BUSH'S DISASTROUS HOMELAND SECURITY DEPARTMENT. "If the American people knew how little has been done, they would be outraged" dammit, I AM
Playing Defense
by Michael Crowley
tnr.com
Last December, I called the Department of Homeland Security's (DHS) main line. "Thank you for your interest in the Department of Homeland Security," a recorded voice responded. "Due to the high level of interest in the department all lines are currently busy. ... We encourage you to call back soon." A beep was followed by a click. It was a good thing I wasn't calling to report an anthrax attack, because I'd been disconnected. As advised, I tried calling back "soon"--and got the same recording. Just a bad week, perhaps? Apparently not. A few weeks later, a Roll Call reporter had the same experience.
Unanswered phones are a small but telling example of how DHS is faring one year after the department opened its doors last March. Far from being greater than the sum of its parts, DHS is a bureaucratic Frankenstein, with clumsily stitched-together limbs and an inadequate, misfiring brain. No one says merging 170,000 employees from 22 different agencies should have been easy. But, even allowing for inevitable transition problems, DHS has been a disaster: underfunded, undermanned, disorganized, and unforgivably slow-moving.
And, yet, George W. Bush can't stop praising it. His January State of the Union address hailed "the men and women of our new Homeland Security Department [who] are patrolling our coasts and borders," whose "vigilance is protecting America." In a September 11 anniversary address at Quantico, Virginia, Bush mentioned DHS no less than twelve times, saying, "Secretary [Tom] Ridge and his team have done a fine job in getting the difficult work of organizing the department [sic]." And, at an event celebrating the department's one-year anniversary this week, Bush declared that the department had "accomplished an historic task," and that Ridge has done a "fantastic job" of making the United States safer.
That's nonsense. DHS has failed to address some of our most serious vulnerabilities, from centralizing intelligence to protecting critical infrastructure to organizing against bioterror. Many a policy wonk who has evaluated the department has come away despondent. Zoe Lofgren, a senior Democrat on two House committees that oversee DHS, puts it this way: "We are arguably in worse shape than we were before [the creation of the department]. ... If the American people knew how little has been done, they would be outraged."
f the September 11 attacks provided one essential lesson about the federal bureaucracy, it is that rival agencies need to better share intelligence so they can "connect the dots" and more quickly track down suspected terrorists. Improving intelligence coordination was a fundamental rationale for creating DHS, and so the bill establishing the department also gave birth to a brand new government office, the directorate of Information Analysis and Infrastructure Protection (IAIP). IAIP was designed to receive vast amounts of both raw and analyzed data from intelligence agencies like the CIA and FBI, allowing DHS analysts to search for patterns that individual agencies might have missed. Bush called this one of DHS's "primary tasks": "to review intelligence and law enforcement information from all agencies of government and produce a single daily picture of threats against our homeland."
But, even before DHS opened its doors, Bush dramatically undermined the IAIP--and, by extension, the entire department. Without consulting Congress--or telling the IAIP's planning staff--he announced the creation of the Terrorist Threat Integration Center (TTIC), a quasi-independent agency that would assume most of the intelligence powers originally intended for the new department. Now TTIC, and not DHS, would become the clearinghouse of anti-terror intelligence. The decision not only eliminated the chief rationale for IAIP's existence; it exacerbated a problem the new agency had been created to improve. That is, rather than cutting through bureaucratic turf battles, TTIC may have complicated them further. Staffed by officials from a variety of existing intelligence agencies, TTIC is housed in the CIA's offices in Langley, Virginia, and its director reports to CIA Director George Tenet. Explained a former administration anti-terror official, "Tenet said the CIA is not going to give up its responsibility on threatreporting and threat analysis. He put a mark in the sand and said, 'No way am I going to give this up to a new organization [DHS] that doesn't know its ass from its elbow.'"
But TTIC has only further confused the interagency intelligence picture, according to a recent report on homeland security information-sharing by the Markle Foundation. "TTIC's creation has caused confusion among state and local entities, and within the federal government itself, about the respective roles of the TTIC and DHS," explained the report, which was overseen by former Aetna executive Zoe Baird and former Netscape CEO James Barksdale. "This confusion needs to be resolved." Even the agency's deputy director, Russell Travers, conceded as much in testimony to the 9/11 Commission in January: "There is a degree of ambiguity between our mission and some other analytic organizations within the government." Internally, TTIC analysts--who tend to be junior and inexperienced--still need permission from intelligence agencies before sharing their data with other parts of the government. The Markle report says that approach "further locks the government into a system that has proven unsuccessful for the sharing of information in the past." Perhaps worst of all, there's no requirement that other intelligence agencies share with TTIC at all. "The original idea [behind DHS] was that a fusion center doesn't allow anyone to make decisions about what flows into it. The analysts are there to look and decide," says a Senate Democratic aide. So much for that idea.
hen again, it's not clear why anyone would trust DHS with something as important as raw intelligence. Consider the story of Paul Redmond, IAIP's first director. Although most of IAIP's intelligence-analysis duties have been given to TTIC, it is still responsible for finding and fixing vulnerabilities in the nation's infrastructure. However, when Redmond appeared before a House subcommittee last June, it was clear that IAIP couldn't handle even this task. Redmond reported that, three months after DHS had begun operations, IAIP had filled just one-quarter of its analyst slots, "because we do not have the [office] space for them." Committee members of both parties were appalled. "Why should I feel comfortable today, Mister Redmond?" asked Republican Representative Chris Shays. "Why should I feel that we made a good decision [about creating IAIP]? ... Do you feel that, given the incredible importance of your office, that that's a pretty surprising statement to make before this committee?" Apparently, Redmond's performance didn't go over well with the Bush administration, either. Soon after, he quietly announced his resignation for "health reasons."
Redmond was only running IAIP to begin with because the best man for the job had been passed over. That man was John Gannon, formerly a top official at the CIA. Gannon had run IAIP's transition team and was expected to become its director. "If there was anyone in government qualified to do that job, he was the guy," says a person familiar with the IAIP. But the administration didn't turn to Gannon--some suspect because he was a Clinton appointee. Unfortunately, the Pentagon official who was the administration's first choice to fill the position said no. So did the next candidate. And the next. In all, more than 15 people turned down entreaties that they apply for the job, according to The Washington Post. "When [the administration] finally realized there was nobody but Gannon to offer the job [to, Gannon] was so pissed off he went elsewhere," says Rand Beers, a former administration counterterrorism official now advising John Kerry. (Gannon is now staff director of the House Homeland Security Committee.)
The story illustrates the trouble the administration has had bringing topflight talent to DHS. "They definitely were not attracting the superstars," says a former administration national security official. "I often felt like I was dealing with the B team or even the C team. You can chalk that up to growing pains, ... [but] it doesn't leave you that comforted." For instance, although several agents from an existing FBI critical infrastructure protection office were expected to make the leap to DHS, virtually none were willing to do so. "A lot of agents said, 'Why would I go there?'" reports one former administration official. "[I]ntelligence professionals have been much more willing to go to the CIA or Departments of Justice, Defense, or State," reported the Gilmore Commission, a group of homeland security experts assembled by Congress and charged with periodically reviewing U.S. defenses against terrorism. It's not just skilled bureaucrats who shun DHS but technical experts, too. For instance, the department has few top bioterrorism scientists in its ranks, according to Tara O'Toole, director of the Center for Biosecurity at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center and one of the nation's leading bioterror authorities. DHS has "a very minimal team in terms of senior people with appropriate technical backgrounds. That's got to change," O'Toole says.
Meanwhile, DHS's leadership has already suffered a slew of defections. Within six months, several key officials who helped launch the new department were gone--including Ridge's chief of staff, Bruce Lawlor, and deputy secretary, Gordon England, both of whom left on rocky terms. The department's chief financial officer, Bruce Carnes, also departed in December. Such defections have further stalled the department's progress. "A lot of time has been lost because the department's management hasn't been tip-top," says a Senate Democratic aide.
And, in case you were wondering, the search for someone to run IAIP settled on a former Marine Corps general named Frank Libutti. But Libutti, while an experienced soldier, lacks any intelligence background. And his pile-driving, military style isn't winning many converts. At a meeting of state homeland security directors at a Virginia Marriott hotel last October, Libutti took the stage as the theme from Rocky blared through a loudspeaker and a laser light show bounced off the walls. He then proceeded to drop and perform one-armed push-ups for the bewildered crowd. Over the course of the conference, multiple sources say, Libutti further alienated the state officials with a crude machismo that caused at least one woman to walk out in disgust. |
