During a briefing with reporters on Wednesday, DHS Secretary Michael Chertoff focused less on the past five years than the coming one — his last in office before the department makes its first change in presidential administrations.

He outlined the department’s goals over the next year — further development of a cybersecurity strategy, living up to its border security commitments, getting to the next stage of REAL ID implementation and putting electronic travel authorization in place.

But he also took the time Wednesday to reflect a little bit on the last five years. His comments are included below, along with those of more than two dozen others in government, think tanks and the private sector who were asked the questions: was the creation of the department a good idea and, if you had the chance to do it all over again, what would you have done differently?

Here are their responses.

P.J. Crowley, senior fellow and director of Homeland Security at the Center for American Progress

Three issues have hampered the Department of Homeland Security over the past five years and will influence its development over the next five.

First, DHS has yet to decide what is important, why and what to do about it. Early on, the department shot its credibility on misleading color-coded threat warnings. Now the color codes never change. Before Katrina, it thought terrorism was important and disaster preparedness was not, only to be taught a tragic lesson that it is still learning. Most recently, it has jumped on the immigration bandwagon, just the latest example where it put politics ahead of security.

The second is the growing gap between responsibilities and actual capacity. When the president created DHS, he made a flawed management decision to combine 22 agencies — some effective, but most not — within existing levels of resources. Some agencies like the Coast Guard and FEMA were under-resourced when DHS was established and still are. It continues to do homeland security on the cheap. Chemical security is a perfect case in point. The emerging top screen process will identify several thousand facilities that merit some level of government regulation. But DHS is devoting only $50 million and fewer than 100 people to what is arguably our most significant domestic vulnerability. Not good enough.

Third, DHS has maintained an ineffective relationship with state and local partners. The failure to collaboratively plan was on display during Katrina — a top-down National Response Plan imposed on a bottom-up process. An epiphany of sorts has emerged with the National Response Framework. But now, as local budgets shrink due to declining tax revenue because of the housing crisis, DHS and the president want to cut homeland security grants by a substantial percentage. So, while we surge in Iraq, which had nothing to do with Sept. 11, New York City has 5,000 fewer police on its streets than it did seven years ago. This makes no sense. We must develop an effective strategy based on realistic assumptions and established priorities and then dedicate the necessary resources to achieve the desired result. Five years later, this challenge remains largely unfulfilled.

Jonah Czerwinski , managing consultant for Global Business Services at IBM and a senior adviser on Homeland Security Projects at the Center for the Study of the Presidency

“The stand-up of has delivered both winners and losers during a tumultuous start challenged by self-inflicted wounds. The path forward requires a strategy that rebalances the homeland security mission with clear priorities and a new strategic framework.

Some pre-existing organizations, like the Coast Guard, enjoyed heightened authorities and larger budgets due to the reorganization that created the Department of Homeland Security. Others, such as FEMA, suffered an “org” chart demotion with real consequences on peoples’ lives as seen in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. Newly created entities, such as the Science and Technology Directorate, continue to struggle with the growing pains of integration and the battle for interagency legitimacy. A lot could have been done differently.

Initial objections by the Bush administration to creating a unified Homeland Security Department gave in to a real-word political science experiment that Congress passed in the form of the Homeland Security Act of 2002. The lack of initial administration support for DHS slowed progress and forced DHS to fight unnecessary bureaucratic battles with the Pentagon and the intelligence community, not to mention new counterparts overseas.

The department’s strategy to this day falls short of prioritizing its resources and investments around its uniquely difficult mission: combat significant threats while maintaining — even enhancing — daily operation of the economy and overall quality of life for all Americans and visitors. And don’t forget natural disasters. A framework that puts this entire mission into a workable perspective may be achieved by the forthcoming — and first ever — Quadrennial Homeland Security Review. Regardless, the next president inherits DHS with a responsibility to elevate this department’s stature, rationalize its White House coordinating entities, and craft a strategy sufficient to the task.”

Clark Ervin, director of homeland security at the Aspen Institute, who served as the Inspector General at DHS from 2003 to 2004

The notion behind the creation of DHS — that there should be one government agency whose mission is detecting, preventing (ideally), and responding to terror attacks — is sound.

There is no question but that part of the problem before 9/11 was that counterterrorism responsibility was widely defused in the government, meaning that, as a practical matter, no one was responsible for it. But, the department was put together too hastily, thoughtlessly, secretly and cheaply.

In retrospect, the Department of Homeland Security should focus exclusively on counterterrorism. Part of the reason why it’s so dysfunctional is that “homeland security” is only part of what it does. Conversely, other agencies have counterterrorism responsibilities that DHS logically should have.

Given this widely recognized state of affairs, the next administration will be tempted to either jettison the department altogether, or to restructure it radically right from the start. As I say, the department should be maintained, and it should be radically restructured. But, it should not be reorganized significantly anytime soon, so as to enable the changes that have already been made to settle.

Benjamin Friedman, Research Fellow in Defense and Homeland Security Studies, Cato Institute

Congress made a large but typical mistake with the creation of the Department of Homeland Security five years ago. James Q. Wilson wrote in 1995 that government reorganizations are usually driven by a perception of crisis that produces a political need to do something quick and extensive. He notes that these circumstances make thoughtful planning for the change unlikely. Reorganizations, he says, are usually victims of a facile urge to clarify lines of authority and end duplication without understanding the incentives of the organizations involved.

Congress and the Bush administration followed this model in creating DHS. They shoved a series of agencies together with little justification for how this combination would enhance American counterterror efforts and mostly ignored the internal politics of the agencies combined. There were good reasons to tie together the information apparatus of the agencies dealing with border entry: Customs, Coast Guard, TSA, ICE. But this hardly required the massive reorganization that occurred. The performance of the department’s agencies was little enhanced by the new bureaucratic entity above them. In fact, efforts to integrate these agencies under a single strategy, budget, and information technology system are arguably time and money consuming distractions from the agencies’ actual work. Meanwhile, the department’s budgets show a lack of managerial direction; funds have flowed into DHS’s agencies in shares roughly equal to what they got before the department was formed. This is subjugation to the status quo, policy by path of least resistance.

Another problem is that the department’s grants force funds toward suboptimal purposes (e.g., chem-bio suits in rural regions that could use more hospital beds), create a group of dependents who promote excessive public fears to justify federal funding, and threaten to federalize local emergency services.

Bruce Hoffman, professor at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service (written aboard a C-17 en route from Kuwait to Afghanistan)

If it its true, as John Arquilla and David Ronfeldt argue, that “it takes a network to defeat a network” then the establishment of the massive DHS bureaucracy will have proven as irrelevant as it is anachronistic to the terrorist threats we face today.

Donald Kettl, nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and author of “System Under Stress: Homeland Security and American Politics”

Political, not managerial, imperatives drove the restructuring. There was an inescapable instinct on Capitol Hill to respond to the 9/11 terrorist attacks and to show the federal government’s commitment to “connect the dots” that lay unconnected before the attacks. Of course, the creation of DHS left the key dots in intelligence unconnected. It also created an administrative behemoth that’s proven extraordinarily difficult to run. The difficulty of bringing so many disparate units into a single department has left some units still operating quasi-independently and has weakened the capacity of some organizations, most notably FEMA, that previously had considerable strength. Managing the Transportation Security Administration remains a daunting challenge, and it’s not clear that the department has full control over the enormous contractor operation that performs many of the key functions.

They’ve made enormous progress. If we had it do all over again, we probably wouldn’t do it the same way. And we need a renewed focus on the most important lesson of all: terrorists will always try to outmaneuver our structures and processes to find points of vulnerability. We are likely only to weaken our homeland security if we think we can restructure our way to solutions. The future is going to require far more agile response and new, lithe instincts for collaboration. That is the department’s big challenge for the future.

Randall Larsen, founding director of the Institute for Homeland Security and author of “Our Own Worst Enemy”

While the Chinese would likely say, five years is “too early to tell,” I suspect that historians will eventually agree that an organization closely resembling the recommendations of the Hart-Rudman Commission would have been a far better first step.

A much less ambitious effort, putting Border Patrol, Coast Guard, Customs, National Domestic Preparedness Office and FEMA under a single director would have been far more manageable and productive. Unfortunately, the department was designed in secret by a small group in the basement of the White House. According to Sen. Hart and Rudman, not a single member of this renowned, bipartisan commission was even contacted during the process.

As Gen. Eisenhower said, “The right organization will not guarantee success, but the wrong organization will guarantee failure.” A smaller, more focused organization would have had a far better chance for success during the first five years.

Larry Allen, president of the Coalition for Government Procurement

DHS was born of political necessity and, as such, was put together very fast. Overnight, professionals used to being in one agency with its own culture were thrown into a new entity with professionals from their own cultures. It isn’t surprising that its taken awhile for the dust to settle.

This is as true of procurement and contracting as anything else. Different constituent parts with different missions to play in the overall agency mission lead to confusion, overlaps in some parts and gaps elsewhere. Plus, TSA has not had to follow the same rules as everyone else (though that is changing now), so there has even been disparity within the agency.

Too many people looked at the agency level first, when the constituent parts was where most of the work was being done. The central procurement office was understaffed and over-taxed. Though Deidre Lee has departed, this is starting to change as well, but I would argue that the individual operations still control a lot of the spend.

The mission of the agency is so politically charged, that has added yet another dimension to the agency trying to get its work done. Oversight is valuable and necessary, but not to the point where all agency officials are doing is explaining their actions. Then the question becomes why the agency isn’t getting anything done. Tough to do your work from a Congressional witness table.

Overall, I think DHS has really just started to come together in the past year. It has its challenges, but I sense that it has turned a corner.

Courtney Banks, CEO of National Security Associates Worldwide

The concept of the department itself was a probably a good idea. In terms of the 22 agencies, I think it’s complex whether or not they’re the right mix. Some of the consolidation was, to say the least, messy — which is what happens when you combine agencies that have distinct heritage cultures.

Some of it was also probably reasonable from an oversight perspective. I think the larger question is not would you do it differently in terms of the makeup of the 22 agencies, but would you have put in place additional mechanisms to ensure the continued coordination across both DHS and with the larger interagency community in a better and more efficient manner.

With hindsight I would also state that a lot of cultural discord and issues were exacerbated when DHS stood up, due to the initial leadership mix being comprised of both senior former military officers and senior law enforcement officials. The Constitution recognizes the difference between military and law enforcement authority in the United States and their respective communities have different rules of engagement and procedures governing use of force. As well they have totally different cultures. Taking this all into context, historically domestic law enforcement typically has not and does not like to work for the military and the military has not worked for law enforcement. When you consolidate civilian and law enforcement agencies — like what occurred in creating DHS (with the exception of the Coast Guard, which has always had both a military and law enforcement role) — using retired or current general officers to lead directorates composed mostly of civilian and law enforcement staff, you can create a dysfunctional command environment. This was a mistake that should have been avoided.

Additionally, many of the senior leadership positions created at DHS are Schedule Cs — political appointees. It is not a good idea to run an entire department with most leadership being political appointments. You need to have more of a mix of career and civil servants. Some of the downside of relying heavily on Schedule Cs to fill the majority of senior leadership slots are high turnover, lack of continuity between election (and particularly) presidential election cycles, and some the Schedule Cs were not necessarily qualified enough to succeed — look at Mike Brown. Another example is for the first time in history the position of Director the Secret Service became a political appointment — and that may not have been the best move. That was a mistake from the beginning.

David Z. Bodenheimer, head of the homeland security practice at the law firm Crowell and Moring

While hindsight is often easy, history predicted many of the pitfalls that undermined the best efforts of DHS to seize its core objectives — consolidate the security team, eliminate smokestacks, and get the best anti-terrorism technology to the forefront.

When the Homeland Security Act of 2002 brought 22 agencies under one organizational title, certain critical functions remained balkanized. For example, DHS established a small central procurement office that steadily grew, but lacked centralized control over some of the largest procurements such as TSA’s IT Managed Services. Over these first five years, a parade of congressional hearings, GAO reports, and Inspector General audits found consistent, systemic, repeated causes for delay, disruption and demise of DHS acquisition initiatives — including lack of requirements definition, competition, and personnel continuity.

And all of these failure modes have well-documented parallels long before the creation of DHS, such as the $4 billion collapse of the Navy’s poorly defined A-12 aircraft acquisition in the early 1990s and the rising tide of sole-source procurements eventually abated somewhat by the Competition in Contracting Act of 1984.

While DHS has made great strides in many areas, major opportunities have been missed in these formative years. If it had a centralized acquisition czar controlling all 22 agencies and establishing unified procurement direction and priorities, DHS would still have faced daunting challenges. However, billions of dollars spent on delayed and terminated Homeland Security programs may well have been saved, producing critical anti-terrorism technologies sooner, connecting the dots for information-sharing functions more completely, and creating the layered defenses necessary to the Homeland Security mission.

Robert C. Bonner, attorney at the law firm Gibson, Dunn and Crutcher, who served as the first commissioner of Customs and Border Protection before leaving in 2006

One of the best ideas of the homeland security reorganization, one that has been achieved in the past five years, is the unification of our country’s border agencies into one agency, Customs and Border Protection (CBP), within one department of government. Before 9-11, border responsibilities were fragmented into four agencies located in three different departments of government. Because of the CBP merger, we are, unquestionably, far more effective with one border agency in preventing terrorists and terrorist weapons getting into our country than we were before.

Jane Bullock, founding partner of the security consulting firm Bullock & Haddow LLC; FEMA chief of staff from 1992 to 2000

I will restrict my comments to what I know — the inclusion of FEMA into DHS.

I think the past five years have demonstrated what a mistake it was to include FEMA – an agency that deals with the consequences of all disasters – natural or manmade ( ala terrorism) into a Department whose purpose is to prevent another terrorist attack.

Dealing with disasters requires a different skill set and mind set then the prevention of a terrorist attack.

Response to disasters was never going to be a priority in DHS — it was all about catching terrorists or preventing terrorists from entering through our borders, our ports, etc.

I believe it was a repeat of history when during the 1980s disaster response was not as important as dealing with the Cold War and what we saw in the 1980s and early 1990s with Hurricanes Hugo and Iniki, the Loma Prieta earthquake and finally Hurricane Andrew in Florida, which demonstrated a government incapable of responding to the basic needs of its citizens — no different than Katrina.

FEMA is a small agency with a huge mission, not just to focus on response but also on mitigation, reducing the impact of future losses. With the pressures and priorities within DHS — and FEMA with a mission inconsistent with the overall mission of DHS — i.e. preventing the next terrorist attack — FEMA should not be part of DHS. From a purely bureaucratic standpoint — how could a small agency like FEMA ever compete for resources with the likes of Immigration Services, TSA, etc.

One last comment to consider: If they were trying to consolidate all the programs that protect our institutions from the terrorist threat — can you explain why the Office of Pipeline Safety which deals with gas, oil, etc infrastructure, which is in the Department of Transportation, was not included in DHS?

FEMA needs to be taken out of DHS so it can serve it’s constituency of people impacted by disasters more effectively and efficiently and concentrate on programs that reduce the impacts of disasters and help make individuals and communities no longer victim of disasters.

Richard B. Cooper, a principal with Olive, Edwards & Cooper LLC

Five years after the founding of the Department of Homeland Security, would or should we have done it this way?

Absolutely. We had no real choice. Pieces that needed to be connected for information, intelligence, security, response, operations and more were not connected when they were needed at the most critical points in time (safeguarding and securing the nation) and the failures and evidence we found after 9/11 leave no doubt to that fact. The realities rendered by 9/11 required a fundamental change to our national game plan and that realization is what the White House and Congress saw as their charge and the bitter pill (for some) that we have had to take. Leaving the long-established federal empires, attitudes, cultures and procedures in place would not have allowed our country to adjust or adapt to the new environments and threats it now occupies. Doing nothing was not an option.

Unfortunately it has become an almost throw-away line to say 9/11 was a transformational event, but it was and it’s time we all recognized that fact, not just as simple rhetoric in a speech but rather a brutal reality in the life of our nation. The department’s creation was the first major step we took in an era where a new age of Darwinism (survival of the fittest) was revealed on our shores. For too long, we allowed our country’s power and success to breed bureaucracies, complacencies and individualized, self-focused operational cultures to take root while ignoring and often overlooking the threats (foreign and domestic, terrorism and Mother Nature) that were gaining in strength and consequence. No doubt all of us would love to go back to the days when things were the way they used to be. Let’s be real — those days aren’t coming back and wishing does not make it so.

Breaking down those walls and forcing the various federal components to work together is the only way our country will be able to address the threats and challenges in any type of systematic and sustainable way.

Has the process and implementation been perfect. No.

Has it been painful to watch and be part of? Yes.

Would I do it all over again? Absolutely.

We’ve all experienced some painful and cringe-worthy lessons over the past five years with DHS, but I would rather learn those lessons now, get smarter as a result and work better with others that have shared interests and missions than go about business as it once was and hope it all works come game time. That game plan failed us and in today’s era of new Darwinsim, failure is not an option.

Jim Flyzik, president of the security consulting firm The Flyzik Group

There is little doubt that strong leadership from the highest levels of government was needed after the 9/11 attacks to better coordinate the various functions and activities needed to combat terrorism and protect our Homeland. I believe there were two ways to accomplish that leadership: 1) An empowered White House Office of Homeland Security reporting directly to the President or, 2) Creation of a new Agency such as DHS.

I worked in the White House Office of Homeland Security prior to the creation of DHS as the Senior Technology Advisor to Gov. Tom Ridge. I believe a strong White House office reporting directly to the president may have been a faster way to achieve the needed coordination. However, an agency does bring functions together with statutory authorities and may prove to be a better long-term answer. DHS is still a very young agency. History will answer this question.

Scott Greiper, managing director of the Legend Merchant Group

The creation of the DHS, though a roll-up of 22 agencies, was an example of the government’s typical “knee-jerk” reaction to an event. It created a bureaucracy-heavy institution that has mishandled Hurricane Katrina and other events.

The initial focus on spending $25 billion to put explosive detection systems in airports was another “knee-jerk” reaction to calm the fears of the flying public — despite the fact that on 9/11 no one brought a bomb aboard a plane. Meantime, the rail/bus security sector received less than $500 million through 2007, even though many of the terror attacks throughout the world have been against public bus and rail systems.

The funding and vetting process for security programs has been slow, lacked transparency and been way too politically influenced.

Although the government and DHS claim to recognize the need to bring smaller companies into large programs as technology innovators and providers, there is still too much reliance on prime contractors and system integrators — the proverbial CYA mentality.

There are too many political appointees within DHS and the turnover in the senior ranks has been devastating as people put their time in and then chase the money in the private sector.

There’s been very poor outreach into the state and local civilian agencies and poor coordination among other federal agencies.

Scott Hastings, partner at the consulting firm Deep Water Point, former chief information officer for the U.S. Visitor and Immigration Status Indicator Technology (US-VISIT) program

The creation of the Department of Homeland Security was a response to a recognition that our homeland was suddenly subject to non-military terrorist based threats in ways we had never contemplated or confronted. It was apparent that the government organizations and structures historically organized to manage our borders and enforce laws that protected our well-being, had limited mission focus on these insidious new threats. Looking back, I offer two thoughts:

First, as the department was formed, legacy departments and agencies were pulled apart, re-structured, and re-formed from the top down to the fields of operations. The compelling story to me as this occurred is the continuity at the operational levels of all the agencies involved. These entities had missions and identities formed through decades, in some cases centuries, with crucial responsibilities that included enforcing our nation’s immigration and customs statutes, ensuring the safety of our transportation systems, and facilitating commerce, they were now expected to incorporate a new mission while transforming themselves.

It should be noted that these men and women maintained there historic missions, carried out there operational responsibilities, and did not “drop the ball” during this entire period. Mariners continued to be rescued, goods continued to be inspected and transported, immigration benefits continued to be provided, while the department sorted out its new mission responsibilities.

Second, I think there are some less than glamorous, but fundamental issues that may have impeded progress. Many federal agencies operate more as “holding companies”; mission areas, the component agencies and bureaus, conduct the business of the departments, manage the resources, control the budgets, acquire the assets. Power tends to be shared, congressional oversight structured around component activities for the most part.

If one of the expectations of the Department of Homeland Security was to rapidly forge a departmental mission that had not existed prior to its stand-up, it would need basic structural and organizational capabilities that may not have been adequately provided at its creation. Some of these include:

• The department was short on personnel. There were simply not enough management positions provided to execute the new mission, and transform legacy mission and reporting structures to a new department.

• Change in government requires budget, and the authority to control it. The Department has limited budget and authority in reality.

• Oversight of the department still occurs in a variety of congressional committees. This tends to result in the perpetuation of historic missions of departmental components, at the expense, perhaps, of unified departmental outcomes.

In retrospect, these issues created significant challenges for Department leadership that continue to this moment.

Colleen M. Kelley, president of the National Treasury Employees Union

Once the president signed onto the idea of a single homeland security agency, there was no question that merging 22 agencies would be an enormous task. NTEU made it quite clear that a fully engaged workforce that was trusted and respected, and whose voices were listened to, was key to a successful DHS.

Unfortunately, the issue immediately focused on the question of employee rights, and whether extending those rights to DHS employees would negatively impact the agency’s ability to perform its mission.

That generated much more heat than light, with the administration and its allies in Congress using the creation of DHS as a highly visible tool in its broader effort to reduce the rights, pay and benefits of federal employees.

Still, when the final personnel rules were put forward, they all but ignored the union input and sought to create a top-down structure which was neither fair nor transparent. Key elements of these rules subsequently were struck down by an NTEU federal court lawsuit.

The result is that morale at DHS is abysmal. DHS ranks 29th out of 30 federal agencies in the Best Places to Work survey.

That being said, the work performed by the men and women of the Department of Homeland Security has been exemplary, particularly given this political backdrop. They are to be commended for their dedication, commitment and mission focus.

C. Thomas McMillen, president of the investment group Homeland Security Capital Corp.

The consolidation of the 22 agencies was a good idea from my perspective. There have been a number of flaws in the aftermath of the department’s creation. First, the congressional oversight which now spans nearly 88 committees and subcommittees is unwieldy. Congress traditionally is not very good at oversight and this overlapping jurisdiction is exacerbating this dysfunctionality. The accountability of the department is spread over so many fiefdoms that constructive oversight is missing. Second, I can’t imagine running an agency that is physically spread out over 90-some offices in the Washington area. We need physical consolidation to one large campus to optimize results. Congressional and physical consolidation would go a long way toward making the department more efficient and accountable to the American people.

Susan J. Monteverde, vice president of government relations at the American Association of Port Authorities

There are some pluses to the Department of Homeland Security — focusing agencies related to security into one department. However, many of these are legacy groups and it is hard to move to a new culture and for DHS and Congress, for that matter, to get their arms around the agency. Another problem is that other groups, like the Department of Energy, have been major players in security, and Department of Defense is also involved in homeland defense, and these are outside of DHS.

Marc Pearl, president and CEO, Homeland Security & Defense Business Council

The Homeland Security & Defense Business Council has observed a tremendous maturation of the Department of Homeland Security over the past five years. Looking forward, the council, while recognizing the challenges that surrounded the formation of the department, is focused on how our government and citizens are prepared for and respond to domestic terrorism or natural disasters. Moving forward, the agencies involved and invested in homeland security have a great opportunity to build a “culture of preparedness” that ensures that everyone in our country — citizens and government alike — can respond efficiently and effectively to such emergencies. The council continues to support the nation’s homeland security mission and its efforts to include the private sector in our national preparedness goals.

Evan Scott, president of the Evan Scott Group, a homeland security consulting firm

The department was established as a reaction to our being attacked. The thinking behind the establishment of DHS was to bring all of our intelligence agencies under one person.

This would allow us to be more effective at assimilating our intelligence gathering and have the ability to act on threats. As is evident with most corporate mergers, the element of culture was never addressed. When you consider the mission of CIA, FBI and NSA, it is clear that they have always felt it was not a good idea to share information. The FBI is a law enforcement agency while CIA is in the business of gathering intelligence and counter-intelligence. These agencies were formed as a result of past wars, including the Cold War.

I do not think anyone really felt the formation of the agency would be easy or effective. However, over time we have emerged as a stronger nation in our ability to gather information, analyze it and react. The focus on all the problems facing the agencies has forced us to make them more effective in fighting an enemy we have never encountered before in this country. The technological innovations that have resulted will continue to advance our ability to communicate and protect the homeland.”

Seth M. Stodder, senior counsel, Akin, Gump, Strauss, Hauer & Feld, LLP

On balance, I think the creation of the Department of Homeland Security was an important and necessary reform. Of course, some things might have been done differently or caused less initial organizational angst, and any merger of entities — let alone 22 of them – would have been complex. Certainly, the department has had some growing pains (the most evident of which being Katrina, obviously), but I think Secretary Chertoff is pushing DHS in the right direction.

And one should recall some of the great achievements of the last five years, including — number one — the fact that no terrorist attack has occurred on American soil. Obviously some of that is due to luck and our military’s relentless attacks on al Qaeda, but much of that is also due to DHS — in conjunction with the FBI, the intelligence community, and foreign governments — working to foil al Qaeda plots.

This was clearly demonstrated during the 2006 threat to transatlantic aviation, where DHS worked closely with the United Kingdom to identify and screen international air travelers presenting a risk before they boarded planes.

Also, one must look at the unification of the border agency, creating “one face at the border,” as a major achievement that has improved our security — integrating the effort to keep bad things and people out of the country.

FEMA is obviously a work in progress, but in the wake of Katrina, DHS and FEMA are working to strengthen the FEMA regional structure and improve the federal role in assisting states and local communities prepare for catastrophic disasters. Clearly much more work needs to be done in terms of strengthening our nation’s security, and building a more resilient society, but the creation of DHS was an important reform and a necessary step toward achieving those ends.

Stewart Verdery, president of the Monument Policy Group, who served as DHS assistant secretary for policy from 2003 to 2005

Creating DHS was a good idea. Repeatedly re-creating DHS is not a good idea. Five years in, it is time to leave the organizational chart alone and allow the department to function, not to reinvent itself over and over again.

From my former vantage point as assistant secretary for Border and Transportation Security Policy and Planning, I have little doubt there needed to be a DHS. Government activities related to preparedness, border security, investigations, and research had to be coordinated in some fashion — either you create a new department or a huge permanent coordinating capability inside the White House. I think the department was the much preferred choice between the two options. Of course, even the lines that created the department left important homeland security responsibilities — FBI’s investigative work, intelligence gathering, consular operations — outside the department. Thus, many of the problems for which DHS takes public blame are actually the result of spirited interagency debate and activity.

Looking at the original DHS structure, it was clear from the earliest days that the department was created with two huge structural problems. One was the lack of central policy-making function of any size to handle the job. Literally several dozen people were supposed to develop and coordinate policy-making in extremely complicated areas like immigration. There were heroic and sometimes successful efforts, but only after five years do we finally have a policy-making apparatus capable of handling responsibilities that must be finalized at the department-level. The second was the division of responsibility for immigration across the State Department, CBP, ICE and CIS. It has taken considerable time to rebuild the decision-making process for immigration and travel issues at a time when the stakes for finding needles in the haystack without damaging our international image and trade couldn’t be higher.

The next five years for DHS hopefully will be time when the department is not held to unrealistic expectations by the press and politicians, creating the wrong incentives to respond to the mini-crisis of the day.

James Lee Witt, CEO of the security consulting firm James Lee Witt Associations and head of FEMA from 1993 to 2001

Supporters may credit the creation of DHS for the reason that there has not been a terrorist attack on U.S. soil since 2001. The unfortunate side of DHS’s creation was that pulling in the terrorism, intelligence, and border control agencies made good sense, but not all the agencies and functions fit neatly into those baskets and everyone now knows that FEMA was one of those.

By subsuming FEMA into DHS, the all-hazards focus on incident management was lost, resulting in a significant degradation in capability; and for decades FEMA had met its mission requirements by being given the legal and practical ability to “task” other federal agencies (OFAs) when needs arose that FEMA couldn’t handle itself. That authority was provided in the Stafford Act, along with a suitable funding mechanism for agency mission assignments, when necessary.

In fact, if DHS had been organized in the same manner that the 1990s FEMA had been modeled, I believe that DHS would have been more successful. That same model could have worked and could have been legislated for many OFA authorities that were not entirely focused on terrorism, intelligence, and/or border security. That would have allowed those agencies to continue doing what they do best, without subsuming them into a much larger bureaucracy that had (by necessity) little focus on those agencies’ missions and programs. It would also have allowed DHS to access those resources and capabilities when needed, however.

Michael Chertoff, DHS secretary

I think in the main it’s been a good idea, because if you look at the major operating elements — the 22 agencies number is a little bit of a misnomer, because some of them are very small pieces that would not exist on their own — we united all of the border activities and all of the major infrastructure activities, like TSA and rail. We pulled it all together, and it’s worked well, because we’ve been able to cross-train, cross-equip and create all sorts of joint activities that leverage different components’ expertise for the whole mission.

For example, the idea of having the Coast Guard in a department that’s different from Customs is silly, if you think about it. They both do the same thing. They have different missions, but they both patrol the same area.

Somewhat more controversial at the time was FEMA, and I would say that if you’re going to do a comprehensive strategy for protecting the country, the same people who evaluate mitigation and response should be linked to the people who talk about prevention and protection.

There is one thing that I would do differently, and it might not have been true in 2003, but it’s based on lessons from Hurricane Katrina. One function FEMA has undertaken, long-term reconstruction like in the Gulf, strikes me as probably at the point where it shouldn’t be in FEMA. When you get into long-term reconstruction and actually reconstructing a city, not just managing the emergency or the immediate response, then you’re really talking about something totally different from emergency management. You’re talking about housing redevelopment, urban redevelopment, social services, case management for people who are traumatized.

That strikes me as social service expertise, and the core of that expertise in the United States government lies partly in the Department of Housing and Urban Development and partly in Health and Human Services. We suggested, for example, that long-term housing reconstruction maybe ought to be a HUD function, not a FEMA function. I’ve suggested a couple times to Congress that if they want to look at this issue, how do we deal with long-term reconstruction, I’d be willing to do that. That might be the one area where I would make a change.

I would say in general, there should be a heavy presumption against reorganization. Every reorganization is costly financially and in morale, and the reality is, you lose time doing everything else, because everybody stops and focuses on where they’re going to be next and what they’re going to have to do to move. I think that the cost of constantly reorganizing continues to grow each time and makes it harder to do things.

When I look at the way a lot of issues are dealt with, not only in my department but in others, the first response is either combine things that are separate, or separate things that have been combined. You could reorganize every two years and all that would happen is consultants would make a lot of money. The one suggestion I made is a pretty easy thing to do, because it’s the one thing that’s not really part of the DHS core mission. But otherwise, I think there should be a heavy presumption about messing around with the structure.

Rep. Peter T. King of New York, ranking Republican on the House Homeland Security Committee

The Department of Homeland Security was created to be the central government agency charged with securing our country. By bringing agencies responsible for preventing and deterring terrorist attacks under the same structure as those charged with response and recovery, the United States would have a more comprehensive national defense system, designed to prevent further attacks from taking place.

Standing the department up has not been easy, and there have been many bumps in the road. But there have been successes as well — it’s no coincidence that our country has not been attacked since 9/11. From boosting funding for first responders nationwide, hardening our port and airline security, constructing a border fence and securing funding for more Border Patrol agents to increasing our nation’s intelligence capabilities and sharing anti-terror technology with our allies abroad, significant policies have been enacted to better secure our nation. But there is still much more to be done.

In order for the Department to be a true success story, the Democratic majority in Congress must consolidate oversight of DHS. We cannot continue to have 86 committees and subcommittees each giving the department different orders. It is time to make the Committee on Homeland Security the primary committee on oversight, as the 9/11 Commission recommended in 2003.

At the same time, the department still has critical missions to complete. DHS must build the full 700 miles of border fencing mandated by Congress in the Secure Fence Act of 2006. Furthermore, the exit portion of US VISIT must be fully enacted to ensure visitors do not overstay their visas. And — importantly — we much make certain that homeland security funding in being distributed strictly on the basis of risk, so that these valuable homeland security dollars are going to the high-risk cities and areas that need them.

Rep. Edward Markey, D-Mass., member of the House Homeland Security Committee

Assessing the effectiveness of the Department of Homeland Security has never been just about boxes on an organizational chart — rather, it is about whether the Bush administration has been willing to require industries to make the necessary security upgrades to make Americans safer. From scanning all cargo being placed on passenger planes, to making sure nuclear weapons aren’t loaded onto boats headed for our shores, or taking steps to route shipments of dangerous chemicals away from our population centers, it has been the Democratic Congress, not the Bush administration, that has taken homeland security in a new, more effective direction. I believe that creating the department was a good idea, and it now has many dedicated homeland security professionals carrying out it its important work. But the department needs to be doing more to protect sensitive infrastructure from terrorists attacks, and Congress will continue to press for needed reforms in this area.

Rep. Michael T. McCaul of Texas, ranking Republican on the House Homeland Security Subcommittee on Emerging Threats, Cybersecurity, Science and Technology

Much like when the Department of Defense was created, there have been some significant obstacles to integrating all of the various agencies within DHS. Overall, however, the fact that we haven’t been attacked in our homeland since 9/11 seems to prove that getting all of the agencies together was in the best interest of the country.

Rep. Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee

Many of the problems the department has faced are a direct result of the administration’s failure to provide the funding necessary to facilitate a smooth transition and integration. Unfortunately, the department’s front-line employees have born the brunt of this mistake, as they were forced to do their jobs with insufficient assets and support. But we’ve made progress over the past year, both in terms of proper funding and in leveraging the assets of the department to support the individual components.

Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee

Five years ago, we were promised that the Department of Homeland Security would make our country safer by better coordinating our homeland defense resources. We’re still waiting for DHS to deliver on that promise. What we’ve gotten instead is reckless spending, poor planning, ineffective oversight, and no real evidence that our homeland security system is significantly better than it was on the day DHS was created.