Homeland Security Searches for a Home
URL:http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,71102,00.html
Thursday, November 21, 2002
WASHINGTON, D.C — Passage of the Homeland Security Act was merely the end of the beginning. Now the real work gets started.
The White House predicts it will take a year to finish establishing the new Homeland Security Department, a job that entails everything from locating the building to deciding who sits where.
Pulling from 22 agencies that perform dozens of tasks, the new Homeland Security Department will eventually employ 170,000 workers from departments as diverse as the Immigration and Naturalization Service, Border Patrol, Federal Emergency Management Agency, Secret Service, Coast Guard, animal and plant health inspection service, the Commerce Department's Critical Infrastructure Assurance Office, Customs Service and intelligence analysts.
Once the department is signed into law, the administration will have only weeks in which to inform Congress about a timetable for the transfer of agencies, which will begin 60 days after President Bush signs the legislation, said Gordon Johndroe, spokesman for Homeland Security Director Tom Ridge.
The transition will be directed by Ridge and personnel director Clay Johnson.
"We've been working with all these people on how to transition in and integrate it while allowing absolutely no gaps in security," Johndroe said.
"One goal is getting everyone on the same e-mail system during the transition period of 60 to 90 days," he added.
But skeptics say the Bush administration may run into serious problems in assembling what is intended to be a key weapon in the war on terrorism. For instance, the person chosen to head the agency is still under lock and key.
The Washington Post reported that Bush will name Ridge to head the new cabinet when he signs the bill, and several names of Ridge deputies are being floated, including Gordon R. England, the Navy secretary and a former high-ranking executive of Lockheed Martin, and John Gannon, a former deputy director of the CIA, who has helped run the department's transition team. A third candidate may be Drug Enforcement Administrator Asa Hutchinson.
They will then be responsible for deciding how much authority to delegate to get the department in working order on such short notice.
"How much power is held back by the secretary and how much is delegated?" asked Alan L. Dean, who helped establish the Transportation Department during 1966 and 1967. "If it's over-centralized it slows down everything and overburdens the secretary. If it's decentralized you have to make sure people getting the authority are carrying out their functions properly."
The administration also hasn't decided where the new department will be headquartered.
"I've heard Crystal City, Pentagon City, across the river, over hill, over dale, but if I were secretary I'd urge that the department be downtown," said Paul Light, senior fellow at The Brookings Institution.
"It sounds mundane but all of the little things that give you an identity in this town are important: stationery, a flag, a logo and they'd better have a Web site open pretty soon," Light said.
Johndroe said that the department will rent space until it has congealed into a more cohesive Cabinet agency, but in the end, only about 10 percent of the department's employees will be in the Washington area.
The department must also start running without the benefit of a budget. Congress has put off until January any department appropriations, expected to cost $38 billion this year.
Even such things as uniforms are still up in the air.
"Uniform decisions have not been made yet," Johndroe said. "We'd expect over time there would be some uniformity of the law enforcement officers of this department in terms of attire, but we will respect the longstanding traditions of many of these agencies."
What is certain is that many of those law enforcement officers will have new job duties in the Homeland Security Department with a focus put on getting rid of some of the overlap and duplication that plagues the existing, multiple bureaucracies responsible for domestic security.
"The idea is to get people from the back office into the front lines," Johndroe said. "Where there are functions that are the same, how can we combine and better utilize personnel and equipment?"
That task could take years to complete, said Comptroller General David Walker, head of the General Accounting Office, the investigative arm of Congress.
Creating a "cohesive culture is a multiyear effort that needs consistent and persistent effort from the top," Walker said.
Then there is concern from the labor unions who fear that federal workers will not have the collective bargaining rights that their counterparts in other federal agencies do.
The legislation passed this week allows the president to waive union rights in cases of national security.
"There's going to have to be a lot of work done to make this something other than a disaster," said Phil Kete of the American Federation of Government Employees. "Reorganizations like this are usually counterproductive because of the downtime associated with people worrying about reorganization."
"I'm concerned they may have removed some of the needed civil service protections against politicizing" the work force, said Dwight Ink, a former White House Office of Management and Budget and General Services Administration official who has dealt with civil service reforms. "I don't think that was the intent, but the approach they used leaves open the potential."
But Ink said he is still "strongly in favor" of the agency, even though it may be over-burdened with too many functions.
Randall Yim, the GAO's managing director for national preparedness, is guardedly optimistic that the creation of the department will be a success.
"I would not discount the unifying force that the department will certainly try to instill" because of the ongoing threat of terrorism, said Yim.
The Associated Press contributed to this report. |
