Randall Yim

andall Yim arrived at the General Accounting Office in late August 2001 prepared to work on environmental and defense issues, but after the 9/11 attacks, the former environmental lawyer and senior Pentagon official found a new calling. "I'm making the classic lawyer's mistake. I had friends and colleagues who were killed in the Pentagon attacks," Yim said. "Because of that personal connection, I feel a sense of urgency."

The staid GAO isn't usually synonymous with urgency, but in Yim's corner of the agency, it is. He's responsible for thinking big about homeland-security problems and coming up with solutions, and his quest is to "weave" homeland security into all facets of government-from building codes to energy policy. He's been walking the halls of Congress and crisscrossing the country to persuade federal lawmakers, the executive branch, local governments, and the private sector to adopt consistent standards for homeland security that infuse it into everyday policy-making.

Yim grew up in Vallejo, Calif., and is a graduate of Stanford University and the University of Pennsylvania's law school. An environmental lawyer by training, Yim, 51, sees parallels between environmental and homeland-security challenges, especially in setting consistent standards. He also draws from his experience as deputy undersecretary of Defense for installations, when he was responsible for finding new uses for closed military bases. His solution was to give developers the bases for free if the developers would make the infrastructure investments-say, in telephone lines-to turn the bases into areas the local community could use-be it for a regional airport or a new retail center. Yim is applying similar strategic thinking in how to load homeland security onto a tattered national infrastructure: His solution is to include security considerations in projects designed to update aged infrastructure and services, such as local public health systems.