(C) Common Dreams
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Man-Made Disaster [1]

['Jeffrey Rosen']

Date: 2008-12-24  

Six years on, the Department of Homeland Security is still a catastrophe.

Michael Chertoff needs an office. When I interviewed the secretary of Homeland Security this summer, we met in a pair of temporary locations between which he shuttles--first in the decaying Nebraska Avenue Complex of the naval station at Ward Circle (a center for signal analysis during World War II) and later in an unmarked and unfurnished office in the nondescript headquarters of U.S. Customs and Border Protection in the Ronald Reagan building, near the White House. Chertoff hasn't settled into an office partly because the six-year-old Department of Homeland Security (DHS) still has no permanent, consolidated headquarters. Instead, the unwieldy amalgam of 22 separate federal agencies operates out of 70 buildings at 40 different locations in the Washington area. And the lack of a real home is just the beginning of the department's bureaucratic problems. The most recent survey by the U.S. Office of Personnel Management on the job satisfaction of federal employees in 36 agencies ranked Homeland Security last or near last in every category. Meanwhile, officials from the Pentagon who have tried to do business with DHS complained to me of organizational chaos at the department. Homeland Security employees, they said, are often unaware of overlapping initiatives championed by their colleagues, and even by Chertoff himself.

This can't have been what Democrats and Republicans had in mind when they celebrated the creation of the department in November 2002--arguably the last moment of bipartisan cooperation that Washington would see for six years. Although hastily thrown together, DHS was hailed by most of official Washington as a necessary response to the extreme vulnerabilities exposed by the September 11 attacks. Today, that bipartisan consensus remains largely intact. In fact, as Barack Obama prepares to take office, some Democrats want to increase the department's budget, which is now over $40 billion per year. "I do think more money has to be spent, order of magnitude twenty to twenty-five percent more," I was told in July by James Steinberg, who emphasized that he was not speaking for the Obama campaign. (He is now expected to become deputy secretary of state. ) "I don't think Secretary Chertoff has fought hard enough within the administration for his share of resources," P.J. Crowley, a homeland security expert at the Center for American Progress, told me in June. "If we continue to suggest we are at war, I wonder if DHS really is on a war-time footing." More recently, the nomination of the charismatic Janet Napolitano to head the department suggests that Obama himself is committed to a strong DHS. In announcing her nomination, Obama said, "She understands the need for a Department of Homeland Security that has the capacity to help prevent terrorist attacks and respond to catastrophe be it man-made or natural." It may still be years away from having a permanent headquarters, but the Department of Homeland Security, apparently, is here to stay.

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[1] Url: https://newrepublic.com/article/64075/man-made-disaster

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