Bush Plan Developed in Silence and Stealth
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Bush Plan's Underground Architects
In Silence and Stealth, Group Drafted Huge Security Overhaul
By David Von Drehle and Mike Allen
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, June 9, 2002; Page A01
There was little doubt in the White House that the creation of a Cabinet
department would have to be done in secret. That's the preferred style of the
Bush administration.
But how secret?
Near-total. In the beginning just four men and a few trusted aides worked on
the most ambitious reorganization of the government's national security
structure since the creation of the Department of Defense half a century ago.
As the work became more detailed and the PEOC Group (from their
underground meeting space, the Presidential Emergency Operations Center)
expanded, White House Deputy Chief of Staff Joseph Hagin gravely explained
the omerta, or code of silence, to each new arrival. At the end of each meeting,
all the papers were collected: nothing left that room.
The work was virtually completed before two of President Bush's most
trusted confidants, Karen Hughes and Karl Rove, were briefed on the plan.
Commerce Secretary Donald L. Evans -- known around the White House as
"Uncle Don" for his long and close relationship with Bush -- heard the news for
the first time the night before it was made public.
No Cabinet secretary was directly consulted about a plan that would strip
170,000 employees and $37 billion in funding from existing departments,
according to members of the PEOC Group interviewed late last week.
Time will tell if these extraordinary measures meant too little input in
answering an extremely complicated set of questions. The heads of several
hard-hit departments declined to comment on the process.
Architects of the Bush plan say they were able to learn all they needed to
know through feints and sleight-of-hand, along with think-tank style research.
"We consulted with agencies and with Congress," said White House Chief of
Staff Andrew H. Card Jr., "but they might not have known we were consulting."
Card concluded this extraordinary secrecy was necessary last spring. Tom
Ridge, director of the Office of Homeland Security, had proposed just one piece
of what became an enormous reorganization. In the aftermath of the Sept. 11
terrorist attacks, Ridge wanted to gather the agencies responsible for protecting
American borders under one umbrella.
The bureaucracies erupted.
Ridge hoped to have the proposal finished in time for Bush's State of the
Union address in late January. "It frankly went nowhere," according to Nicholas
E. Calio, the president's lead liaison to Congress. Turf squabbles delayed
things for nearly three months.
Finally, in mid-March, Bush stepped in. He convened the Cabinet
secretaries who could lose agencies from their departments, including Treasury
Secretary Paul H. O'Neill and Attorney General John D. Ashcroft. He found
"obvious examples of bureaucratic inertia that would prevent this from
happening," according to Card.
Card -- and Ridge, and Bush -- drew the following lesson: Ideas introduced
piecemeal will be killed piecemeal. Trial balloons, an administration official
explained, "are easy to shoot down."
The scale of the project was dictated by Bush, influenced by months of
nudging from Ridge and Vice President Cheney, and galvanized by the
bureaucracy's success in scuttling the border proposal. "Start with a clean
piece of paper," Bush instructed the group, according to one senior official. "It's
going to have to be something big or nothing at all."
On Thursday, Bush surprised Washington with a proposal that would
combine such agencies as the Immigration and Naturalization Service, the
Customs Service, the Coast Guard, the Secret Service, the Federal Emergency
Management Agency -- even the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory -- into
the third-largest unit of the federal government, behind the Pentagon.
Congressional leaders learned of the plan only hours before the public did.
Same with members of the Cabinet.
"We were worried about the rumor mill," explained Hughes. "People get
scared in an agency when they think something's going to happen to their
agency. A lot of these are front-line agencies that we were counting on to
defend us. So we didn't want rumors starting and people being worried about
losing their jobs."
According to Card and other sources, the work of the PEOC Group can be
traced back to Bush's presidential campaign, when he and his opponent,
then-Vice President Al Gore, agreed on the need to bolster the country against
terror. This subject intrigued Cheney, who "did a deep dive" into the available
research and theories, Card said.
Aided by a small staff, Cheney examined security proposals from
commissions headed by former Virginia governor James S. Gilmore III, by
former senators Gary Hart (D-Colo.) and Warren B. Rudman (R-N.H.), "and
others, going back a ways," Card said in an interview Friday.
When terrorists destroyed the World Trade Center and damaged the
Pentagon, Cheney's work became the basis for Bush's announcement nine
days after the attacks that he was creating the Office of Homeland Security, led
by Pennsylvania Gov. Ridge. It was an advisory position, with no authority over
the estimated 100 federal agencies with some role in homeland defense. Critics
on Capitol Hill and elsewhere derided the office as an empty gesture.
But several knowledgeable sources said that Cheney never expected the
initial design to endure; instead, he favored a large-scale reorganization of the
government from early on.
Bush, on the other hand, remained agnostic. When a chart was published
showing a spaghetti bowl of tangled lines of authority for homeland protection,
"he knew instinctively that there had to be a better way," one adviser said, but
the president also had more pressing concerns. The first task, Bush told Ridge,
was to "harden America, secure the country, make sure everyone was vigilant,"
according to Card.
In early October, in separate meetings with key House members and
senators to discuss homeland defense, Bush heard one lawmaker after another
extol the need for a Cabinet-level authority to force changes on agencies that
had never before thought of themselves as fighting a war. The president pleaded
for time to let Ridge tackle the immediate job -- "to try to do what we could with
the legal authority we had," Hughes said. After that he would have time to
examine the deeper structure of the bureaucracy.
It was better to have Ridge pep-talking state police leaders and exhorting
governors and touring border checkpoints looking for holes than to have him
"blah, blah, blah up on the Hill," one senior White House official said.
But what the administration now presents as an orderly two-step process --
the short-term strategy and the long-term strategy -- was not always laid out
that way. Officials repeatedly said things that made it sound as if Bush were
fundamentally opposed to a formal Cabinet agency. "He does not think it's
necessary," press secretary Ari Fleischer said last fall.
As recently as May 30, as the final details of the Bush plan were being
tweaked in secrecy, Ridge told the National Journal that he would advise Bush
to veto any bill that made his office more than advisory.
In the last months of 2001, as Ridge went about his immediate tasks, he
seemed increasingly frustrated by his inability to force change. ("I'm not
authorized to be frustrated," the former soldier snapped recently, when asked
about this impression.) He found that even when agencies wanted to shift their
priorities to focus on terrorism, they didn't feel free to do so.
"You'd say to Customs, look for any material related to bioterrorism in
incoming packages," Card explained. "Customs might agree. But Treasury" --
the parent department for the Customs Service -- "says the top priority is to
collect the tariff. Or Immigration would say, no, our priority is to process the
paper, not look at the people."
Meanwhile, some of the things Ridge managed to accomplish were widely
scorned, especially his system for rating the degree of terrorist threat each
morning according to a color-coded scale. The conservative magazine National
Review headlined a recent article about Ridge, "Color Me Pointless."
Ridge continued to meet daily with Bush, and often steered their
conversations to the crippling effect of having key agencies spread out over
multiple Cabinet departments. After one of these conversations, Chief of Staff
Card ordered his deputies, Hagin and Joshua B. Bolten, to gather as much
intelligence as they could concerning the roots of the bureaucratic impasse
over immigration, intelligence sharing and one or two other issues.
"I stuck a microscope in some of the organizations," Card said, and he
came away persuaded that only a secret lightning strike could force the needed
changes.
In the last week of April, the president authorized "a little team" to tackle
the subject, without concern for personalities, favored appointees or prickly
institutions, Card said. The nucleus was Card, Ridge, Office of Management
and Budget Director Mitchell E. Daniels Jr. and White House Counsel Alberto
R. Gonzales. The next officials to be brought in, in the first week of May, were
Hagin, Bolten, Calio, national security adviser Condoleezza Rice and her
deputy, Stephen J. Hadley.
One trusted staff member of each of the four officials in the nucleus began
to meet daily on the issue. The team was given 10 days to collect enough
information to sketch options and identify obstacles.
Card ordered up research into the creation of the Defense Department in the
late 1940s as a case study. A small team of analysts gathered journal articles
and think-tank reports and position papers posted by members of Congress on
their Web sites.
"People imagine that we were working in a closet," Card said, "but it was
more like working in a library."
PEOC Group members, meanwhile, collated the information they had and
gathered more, as much as they could without letting anyone know what they
were up to.
Ridge had already been at this for some time. During visits to the borders
with Customs Commissioner Robert C. Bonner, Immigration Commissioner
James W. Ziglar and then-Coast Guard Commandant James M. Loy, he
learned the details of those agencies.
He met with Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman (D-Conn.), and other backers of a bill
that would have forced the sort of changes that Ridge was secretly designing.
He talked with Sen. Bob Graham (D-Fla.), Rep. Porter J. Goss (R-Fla.), and
other leaders of the intelligence committees; House Minority Leader Richard A.
Gephardt (D-Mo.), and a long list of other officials.
Always he kept the focus fairly narrow, trying to figure out the shape of one
puzzle piece without giving away the overall picture. "These were very specific
conversations," Ridge said. Card, Cheney and congressional liaison Calio were
conducting similar missions.
The PEOC Group found it very helpful that Lieberman's bill had started
moving in the Senate. It covered a lot of the same issues the White House was
secretly wrestling with. By pretending to seek reactions to the bill, they were
able to learn a lot from potential supporters and opponents of their own work.
They used this camouflage right up to the end.
"I got a call from Ridge on Wednesday," Lieberman recalled. "He said,
'We're looking at your bill and I have a couple of questions about it.' " Ridge
never let on that Bush had his own even larger proposal at the printers.
"The next morning, a reporter asked me about the plan," Lieberman
continued, "and I said, 'I didn't realize I had this much influence with the
administration.' "
By May 10, the PEOC Group was ready to start making decisions. By then
the group had grown to include I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Cheney's chief of staff.
Card presented the task as almost an academic exercise. "Don't assess the
political feasibility or the unintended consequences," he said in his opening
remarks.
And indeed, they started out in a highly theoretical vein, according to
several participants. Analysts presented a lecture on six common traits of
effective organizations, "unity of command," "unity of effort," and so on.
Then they looked at all the existing proposals -- from bills in Congress to
special commission reports -- and discussed the strengths and weaknesses of
each one. In subsequent meetings they steadily narrowed the choices.
Throughout the process, Card and Ridge continued to see Bush daily, and
he would ask how things were going. "He'd say, 'How's that Coast Guard issue
coming?' or 'How's this gonna affect Customs?' " Card said.
Little by little, group members realized they were moving toward a more
sweeping plan than any of the existing models, for reasons that were,
ultimately, partly political. New details hit the news almost daily of failures to
anticipate the Sept. 11 attacks. This had two effects: it raised the pressure for
a serious response and it built support for Lieberman's bill, leading to fears in
the White House that he would preempt the administration.
"Everybody became clear that we were all headed in the same direction,
which was larger rather than smaller," Calio recounted.
From the pragmatic viewpoint of a professional vote-counter, Calio heartily
agreed with this trend. He initially doubted whether any proposal that stepped
on so many toes and threatened so much turf could pass Congress. Ironically,
though, Calio concluded the only hope was to propose something so significant
it would generate its own momentum. "The only way to get anything passed
was to get something big," he said.
On the other hand, not every idea was added to the proposal. One key
question was whether to shift the FBI into the new agency, but Bush decided
against it. "The president said this needs to be a homeland security, not a law
enforcement, agency," a senior official said.
The group also discussed tying the National Guard into the new department,
and concluded that it should stay under the Defense Department.
The final proposal was three-quarters of an inch thick, filled with charts
outlining various options and the pros and cons of the groups's
recommendations. Card and Ridge met with Cheney on May 21 to present their
work.
The next day, during the long flight from Washington to Berlin to begin a
presidential tour of Europe, Card took Bush page-by-page through the fat
document. Bush raised a number of specific questions, mostly nuts-and-bolts
matters regarding the problems of unifying agencies with different work rules
and pay scales. But he approved the basic outline.
From there, it was a race to plug in enough details to go public before the
inevitable leaks. June 6 and June 12 were proposed as release dates. Some
inside the White House wanted more time to prepare, but Calio insisted that
speed was of the essence to capture momentum and give Congress time to
act.
On Wednesday, June 5, Rep. Jane Harman (D-Calif.), co-sponsor of a bill to
overhaul homeland security, was heading to a television studio when she
learned that a scheduled session on the subject had been abruptly canceled by
the House Judiciary Committee. Rep. Christopher Shays (R-Conn.) had just
complied with a mysterious request from the White House to cancel a different
hearing that he had planned on the same topic.
"If I were a conspiracy nut I'd say something's up," an aide said.
"Yep," Harman answered. "Something's up."
It wasn't until the next morning that she found out what: minutes before it
broke in public.
Staff writers Dan Balz, Dan Eggen and Bill Miller contributed to this report. |
