WASHINGTON, June 10 (UPI) -- The White House will still employ a homeland security adviser to the president even if Congress creates a Department of Homeland Security headed by a Cabinet-level secretary, current Director Tom Ridge said Monday.
Even with a secretary of a new Homeland Security Department, a homeland security director would provide advice to the president and serve as a communications link among federal agencies, Ridge said.
"Having an adviser to the president serving in a capacity very similar to the service and support (national security adviser) Dr. Condi Rice gives on international affairs is something very consistent with the proposal (for a new department) and it is the way forward for this administration," Ridge told a meeting of the National Association of Broadcasters.
Ridge would not say which job might be in his future.
Ridge also challenged Congress to overcome impending turf battles and create a new Department of Homeland Security this year -- hopefully before Sept. 11. "If we can work together and get it done by the end of this year as the president has expressed and hoped, I think it would be an incredible accomplishment," Ridge said.
The jurisdiction of 88 committees would be affected by the reorganization along the lines advocated by President Bush. The plan is a massive undertaking, affecting some 170,000 federal employees to create a department that would have an annual budget of nearly $40 billion.
The Vietnam veteran and former Pennsylvania governor defended the administration against accusations, coming mostly from Congress, that the new department would duplicate existing intelligence capabilities at the CIA and FBI, which are not slated to become part of the new security department. Ridge said the new department would not gather intelligence, but would provide a central command to synthesize and analyze data from the CIA and FBI and then take appropriate action.
"Basically, the department would be able will be able to put together all the pieces of the puzzle," Ridge said.
Bush is not inventing a new bureaucracy, Ridge said, but is instead turning government to face the latest threats in the same way President Harry S. Truman turned the government to meet the new threats posed by the Cold War after victory in World War II. "His vision and his reorganization helped bring down the Berlin Wall and ended the Cold War," Ridge said about Truman. "It is time for us to take the lessons of Sept. 11 and apply them to homeland security."
