Department of Homeland Security

from Terrorism Q&A website

What is the Department of Homeland Security? It's the new cabinet department approved by Congress in November 2002, designed to consolidate U.S. defenses against terrorist attack and better coordinate counterterrorism intelligence. Incorporating parts of eight other cabinet departments, it is the first new department since the Veterans Affairs Department in 1989. Under the terms of the November 2002 legislation, the department has one year to consolidate the 22 agencies it is adopting-but given the scale of the reorganization, experts warn that it may be much longer before the department has fully assumed all of its new functions.

What will the Department of Homeland Security do? It's designed to oversee America's defenses against terrorist attack. The department is designed to absorb several federal agencies dealing with domestic defense, including the Coast Guard, the Border Patrol, the Customs Service, the Immigration and Naturalization Service, the Secret Service, and the Transportation Security Administration (which was created after September 11 to oversee airline security). It will explore ways to respond to terror attacks involving chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons, and work to better coordinate intelligence about terrorist threats. The department is also expected to implement much of the National Strategy for Homeland Security, the domestic security plan unveiled by President Bush in July 2002.

Will the department make America safer? It could-but the key question is implementation, experts say. If all goes well, the department could streamline homeland security procedures and let U.S. intelligence respond to threats more effectively.

But the sheer magnitude of the proposed bureaucratic estructuring may trigger turf wars and distract senior U.S. officials from other aspects of the war on terrorism, experts warn. The new department merges nearly 170,000 employees from 22 different agencies. Warning that a reorganization of this scale could divert attention and resources from counterterrorism, a July 2002 report from the Brookings Institution had proposed a leaner department. Moreover, some policy experts warn that important agency missions unrelated to homeland security-such as the main focus of the Coast Guard, search and rescue at sea-could suffer.
Finally, simply putting agencies under one roof doesn't mean they'll work better. Intelligence experts disagree over whether the new department's proposed intelligence division will do any better at coordinating intelligence efforts than the FBI and CIA did before the September 11 attacks. Much will depend, experts say, on whether the new secretary is given a real mandate for change.

Did the Bush administration initially want a cabinet department on homeland security? No. After the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the Bush administration tried a more modest restructuring of America's homeland defenses by creating a White House office to handle domestic security, headed by Tom Ridge. But congressional critics warned that the White House homeland security office fell short, noting that federal agencies were trying to buck Ridge's oversight and that Ridge had no budgetary authority over the agencies he sought to coordinate.

Is this a major government overhaul? Yes. Bush administration officials say the federal government hasn't seen such sweeping changes since 1947, when President Truman merged the War and Navy departments into the Department of Defense. Even experts unconvinced by that claim say that the department's creation represents a major governmental restructuring.

Was one federal agency responsible for domestic security before September 11? No. Earlier terrorist attacks-especially the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, the 1995 bombing of an Oklahoma City federal building, and the 1995 sarin gas attack in the Tokyo subway system-sparked discussions about the need for such an office, and before September 11, several blue-ribbon commissions and congressional leaders recommended that the federal government create one. Nevertheless, homeland security remained low on the political radar screen-until the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

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