nail in the image of Republicans as good leaders and managers, it does not address what needs to be done.
And that is that the DHS needs to be overhauled, and given the agencies that are needed to perform its functions, including investigatory powers, information gathering abilities, a means of planning for procurment, training and mission contingencies, and above all, a far sharper mandate to deal with crisis points for which the DoD should not be the lead agency. These problems will require some enabling legislation, but they are, in the main, problems of an executive branch which simply cannot manage anything successfully and with firm competence required of mission critical functions.
Instead it is clear that Republicans are going to carve the department up in order to protect their electoral interests, and avoid admitting failure. Instead what it is getting is corporate kickoff speak palbum in the form of human interest stories, rather than clear direction. Instead of protecting the US from terrorism and disaster, it is being used as a secret police that threatens and intimidates US citizens a part of the "Patriot act" domestic spying system which allows warrantless searches and thought crime investigations.