Mission: Difficult, but Not Impossible
By CLARK KENT ERVIN
The New York Times
Clark Kent Ervin was inspector general of the Department of Homeland Security from January 2003 to Dec. 8.
OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR
ARLINGTON, Va. — AS he considers new candidates for secretary of homeland security, President Bush should resist the temptation to nominate a politician, a policeman or a protégé. The new secretary should have experience in both the business world and in Washington, and be as adept at overseeing mergers and acquisitions as at navigating the federal bureaucracy and Capitol Hill.
All these skills will be necessary to ensure that the Department of Homeland Security has the resources and authority to do its job. It is a difficult mission. Although the department can point to real achievements in areas like airport safety and border control, it can do better - and it can do much better in the fields of intelligence and financial management.
Certainly there has been progress in making America safer in the nearly two years since the department's creation. Most notably, cockpits are hardened, some pilots are armed, the number of air marshals has been substantially increased, and both airport and airline personnel are better trained and more aware of the critical role that they play in preventing a repeat of 9/11.
But even in the area where the most progress has been made, gaps remain. We sent a team of auditors undercover to airports around the country last year to see how well screeners were able to detect guns, knives and explosive devices. We found that it was still far easier than it should have been, two years after 9/11, to get deadly weapons past passenger and baggage checkpoints.
Yet the department has been reluctant even to acknowledge the problem, much less put in place some of the recommendations that we made to fix it. There is little reason to believe that screener performance will have improved appreciably by the time the next round of covert testing is completed early next year.
Other points of entry also pose challenges. Only about 6 percent of the thousands of containers that arrive at American seaports each day are physically inspected for weapons of mass destruction and other contraband. It is impossible to inspect all incoming cargo, so the department relies on abnormalities in the cargo manifest regarding contents, shipping route and other variables to choose containers for inspection. But manifests can be written to disguise abnormalities. And even when cargo is duly inspected, there is no assurance that smuggled weapons will be found.
The department does have agreements with a number of nations permitting the stationing of department inspectors at foreign ports. But it is unclear how much cargo inspection Americans are able to do, or how much oversight they exercise over foreign inspectors. Even if a given shipment is thoroughly inspected before it sails for the United States, it is unclear whether any tampering with cargo en route can be detected.
When it comes to screening people, the department is making some progress. The longstanding goal of an entry-exit immigration system at all points of entry, so that we know which foreigners are entering the United States and when they leave, is within reach. The system scans visitors' fingers and takes their photographs, then checks this data against terrorist and criminal watch lists. Since the system was installed at airports and some seaports in January, hundreds of criminals have been caught and scores of suspected terrorists have been turned away.
But the department initially exempted the millions of travelers from nations whose citizens do not need visas to enter the United States for 90 days or less. So a free pass was essentially being given to people carrying passports issued by friendly nations - even though some of those nations' passports are relatively easy to steal or counterfeit. As we recommended, the department started to apply the new program to these nations in September, and numerous criminals and suspected terrorists have since been identified as a result.
But the bulk of travelers to the United States come from Mexico and Canada, and most people carrying those passports are still exempt from the department's screening system. And while the system is working at airports and some seaports, it is only now being used at border crossings, through which most people enter the United States. Finally, the part of the system that tracks when foreigners leave the country is only in the pilot stage, and until that is in place, visitors, including some who should not have been admitted to the United States in the first place, can continue to overstay the terms of their entry.
Another critical area where the department has failed to live up to its promise is intelligence. One of the principal rationales for the department was the premise that centralizing in one federal agency all intelligence information concerning terrorist threats against America would significantly increase the chance of preventing another 9/11. Thus was born the department's information-analysis unit.
Among other things, this unit was supposed to take the lead on consolidating the dozen or so terrorist watch lists maintained by various government agencies into one accurate list that could be used by border inspectors and law enforcement personnel. But the Terrorist Threat Integration Center was subsequently created under the aegis of the C.I.A., while the Terrorist Screening Center was made part of the F.B.I.
That meant that the department's information analysis unit was crippled almost from the start. With the unit a junior player in the highly competitive and clubby intelligence community, its raison d'être was quickly overtaken by others, and it has found itself ever since without a niche. While the widely heralded new intelligence reform law has much to recommend it, it will probably further minimize the unit's role in the intelligence community.
The department is woefully behind in compiling a list of the critical components of the nation's infrastructure and in developing plans to protect them against terrorist threats. As now constituted, the list is said to be a hodgepodge of sectors and sites with little apparent rhyme or reason other than politics. Since the nation cannot protect every bridge, utility, chemical plant, farm or factory, sound criteria must be developed to determine which are most critical to national security and, in turn, which are most vulnerable to terrorist attack. Then a plan must be developed to protect these targets.
Part of the department's difficulty in carrying out its mission stems from its finances, which, quite simply, are a mess. While the details may not mean much to non-auditors, the practical implications are troubling.
The Immigration and Customs Enforcement Bureau, for example, which is supposed to track down and deport illegal aliens, did not keep track of its spending and, as a consequence, has frozen hiring and travel, severely hampering its performance. Meanwhile, the Transportation Security Administration has been spending money as if there is no tomorrow, overpaying one contractor, Boeing, by almost $50 million, and paying nearly half a million dollars for a lavish awards ceremony for its employees.
Such government spending is always disturbing, of course, but in the Department of Homeland Security, the stakes are especially high. Any money wasted is money not spent on keeping America safe.
The new secretary will have to be a skilled manager to devise a plan for moving the department forward, and also have a talent for diplomacy and a concern for civil liberties. He or she will need the president's full support both publicly and privately.
And while this may well be too much to hope for in Washington, the new secretary should also be someone willing to acknowledge the department's mistakes and shortcomings, someone who welcomes constructive criticism, outside oversight and independent scrutiny. After all, unrecognized problems tend to go uncorrected, and unaccountable institutions tend to be ineffective.
Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company |
