On
March 1, 2003, the recently established Department of Homeland
Security (DHS) will begin to absorb the federal agencies currently
responsible for the functions being transferred to the new
department. The most difficult aspects of making the transition
from a disorganized federal bureaucracy incapable of adequately
defending the homeland to a streamlined and efficient program with
a strategic focus will become evident in the coming months and
years.
As
Secretary of Homeland Security Tom Ridge begins this transition, a
number of principles should be followed:
- Develop
a multi-use culture for the DHS by building on the example of
high-performing agencies that have successfully managed many
diverse responsibilities.
- Learn
from the best practices of the private sector to effect an
efficient transition and promote maximum rationalization of
redundant programs and processes.
- Ensure
that traditional American civil liberties are advanced hand-in-hand
with homeland security policies by empowering the Officer for Civil
Rights and Civil Liberties and the Privacy Officer.
- Begin
to rectify deficiencies in the Homeland Security Act of 2002, beginning with
restructuring the Border and Transportation Security Directorate
and establishing an intelligence fusion center.
- Provide
better assistance to state and local governments by creating a
network of high- level regional offices and reforming the first
responder grant program.
DEVELOPING A MULTI-USE CULTURE
The
one challenge shared by all of the diverse agencies being
transferred to the DHS is the need to balance security missions
with non-security duties or concerns. Indeed, how the department
would balance sometimes seemingly conflicting duties was a major
focus of the congressional debate over whether or not to create it
and continues to be an item of consideration today.
Fortunately, the DHS will include two
federal agencies, the United States Coast Guard (USCG) and the
Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), that have excelled at
meeting diverse needs in a cost-effective manner. Secretary Ridge should
promote the multi-mission focus of these agencies as a guiding
ideology for the entire department.
At
its core, a multi-use culture would develop programs to meet
homeland security and non-homeland security challenges through
shared resources and methods. In many incidents, such a flexible
culture of operations will be a practical necessity as the
cause--natural disaster, human error, or terrorist act--is not
always immediately clear. In addition, this approach is also more
cost-effective than the alternative of creating numerous,
frequently redundant programs designed to respond to specific types
of incidents.
FEMA
and the Coast Guard offer clear examples of such a culture. FEMA's
"all-hazards" approach to dealing with many different kinds of
disasters has enabled it to develop strong relationships with the
first-response community that has been central to its success. FEMA
has recognized that local governments can afford only one set of
first responders, so they must be equipped and trained to meet the
variety of challenges they are likely to face. As a result,
training programs and equipment are designed to work in many
applications.
Similarly, the Coast Guard's focus on
maritime operations has allowed it to develop tactics that are
applicable to any situation that arises on America's waterways. To
meet this challenge, the Coast Guard has focused on developing a
program known as "Maritime Domain Awareness" that allows it to
recognize what is occurring on America's waterways and quickly
respond (usually within two hours). The process of surveillance,
detection, classification, and interception is generally the same
for each mission. Similarly, the assets used to observe, evaluate,
and respond are typically the same.
A
multiple-use approach to homeland security assets is the best
strategy to enable the department to meet its important mission
efficiently and effectively. Organizationally, such an approach
also would be cost-effective. Thus, this is an issue not only of
good governance, but also of practical necessity if the federal
government is to interact efficiently with local agencies involved
in its various missions.
LEARNING FROM THE PRIVATE SECTOR TO EFFECT AN
EFFICIENT TRANSITION
The
construction of the DHS is a merger on a nearly unprecedented
scale: 22 federal agencies with approximately 177,000 employees
will be brought together under new leadership. In addition, several
entirely new offices have been created. Success, however, is by no
means preordained. Fortunately, the experience of private-sector
business mergers provides a model upon which a smooth, efficient,
and cost-effective transition can be built.
Mergers that emphasize reducing redundancy
and overlapping functions are more likely to achieve productivity
gains and savings by emphasizing economies of scale. Many
businesses are measurably successful, in budgetary and managerial
terms, because of the sound principles they use to guide mergers
and acquisitions.
One
of the most important principles is maintaining an adaptable and
versatile leadership that can make decisions with the shared goal
of improving the effectiveness and efficiency of the ever-changing
company. This
flexibility allows business leaders to make necessary adjustments
to meet the needs of a consolidated, restructured, and larger
company; it is especially significant in personnel practices, as
the changing needs of the company can include a redefinition of job
descriptions, new policies and procedures, and cultural and
attitudinal adjustments for every employee. Upholding the important
principle of flexible and versatile leadership helps ensure that
the merger is a success and that the separate companies are
combined smoothly into one.
Flexibility is also an important factor in
determining the financial success of the merger. The consolidation
process of companies involved in a merger presents a timely
opportunity to reduce inefficiencies and achieve cost savings with
a more streamlined process of doing business. Historically,
business mergers can result in substantial administrative savings
by eliminating redundant functions.
Thus, the process of mergers and
acquisitions in the business sector, when using sound guiding
principles, presents ample scope for generating profit. Indeed, an
estimated 34 percent of companies enjoy such profits as a result of
a well-planned process. The consulting firm of Booz Allen
Hamilton has cited procurement savings of 3 percent to 25
percent. If the
consolidation of federal homeland security programs into the DHS
achieves similar overhead savings with the President's proposed
homeland security budget for FY 2004 of $36.2 billion, this would mean
budgetary savings in the hundreds of millions of dollars.
While cost reduction is not considered to
be the sole goal of mergers and acquisitions, it is often the
fortunate result of a flexible and well-managed business deal. The
same is true of the creation of the Department of Homeland
Security, which is intended to make the disjointed federal homeland
security effort more effective. By bringing together federal
programs and agencies from a myriad of departments, the creation of
this new department is similar to a large-scale business merger.
The consolidation effort will require flexibility and principled
management decisions so that the federal government's many existing
redundant functions can be coordinated and streamlined
effectively.
ADVANCING CIVIL LIBERTIES AND
SECURITY
The
infusion of security practices into everyday domestic operations is
relatively unprecedented in American history. For the nation's
first century, two great oceans provided a degree of security from
external threats, and while that has not been the case for decades,
the mythology that America's foes will be fought overseas, not on
U.S. soil, has lingered.
Homeland security policy necessarily
challenges that illusion. The terrorist attacks on September 11,
2001, illustrated that vulnerabilities in domestic
operations--whether simple aircraft boarding procedures or
immigration and customs programs that emphasized economics and drug
interdiction--present opportunities for America's enemies to
attack. This new area of national security planning has rightfully
led supporters and skeptics alike to question the effect that new
policies will have on traditional American freedoms. In fact, both
civil liberties and homeland security must be advanced together and
in a mutually reinforcing manner.
To
ensure that the privacy and civil liberties of all Americans are
upheld with the increased level of security provided by the new
department, the DHS will include two new positions: an Officer for
Civil Rights and Civil Liberties and a Privacy Officer. The Officer
for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties will be responsible for
reviewing and assessing all information claiming an abuse of civil
rights, civil liberties, or racial and ethnic profiling by DHS
employees or officials. Implicit in this role is the public
communication and promotion of this office's functions and
responsibilities, as well as readily available contact information
for filing a claim. The Secretary of Homeland Security will be
required to review this information and report annually to Congress
on the implementation of this office and the funds used toward its
goal, as well as details of all allegations of abuse and the
response by the department.
The
Privacy Officer will be responsible for assuring that all
technologies used by the DHS uphold and do not erode the privacy
protections relating to use, collection, and disclosure of personal
information as granted in the Privacy Act of 1974. In this
capacity, it will be vital that the Privacy Officer quickly forge
close relationships with the Director of the Office for Science and
Technology in the Directorate for Information Analysis and
Infrastructure Protection as well as the Undersecretary for Science
and Technology. Similarly, it will be crucial for this officer to
be aware of technologies being developed by other members of the
homeland security community that may have applications for the DHS,
such as the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency's Total
Information Awareness program. This officer will also be tasked with
reviewing legislative and regulatory proposals involving the
collection, use, and disclosure of personal information by the
federal government. Additionally, the officer will assess the
department's privacy rules and report annually to Congress on its
activities, including reports of privacy violations.
The
establishment of these positions is consistent with the DHS's
fundamental responsibility to improve security while protecting the
civil liberties of all Americans. As the DHS develops ways to
prepare for and predict terrorist threats, it is also important
that it not overreach and either infringe on civil liberties or lay
the groundwork on which a future administration might restrict
freedom.
Establishing offices to fulfill this
responsibility is certainly a step in the right direction. While
their oversight of such concerns seems appropriate at present, it
must be flexible in the long term. The new department will be
constantly researching and developing improved methods for homeland
security, as technology continues to offer many solutions in this
area. Such growth, however, will inevitably raise new concerns
regarding privacy and civil liberties issues. Therefore, these two positions must be
adaptable for proper oversight of the DHS's expanding capabilities
in the future.
Both the Officer for Civil Rights and
Civil Liberties and the Privacy Officer should be individuals who
are thoroughly experienced and familiar with these issues,
particularly within the federal government. A candidate with a
background in national security issues, intelligence practices, and
national security, criminal, constitutional, and privacy law would
be well prepared to assess the true risk that is facing our country
while also measuring it against the sensitive personal information
that is needed to counter that risk. The delicate balance between
increased security and upholding the civil liberties granted by the
Constitution of the United States may indeed be one of the toughest
challenges facing the new department, but it is also one of the
most critical.
RECTIFYING THE DEFICIENCIES OF THE
HOMELAND SECURITY ACT
From
the day President Bush proposed the creation of the Department of
Homeland Security, the reorganization was compared to the
establishment of the Department of Defense (DOD) in 1947. Likewise,
the Homeland Security Act of 2002 was frequently compared to the
National Security Act of 1947.
No
commentator at the time could have known how true this analogy
would be. Like the National Security Act, the Homeland Security Act
failed to fully implement the vision behind it. For DOD, full
reform did not come until 1986 with passage of the
Goldwater-Nichols Act. Similar reform will be necessary in
the DHS and the rest of the federal bureaucracy involved with
homeland security, although this time Congress will share
responsibility with the President because of the significant
reorganization authority the Act grants the executive.
The
two most glaring shortcomings of the Homeland Security Act were
failure to effect the dramatic reform of America's border security
agencies and failure to establish an intelligence fusion center
that would solve the communication failures that prevented
unraveling al-Qaeda's plot before the September 11 attack. In
recent weeks, the Bush Administration has offered two proposals to
rectify these imperfections: restructuring of the Border and
Transportation Security Directorate and establishment of the
Terrorist Threat Integration Center (TTIC).
RESTRUCTURING AMERICA'S BORDER SECURITY
AGENCIES
On
January 30, 2003, Secretary of Homeland Security Tom Ridge
announced a restructuring of the DHS's Border and Transportation
Security Directorate. Ridge's proposal would take the elements of
the Immigration and Naturalization Service (including the Border
Patrol), the Customs Service, the Animal and Plant Health
Inspection Service, and the Federal Protective Service and
consolidate their functions into two new entities:
- The Bureau of
Customs and Border Protection would be responsible for
securing points of entry into the United States and conducting
physical inspections of people and conveyances at these
points.
- The Bureau of
Immigration and Customs Enforcement , on the other hand,
would be responsible for enforcing customs and immigration laws
within the United States and securing federal property.
This
reform, although overdue, may face opposition from Congress, which
fought hard to keep these functions separate in the Homeland
Security Act. Congress transferred all of the federal government's
critical border security functions to the DHS, but it did so in a
fragmented fashion. The Homeland Security Act was written in a way
that separated customs and immigration enforcement. While placing both
functions under one Undersecretary for Border and Transportation
Security was a step in the right direction, it will do little to
reduce redundancy at points of entry. Secretary Ridge's proposal
would rectify this oversight.
EFFECTIVE INFORMATION SHARING THROUGH
INTELLIGENCE FUSION
During his State of the Union Address,
President Bush also announced the creation of a Terrorist Threat
Integration Center to fuse and analyze terrorism-related
information from all sources. The TTIC will report to the Director
of Central Intelligence (DCI) and will consist of members of the
DHS, the Federal Bureau of Investigation's Counterterrorism
Division, the DCI's Counterterrorist Center, and the DOD.
Most
important, the TTIC not only will have access to the full scope of
intelligence and law enforcement information collected by the
United States for analysis, but also will be responsible for
ensuring that this information is shared with other agencies and
state and local authorities. The center will be responsible for
completing this mission through the use of shared databases and by
maintaining an up-to-date database of known and suspected
terrorists.
The
findings of the joint inquiry of the Senate
Select Committee on Intelligence and the House Permanent Select
Committee on Intelligence into the September 11, 2001 ,
terrorist attacks,
as well as other aspects of the investigation into 9/11 and the
analysis and recommendations of nearly every report on homeland
security since then, have all demonstrated the need for such a
center. In the months and years before September 11, 2001, for
example, two FBI offices and the CIA were conducting independent
investigations related to the attacks, but none of these offices
knew about the other's investigations; the names of the suspects
being investigated were not even added to existing terrorist watch
lists. Although legal impediments prevented the FBI and CIA from
sharing this crucial information, the biggest obstacle was
bureaucratic and human.
To
deal effectively with this dangerous state of affairs, a solution
that crosses agency lines and removes the human quotient from data
transfers is necessary to ensure that all federal, state, and local
entities with a counter-terrorism role have access to the
information they need to prevent future attacks. To be successful,
the TTIC must:
- Include
access to and the ability to explore all government databases,
including those maintained by the intelligence, regulatory, and law
enforcement communities;
- Integrate the information found in those
databases for use by individual analysts;
- Make
automated independent judgments about that information; and
- Allow
analysts to provide more complete and accurate warning.
In
addition, an intelligence fusion center is a better solution to the
intelligence failures that preceded 9/11 than is the recommendation
of some--including the Gilmore Commission, Senator Joseph Lieberman
(D-CT), and others--that a new domestic intelligence agency be
established. Such an agency would merely add another stovepiped
agency to the collection of departments and offices that already do
not adequately share information while also presenting serious
challenges to American civil liberties.
PROVIDING BETTER ASSISTANCE TO THE
STATES
Creation of the Department of Homeland
Security in no way reduces the crucial role of state and local
government in providing homeland security. Local agencies are the
most likely to respond first in a crisis.
For
example, the approximately 17,000 state and local police
departments may be the first to identify evidence of a possible
terrorist threat. State and local health care communities will
likely be the first to recognize the symptoms of a chemical or
biological attack. Local fire, Emergency Medical Service (EMS), and
police departments will nearly always arrive first at the scene of
a terrorist attack. The September 11, 2001, attack on the Pentagon
demonstrated this clearly: The local Arlington County fire
department managed the response through the early days.
However, with the recent focus on federal
efforts for the new DHS, many of the needs of state and local
communities have been neglected.
ESTABLISHING A SYSTEM OF REGIONAL
OFFICES
Communication between local, state, and
federal authorities is vital. The DHS will include an Office for
State and Local Government Coordination (OSLGC) in the Office of
the Secretary to coordinate DHS policy related to state and local
programs, assess state and local resources, and manage
communication between the DHS and these agencies. The department's
authorizing bill, however, provides no guidance on how the OSLGC
should conduct these responsibilities, and merely establishing an
office in Washington that is required to answer calls from state
and local officials would be insufficient. To be fully effective,
the office must have a presence outside of Washington, where it can
closely interact with governors and mayors.
The
DHS will inherit a variety of field offices from many of the 22
federal agencies it is absorbing, which the President has proposed
consolidating as part of his FY 2004 budget request. Their functions would
be bolstered by the appointment of a highly visible non-career
appointee who would represent the DHS Secretary in a given
geographic region and report to him through the Office of State and
Local Government Coordination. This person should be the primary
contact for officials in the region seeking advice or voicing
concerns.
Similarly, regional liaison officers
should be the primary link for transmitting federal objectives and
priorities to states and localities. The regional liaison officer
should supervise an operations center to communicate the federal
response to a local incident in a coordinated, interagency
manner.
The
regional offices, however, should focus on managing the DHS's
relationship with state and local governments and on providing them
the resources they need. They should not have operational authority
over the existing regional federal offices, which fulfill specific
federal missions and should continue to answer to the appropriate
undersecretary.
REFORMING FIRST RESPONDER GRANTS
Well-prepared first responders at the
state and local level are crucial to an effective homeland security
policy because they will always be the first to arrive on the scene
of an attack. In 2003, to provide for these crucial assets more
effectively, President Bush offered his First Responder Initiative,
which included a dramatic increase in federal grants from $300
million to $3.5 billion, and a proposal to consolidate all federal,
homeland security-related grants to first responders into one
program that would be managed by the Federal Emergency Management
Agency and designed to meet the different needs of recipient
states.
In
his FY 2004 budget request, President Bush asked Congress for $3.5
billion in grants for the Department of Homeland Security to
deliver to state and local responders. This was the same amount he
had requested as part of his First Responder Initiative in FY 2003.
However, when Congress passed the omnibus appropriations bill (H.J.
Res. 2) on February 13, 2003, the $3.5 billion was divided between
$2 billion for domestic preparedness and $1.5 billion to law
enforcement as part of established but underperforming grants
managed by the Department of Justice for traditional policing
purposes.
In
addition, Congress micromanaged how half of the domestic
preparedness funds could be spent instead of providing Secretary of
Homeland Security Ridge the flexibility to meet the varying needs
of America's states and cities. This rigidity will dramatically
reduce the usefulness of the funds.
All
federal grants designed to assist first responders in preparing for
disasters--whether terrorist, natural, or man-made--should be
consolidated into a single, flexible program in the Department of
Homeland Security,
which should initially be funded at the President's requested level
of $3.5 billion. The Secretary of Homeland Security should manage
this consolidated grant program through the Office of State and
Local Government Coordination, which will have the most direct
interaction with the local governments that need support. Existing
specialized domestic preparedness grants, whether under the DHS or
another federal agency, should be eliminated.
The
consolidated domestic preparedness grant program should provide
assistance to first responders for planning, procuring equipment,
training, and exercising. However, Congress should not micromanage
how much the DHS can spend in each area. Instead, the OSLGC should
be free to provide funds based on a state's needs.
In
order to receive funds, states should be required to submit an
application to the DHS that includes an all-hazards response plan
featuring mutual assistance agreements among local communities and
promotes interoperability of equipment and procedures. Funds should
then be distributed through the state governors' offices consistent
with such plans. The federal government should require that the
majority of funds be transferred to the local level expeditiously.
Finally, the grant level should be reassessed six months after the
consolidation occurs, and annually afterwards, to ensure that the
needs of America's first responders are being met.
CONCLUSION
The establishment of the Department of
Homeland Security can dramatically improve domestic security in the
United States. However, the efficiency of the transition from the
previous sclerotic bureaucracy to the new department is crucial.
Secretary Ridge should ensure that the department adopts a
multi-use culture to balance its security and non-security
missions, promote maximum consolidation as a best business
practice, ensure that civil liberties and homeland security are
advanced simultaneously, address the deficiencies of the Homeland
Security Act of 2002, and take additional measures to assist state
and local governments as effectively as possible.
Michael Scardaville is Policy Analyst for
Homeland Security in the Kathryn and Shelby Cullom Davis Institute
for International Studies at The Heritage Foundation.