Five Homeland Security Hurdles
Personnel Pitfalls
Data Deficiencies
Organizational Obstacles
Multiple Missions
urely Tom Ridge knows what he's up against. As secretary of the newly created Homeland Security Department, Ridge is directing the largest overhaul of the federal government in 50 years. A combat veteran, former prosecutor, seven-term congressman, governor and presidential adviser, Ridge is no shirker when it comes to public service. Still, this new assignment must give him pause. There is no blueprint for successfully merging the 22 agencies, 170,000 employees and hundreds of computer systems and management processes that will come together in the new department beginning March 1. And the department's $37 billion annual budget will seem like small change when it comes to tackling the enormous challenges facing Ridge and his management team.
Ridge is an optimist. "Changes bring opportunities," he told employees of the new department at a town hall meeting in December. "We have an opportunity to do something that happens in this town every 50 or 60 years, and that's create a new department. And in this instance, perhaps, to create a legacy and preserve and protect a way of life that is unique to each and every one of us."
History suggests that creating an effective department will take years, but Ridge may not have that kind of time. An independent task force chaired by former Sens. Gary Hart and Warren Rudman recently concluded that "we are entering a time of especially grave danger" and that "America remains dangerously unprepared to prevent and respond to a catastrophic attack on U.S. soil." In the following pages, we look at five hurdles Homeland Security leaders must overcome to ensure America is prepared to prevent and respond to terrorism.
While Bush administration officials repeatedly have said the new department won't cost taxpayers more than has already been budgeted for its constituent agencies, setting up the department will almost certainly require new investments. In a December analysis, the General Accounting Office concluded that while there may be long-term savings associated with the creation of Homeland Security, it will be years before such savings are realized.
"Any reorganization will incur start-up costs as well as require some funding that may be temporarily redundant, but necessary to maintain the continuity of effort during the transition period," GAO reported in "Homeland Security: Management Challenges Facing Federal Leadership" (GAO-03-260).
The Congressional Budget Office last summer projected setting up the new department will cost about $4.5 billion from 2003 to 2007. That's on top of the projected net spending for ongoing activities at the transferred agencies. While CBO is revising its estimate based on the law that created the department in November (P.L. 107-296), it is doubtful the new estimate will be significantly lower. "CBO's estimates could best be described as conservative," GAO reported, based on the fact that CBO did not account for the potentially significant costs of consolidating multiple pay and retirement systems.
Not surprisingly, members of Congress, especially Democrats, have criticized the administration for failing to adequately fund the new department. "Without the proper resources linked to a comprehensive strategy, the security of our ports, our communities and our critical infrastructure will always be lacking," says Sen. Joseph Lieberman, D-Conn.
But Congress hasn't exercised much leadership in funding the new department either. It adjourned for the winter holidays before completing 11 of its 13 annual appropriations bills-nine of which include funding for agencies slated to move into Homeland Security.
The delay in federal funding is especially problematic for state and local first responders-the law enforcement personnel, firefighters and emergency workers who have carried much of the financial burden of increased security since Sept. 11. First responders have received little federal assistance at a time when they need it most. The National Conference of State Legislatures reported in November that two-thirds of states report declining revenues and more than half face budget shortfalls. The Homeland Security Department is supposed to play a critical role in funding first responders, but state and local officials are increasingly skeptical they will receive the money they need.
In a study published in July, analysts at the Brookings Institution concluded that many elements of the new department will need additional funding if they are to fulfill their missions. According to Brookings: "The department can hardly be a tribute to the victims of September 11 if Congress and the president pretend that homeland security can be bought on the cheap. An under-trained, under-staffed Department of Homeland Security would be a hollow monument indeed."
Getting the right people with the right skills in the right places will be enormously difficult for Homeland Security officials. The recent experience of the Transportation Security Administration offers an important lesson in the law of unintended consequences. TSA's push to recruit federal air marshals came largely at the expense of other federal law enforcement agencies.
About 64 percent of the air marshals TSA hired came from other agencies that also were scrambling to boost staff after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, GAO found. Because TSA has a more flexible personnel system than other agencies locked into the grade and pay structure of the General Schedule, it could offer higher pay for comparable work. Federal employees responded in droves. The Immigration and Naturalization Service reported a 556 percent increase in the loss of agents from 2001 to 2002, due largely to the lure of higher-paying jobs at TSA, GAO reported.
The legislation creating the Homeland Security Department allows its top officials wide latitude to design a flexible compensation and human resources management system, though they must do so in consultation with the Office of Personnel Management. "We have an opportunity to put together a contemporary personnel system that gives us the kind of merit-based, fairness-based program that we want to govern all 22 presently different departments and agencies," Ridge told employees at the December town hall meeting.
Brookings found that those 22 agencies contained at least 80 different personnel systems. They include special pay rates for the Transportation Security Administration, the Secret Service and the Biomedical Research Service; higher overtime rates for air marshals, the Secret Service and immigration inspectors; guaranteed minimum overtime for Customs officers and immigration inspectors; Sunday, night, and premium pay for Secret Service agents, Customs Service employees and immigration inspectors; and foreign language awards and death benefits for Customs officers. In addition, the new department will have contracts with at least 18 separate employee unions.
Not all of the problems with existing personnel systems arise from pay inequality. "The current civil service personnel system . . . is slow at hiring, interminable at firing, permissive at promoting, useless at disciplining, and penurious at rewarding. The vast majority of federal employees describe the hiring process as slow and confusing, a quarter do not call it fair, and less than a third say that the federal government does a good job at disciplining poor performers," Brookings found.
In addition, a GAO analysis of OPM data showed that 26 percent of career employees at the Animal Plant Health Inspection Service, 33 percent at the Coast Guard, 31 percent at the Customs Service, 40 percent at FEMA, 21 percent at INS and 30 percent at the Secret Service will be eligible for retirement with unreduced annuities by the end of 2007.
Moving information where and when it's needed is critical. It's also exceedingly difficult. Just ask any of the 650,000 state and local law enforcement officials who "operate in a virtual intelligence vacuum, without access to terrorist watch lists provided by the State Department to immigration and consular officials," according to the October 2002 Hart-Rudman report, "America Still Unprepared-America Still in Danger," sponsored by the Council on Foreign Relations. The task force cited the lack of intelligence sharing as a critical problem deserving immediate attention. "When it comes to combating terrorism, the police officers on the beat are effectively operating deaf, dumb and blind," the report concluded.
Homeland Security will have an information analysis and infrastructure protection component, but it's not at all clear how it will work effectively. Retired Marine Corps Col. Phil Anderson, a security expert and senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, believes this will be the single most difficult challenge for the new department. Not only will it fall to Homeland Security to make sense of the mountain of intelligence gathered from disparate sources, but then officials will have to get that information to the people who can most effectively act on it-many of whom are outside the federal government.
Lieberman already is worried that Homeland Security won't have access to the raw intelligence gathered by other agencies. "It appears that, in order to protect their own turf, some key agencies may already be working against the spirit of the legislation," he said in December. In a Dec. 17 letter to President Bush, Lieberman wrote, "I call on you to intervene immediately and clarify to the intelligence community and the nation that the new department will play the central role in fusing and analyzing intelligence that Congress intended it to play. It is time to nip these damaging bureaucratic turf battles in the bud and ensure from the start that the department has broad access to the information it needs to protect the American people."
But even if Homeland Security has direct access to every piece of intelligence gathered by every other agency, "they won't know what to do with it," a Defense intelligence official says. "That's the problem anyone has-it's virtually impossible to make sense of the amount of data that we collect in the way some would like. I cannot imagine how [the new department] will solve this problem."
Bureaucracies are no match for terrorists. Traditional, hierarchical organizations-such as federal agencies-are by nature poorly structured to cope with an amorphous threat like terrorism, says Charles Wise, a professor of public affairs in the School of Public and Environmental Affairs at Indiana University.
"The design for a new central homeland security organization cannot be based on assumptions about how it will operate," Wise wrote in "Organizing for Homeland Security," in the March/April 2002 issue of Public Administration Review. "The idea of top-down coordination rests on the notions that the organizations to be coordinated have been identified or can readily be identified by the headquarters coordinators; that the relationships f these organizations to each other are well understood; that agreement has been reached about what objectives will be accomplished . . . and that the authority and means to effectuate desired goals exist to alter the relationships in the desired direction." The problem with this approach, writes Wise, is that most of these assumptions are unfounded, because the terrorist threat is constantly shifting and evolving. Organizations that hope to counter the threat must be able to evolve as well.
In addition, as the July Brookings study, "Assessing the Department of Homeland Security" points out, the agencies comprising the Homeland Security Department have multiple missions, which sometimes conflict with one another. TSA, Customs and INS all must provide services to the public or facilitate commerce, at the same time they enforce security measures. "[They] must be fast, courteous, and responsive to the vast majority of the people they encounter, but must be vigilant, tough, and unforgiving to the very few who present a threat to the nation. It is a managerial balancing act that neither Customs nor INS has handled well, and that the TSA has asked Marriott and Disney to help solve," Brookings found. According to the study: "It will take years, if not decades, to create common management systems to govern the department, and perhaps just as long to break down the competing cultures those systems currently protect."
What's more, "Merely combining similar units will not produce coherent policy, for example, nor will it produce greater performance, increased morale, or raise budgets. Twenty-five years after the establishment of the Department of Energy, the nation still has no coherent energy policy. Consolidating efforts most certainly will not make broken agencies whole. If an agency is not working in another department, there is no reason to believe that it will work well in the new agency. Conversely, if an agency is working well in another department or on its own as an independent agency, there is no guarantee it will continue to work well in the new agency," Brookings reported.
Homeland Security will need to do more than combat terrorism. While security will necessarily be the agency's top priority, agency leaders will be held accountable for a host of critical non-security functions as well. As Brookings noted: "Homeland Security would be responsible for levying duties on goods, confiscating stolen art works, conducting search-and-rescue operations, installing and maintaining buoys, setting ship standards and mariner qualifications, carrying out research on hoof-and-mouth disease, helping people harmed by earthquakes, floods, hurricanes, or tornadoes, and inspecting zoos, circuses and pet shops to ensure animals are healthy. . . . Although homeland security will be job No. 1 for the new department, the secretary and other senior officials will need to devote time and effort to ensure that the non-homeland security functions will continue to receive the same degree of attention as at present . . . even though they will necessarily take time and energy away from the new department's primary responsibility."
The ability of agency managers to successfully fulfill multiple missions may be the ultimate test of success for Homeland Security. An agency that can spot a stolen Picasso being smuggled out of the country, provide emergency assistance after a tornado and thwart terrorists planning an attack with biological weapons-all in a days work-will be doing something right.