WASHINGTON, Aug. 9 (UPI) -- There is general agreement in the halls of the U.S. Congress that the Department of Homeland Security is a disaster area. But what can be done about it?
Neither the current Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, nor his predecessor, Tom Ridge has mastered the complexities of their gigantic department, in the eyes of many security analysts.
It is difficult to find a major DHS program that has been launched or expanded since the department's creation in March 2003 that is not years behind schedule, vastly over budget, or exposed as full of holes. Almost weekly, the Government Accountability Office, the Congressional Budget Office and the Congressional Research Service release new, well-documented reports about massive holes in maritime security, border security, or other areas. And agencies like the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which worked extremely well when it was an autonomous entity, have deteriorated seriously in performance since being incorporated into the department.
As we have noted in previous columns, it is certainly the case that Ridge and Chertoff, hard-working and conscientious through they were, lacked the kind of administrative and managerial experience necessary to master such a huge bureaucracy. This was particularly essential in the case of homeland security which was created from scratch and which incorporated 22 existing agencies into its mammoth structure.
President George W. Bush might have done better to recruit some veteran executive from a successful massive U.S. industry such as Exxon, General Electric, Boeing, Lockheed Martin or Northrop Grumman who was used to running such an enormous and complex organization. It would also have helped to have had experience in managing high technology programs, especially those with important security aspects, since so much of the department's responsibilities spill into those areas.
However, the real problems of the department run far deeper than the supposed shortcomings of the people who run it.
In an age when modern intelligence technology makes the outsourcing and lateral coordination of organizations more practical and common than ever, the elephantine structure that was created in the department is a throwback to the gargantuan "big government" systems that were in fashion in the era of the 1930s New Deal and the decades that followed.
It is a particularly striking irony that President Bush and a deeply conservative Republican-controlled Congress whose leaders were traditionally skeptical about big government created homeland security in the first place. Almost all the previous consolidations of existing government bureaucracies in new or enlarged super-departments over the past 40 years have not worked at all well. And most of them were created by liberal Democratic administrations and Democratic-controlled Congresses.
The best model for at least some of the smaller agencies that have been folded into the department might well be to restore their independence and simply encourage Congress to keep a far closer eye on them. In other parts of the federal government, the Veteran Affairs Department is now working overtime in upgrading its security procedures because Congress has reacted with fury over the security breach of data on 26.5 million U.S. military veterans that occurred in May.
Folding a huge number of existing agencies into a new super-department puts them into conflict with each other within a new and inevitably chaotic management structure. Competition for status and scarce resources within the department's bureaucracy is then bound to occur and the bureaucratic skills needed to beat out other agencies in this struggle will not be the same ones necessary to help the respective agencies fulfill their stated missions and perform to their peak capacity.
In other words, the set-up will tend to promote and reward managers with bureaucratic intrigue skills rather than the managerial ones necessary to get the jobs done.
The bigger and more complex the bureaucratic policymaking structure in any organization is, the slower, the response time to implement its programs and necessary change invariably becomes. Therefore, far from speeding up the implementation of homeland security programs across the board, the creation of the department appears to have significantly slowed them down. It created new vertical layers of management on top of the existing ones when the urgent need after the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks was to make horizontal coordination between agencies easier.
There is no simple, or magical, "fix" to these structural problems. Much of U.S. industry suffers from them too. But it is a start to recognize that they exist. And the growing willingness of congressional panels in both houses to probe more deeply into the department's labyrinthine structure and try to hold individual agencies and their senior officials specifically accountable for their performance is a welcome start.
