Dec. 8, 2007 – 7:04 p.m.
The Homeland Security Department has existed for only five years, but it already has its share of hardy perennials.
Those are the issues that arise each appropriations season, no matter which party is in power, and which seem to always have more or less the same outcome.
For homeland security, they include debates over risk-based allocation of grants, federal vs. state responsibility for funding and probes of the latest mishandled disaster.
Those probably won’t change under a Democratic president.
But beneath those public displays of executive-legislative thumb wrestling, real policy changes will be debated, and serious shifts in the way the federal government acts to protect the homeland could come to pass.
While some policy analysts and political leaders focus on high-profile changes such as improving the terrorist watch list and enhancing border security, others are calling for a focus on less obvious but equally important organizational and oversight measures, and even questioning what “homeland security” really means.
“Candidates need to be thinking more broadly about homeland security,” said Dan Byman, director of Georgetown University’s Center for Peace and Security Studies. “What is a realistic mission for homeland security in general? What level of risk are we prepared to accept as a society? How do we prioritize between threats that are real or obvious, like high-consequence natural-disaster threats, and lower-consequence things that are politically [worrisome] and really terrifying?”
Protecting critical infrastructure is point No. 4 on the agenda of House Homeland Security Committee Chairman
But the department has yet to take a full account of what that U.S. critical infrastructure is.
According to the Congressional Research Service, as of January 2006 there were about 77,069 entries in the Department of Homeland Security’s national asset database, a list that includes chemical and hazardous material sites, nuclear plants, and sites important to local communities such as festivals and petting zoos.
While the department subcategorized about 600 of these sites as “critical” assets, it has maintained the far larger portion of less-than-critical places, against the advice of the department’s inspector general, on the notion that the future determination of critical assets, risk analyses, and situational awareness would be derived, and benefit from, the broader “universe” of entries.
The database, however, has created some confusing questions for policy analysts. Among them: what constitutes a critical asset? Why, for example, did the department’s Office of Infrastructure Preparedness include 127 gas stations when tens of thousands of others are not? Why the 163 water parks? Why the thousand-plus casinos?
Undersecretary for Preparedness George W. Foresman, who oversees the office, responded to the inspector general that “many assets not ‘critical’ are, in fact, critical depending upon the circumstances. . . .” But the idea that criticality can change from one situation to the next contradicts the statutory definition of the term; according to the Patriot Act and other policy documents, “critical infrastructure” refers to specific assets or systems within a given economic sector, if not the sector itself, that are “so vital to the United States that the incapacity of destruction of such systems and assets would have a debilitating impact” on national security.
Under the conditions the undersecretary stated, however, “just about any asset could be considered critical and setting and implementing priorities would become even more complicated than it is now,” CRS specialist John Moteff wrote in his July report.
And more expensive. Homeland security spending has risen since 9/11, going from about $15 billion in fiscal 2001 — before the department was created — to about $50 billion in fiscal 2007.
Meanwhile, the current list of sites to protect doesn’t include much of the nation’s self-assessed infrastructure, according to the White House’s own “National Strategy for the Physical Protection of Critical Infrastructures and Key Assets.” Written in 2003, that document mentions 440 skyscrapers, 80,000 dams, 3,000 government facilities, 167,000 gas stations, 26,600 financial institutions, 66,000 chemical plants, 87,000 food-processing plants, 250,000 defense firms, 2 million farms, and 137 million postal and shipping sites.
Where should public officials draw the line?
“The key thing would be, is it feasible, and it’s simply not feasible to protect every shopping mall, every bank, every tree in the forest,” said John Mueller, author of “Overblown: How Politicians and the Terrorism Industry Inflate National Security Threats, and Why We Believe Them,” and a political science professor at Ohio State University.
If there’s an infinite number of targets, as the above list portends, then there’s an infinite number of places for people to spend federal money, and an infinite number of funding requests, Mueller said. These plans to protect trains and shopping malls haven’t born results in other countries, such as England and Israel. The terrorists simply bomb somewhere else.
Meanwhile, members have a vested interest in finding ways to bring home federal money to protect their skyscrapers, bridges and ports.
“That’s what their job is,” Mueller said. “There’s nothing irrational or undemocratic about it. It’s the essence of the process. That doesn’t mean that it always leads to good policy.”
For its part, Congress passed the 9/11 commission recommendations (PL 110-53) last July, which wrote into law a presidential directive requiring the DHS secretary to create, with the help of a consortium of experts from all levels of government and academia, a list of critical assets whose loss would “cause national or regional catastrophic effects.”
Until that happens, and the final product could take years, the new president won’t know with any real certainty what he or she is trying hardest to protect.
Another area that many, including the 9/11 commission, say needs overhauling is congressional oversight of the Homeland Security Department.
Right now, a whopping 86 committees and subcommittees — nearly half of the total number of congressional panels — claim jurisdiction over some part of the agency. The result is that oversight consumes a “very significant” amount of the department’s time and resources, which otherwise would go toward conducting operations, Secretary
Chertoff listed the department’s oversight activities. In 2006, the last year for which complete figures were available, the Homeland Security Department:
• Participated in 206 congressional hearings (during a session in which the House met for only 101 days and the Senate for 137 days) — an increase of 25 percent since 2004.
• Attended 2,242 briefings for members — a 28 percent increase from 2004.
• Made senior management available for the hearings and briefings with only a few days’ notice, and their testimony and statements were often redundant. Senior officials testified before five different panels in the 110th Congress on the subject of post-Hurricane Katrina housing and before seven panels in the second session of the 109th on the subject of border security.
As of August of this year, the department:
• Wrote 460 legislatively mandated reports — more than half of them recurring reports — a 29 percent increase since 2004.
• Answered 2,630 questions for the record submitted by Congress members after hearings.
• Responded to as many as 6,500 letters from members.
Kamarck said the failure of Congress to enact one of the main remaining recommendations of the 9/11 commission was “insane.”
“It makes no sense, and it contributes significantly to the problems we’ve seen in the department.”
How much a Democratic president would press a Democratic Congress on the issue, though, is not clear.
Institutional loyalty often wins out over party loyalty in such contests, and the GOP Congress did not give President Bush satisfaction on that score, either.
“The more time department officials spend testifying before the 86 committees and subcommittees that have jurisdiction over DHS, the less time they spend implementing and improving domestic security measures,” King said. “The 9/11 commission specifically directed Congress to consolidate DHS oversight — doing so would probably offend a few committee chairmen, but in the post 9/11 world, the security of the American people must outweigh inside-the-beltway jurisdictional squabbles.”
While cooperation among the CIA, FBI and other intelligence agencies has shown improvement since 9/11, that collaboration has yet to fully filter down to the local level.
The Homeland Security Department, which serves as a conduit of intelligence from federal agencies to local police and fire departments, has formed partnerships with dozens of “fusion centers” around the country — offices set up by state and local law-enforcement authorities to fill gaps in intelligence and coordinate security efforts accordingly.
While the department has provided more than $380 million to state and local governments in support of these centers, several challenges remain:
According to a Government Accountability Office report in October, local officials have had problems accessing multiple information systems provided by DHS, as well as other agencies. They also expressed difficulties obtaining and using security clearances, finding and training personnel, and gaining federal funding for their activities.
The department responded by developing a technical assistance program for fusion centers and drafted requirements for their basic capabilities. Additionally, it should clearly articulate its long-term vision for the fusion centers, including the extent of its commitment to providing them with federal funding, the GAO found.
“It is critical for center management to know whether to expect continued resources, such as personnel and grant funding, since the federal government, through the information sharing environment, expects to rely on a nationwide network of centers to facilitate information sharing with state and local governments,” the report stated.
Jim Arkedis, director of the Progressive Policy Institute’s national security project and a former Navy intelligence officer, said integrating intelligence between the federal and local levels is an important priority for the next administration, pushing intelligence down to law-enforcement and border patrol agents, so they know who to look for, he said. “Right now, I don’t think they do.”
The National Guard has always played a critical role in national security — it’s America’s original homeland security department.
But the administration’s reliance on the Guard in fighting the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have strained these forces. The sending of a half-million “citizen soldiers” overseas, many for multiple tours, has sapped stateside units of the equipment they need to do their jobs.
In March, National Guard Bureau Chief Steven Blum testified before Congress that the Guard had only 40 percent of its required equipment on hand, hampering its domestic-response capabilities.
This poses a problem for the states, which relied heavily on the Guard during the emergency response following Hurricane Katrina. Yet the level of the Guard’s domestic preparedness is hard to estimate because the Defense Department doesn’t monitor the Guard’s readiness for domestic missions. Equipment shortages have hampered the Guard’s ability to train and prepare for large-scale domestic events, a GAO report in January found.
The overuse of these resources in Iran and Afghanistan has created “a great strategic risk” for the United States, said Phillip Carter, a government-contract lawyer, former Army officer and fellow at the Truman National Security Project, a liberal foundation devoted to reclaiming a strong security tradition among the Democratic left.
The solution, he said, is to “right size” the force, increasing the ranks of the Guard and reserves by 75,000 to 100,000 to create a U.S.-only contingent. This could be accomplished in part by fully funding college programs for soldiers as well as by increasing the active-duty forces, whose dwindling numbers have caused an increased reliance on part-time soldiers.
“Simply put, we have nothing left in reserve, nothing with which to respond abroad to threats from our enemies,” Carter said, “and only exhausted and ill-equipped troops at home for governors to call upon during state-level emergencies like this year’s tornadoes and wildfires.”
Matt Korade can be reached at mkorade@cq.com.