THAT PRESIDENT BUSH has called for the creation of a Cabinet department for domestic defense hardly is surprising. Nor is such a department a bad idea, at least not on paper. Notwithstanding some bureaucratic opposition, the department will be established, probably by the end of the year.
Politically speaking, the administration has had a rough time during the past two weeks, thanks to press and congressional probing of executive-branch intelligence failures before September 11. Until last week’s announcement, the White House had seemed opposed to creating a department of homeland security–spokesman Ari Fleischer repeatedly said it wouldn’t “solve anything.” But Bush couldn’t have wanted to be thrust further on the domestic-security defensive by veto-proof legislation establishing such an agency.
Bush hardly is the first president to have made his own an idea with more support in Congress than in his own ranks. Nimble politicians make such adjustments, and Bush, like his predecessor (recall how Bill Clinton claimed as his own the Republican welfare-reform bill), is duly nimble.
Indeed, we now are told that the president had decided a while ago to call for a homeland security department, but not until July. By making the announcement when he did last week, his proposal for the new department meant that another round of intelligence-failure stories wouldn’t dominate headlines. Instead, Bush led the news.
Substantively, of course, the truth is that the president’s experiment with the White House-based Office of Homeland Security hasn’t worked very well. Bush created the office in late September. Former Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Ridge is its first and only director. His job has been advisory: to counsel the president on how best to defend the nation against terrorist attack.
Ridge has no command over the federal agencies that actually are charged with aspects of domestic defense, such as the Coast Guard. Nor, because of congressional demands for Ridge to testify on Capitol Hill, was that going to change. The White House resisted those demands on grounds that if Ridge should testify, then others close to the president who likewise hold nonconfirmable positions might have to do so as well. That is a principled position but also one whose maintenance has ensured that Ridge’s office would be given no real authority, thus establishing a clear predicate for congressional oversight.
As an adviser to the president, Ridge some months ago made the sensible recommendation that the several agencies that deal with our borders should be relocated in a single agency. But it drew strong objections from the heads of the affected parts of government and died inside the White House.
That experience might well have influenced Ridge’s recommendation to the president in favor of creating a department of homeland security. Only Congress can establish such an agency. And so it is that the president is asking Congress to tell the executive that it must organize itself in new ways. Not surprisingly, one of the four components in the president’s proposal is “border and transportation security.” It includes agencies Ridge had earlier said should be placed under the same umbrella–Customs, the Coast Guard and the Border Patrol.
The other components in the new department would analyze homeland intelligence and evaluate threats to the nation; defend against bioterrorism and nuclear attacks; and prepare for and respond to any incidents. Dozens of agencies and offices would be placed in the new department. The new secretary would have money ($37 billion) and troops (170,000 employees).
Congress will of course leave its imprint on the president’s proposal. But the important point is that the two elective branches now are joining in the making of a department that will have homeland security as its primary mission. The case for it is that the federal government isn’t organized and directed nearly as well as it should be in the face of threats to America that are even graver than we thought last fall.
The security-driven reconstitution of government shouldn’t be taken as a guarantee against any future attack. Nothing could be. But, as Ridge said last week, it does promise “a dramatic improvement in [the government’s] ability to protect and defend the interests of this country, its citizens and our way of life.”
Terry Eastland is publisher of The Weekly Standard.
