Inside Bush's Big Plan

By Karen Tumulty/Washington

Last Wednesday at around noon, Senator Joe Lieberman was pulled out of a meeting with majority leader Tom Daschle; Homeland Security adviser Tom Ridge needed Lieberman on the phone. For months the Bush Administration had been quashing the Connecticut Senator's proposal for a Cabinet agency to deal with homeland security--just as it had when the idea was proposed before Sept. 11 by a commission led by former Senators Warren Rudman and Gary Hart. Ridge had refused to testify before Lieberman's Governmental Affairs Committee, and the White House had pressed Republicans to fight the plan when it emerged from the committee two weeks before. But when Lieberman picked up the phone, he was startled to hear Ridge say, "We're looking at your bill. Let me just ask you a couple of questions." Then Ridge plunged into the fine print.

During the conversation, Ridge gave no hint of the surprise that greeted Lieberman the next morning as he headed for a vote on the Senate floor. Reporters told Lieberman that President Bush would deliver a televised address that night to call for a new Cabinet-level agency even more sprawling and powerful than the one the Senator had proposed. Suddenly, the stampede was on for what the White House touts as the biggest reorganization of government in more than a half-century. The swiftness of the about-face was best summed up by Fred Thompson, the ranking Republican on Lieberman's committee, who pulled him aside and said, "I've been having a great time today explaining my enthusiastic support for a proposition I voted against two weeks ago."

Nearly everyone now agrees that it makes sense to combine many of the domestic-security responsibilities that are scattered across 22 federal agencies, which employ nearly 170,000 people, consume close to $37.5 billion a year and answer to 88 congressional committees and subcommittees. The various offices and agencies grew up, each with its own history, in bygone eras with concerns that now seem almost quaint: the Secret Service, to combat counterfeiters; the Customs Service, to collect tariffs; the Coast Guard, to prevent smuggling. But in the post-9/11 world, the threat has a different face. "Thousands of trained killers are plotting to attack us," President Bush said Thursday night, "and this terrible knowledge requires us to act differently."

Bush's plan would roll Secret Service, Customs and the Coast Guard--along with the Immigration and Naturalization Service, the new Transportation Security Administration (TSA) and dozens of others--into a single new Department of Homeland Security, to be run by a Cabinet Secretary (Ridge, by contrast, is basically a White House staff member). This sort of idea--consolidating the agencies that oversee the border, for example--has been kicking around since at least as far back as Al Gore's reinventing-government project of the mid-1990s. But the question that will be debated over the next few months is whether Bush's proposal goes too far, creating a bureaucratic Dr. Frankenstein's monster too unwieldy to do its job, or not far enough, shuffling job titles and office space without fixing the structural and institutional flaws that make Americans feel so vulnerable.

One thing the new agency will not do is fix the central problem exposed by 9/11's missed warnings: the fragmented, territorial, risk-averse culture of the agencies that collect and analyze intelligence. The new Department of Homeland Security would have an in-house intelligence-analysis group, but the information it receives would be only as good as what the CIA, the FBI and the supersecret National Security Agency (NSA) decide is safe or useful to give it. That means Homeland Security analysts will not get full access to raw intelligence data. Had the new department been around last year, its analysts would not have seen the memo from Phoenix, Ariz., FBI agent Kenneth Williams, who warned last July that terrorists might be enrolling in flight schools. They would not have heard about the FBI's in-house argument over whether to search the computer of suspected terrorist Zacarias Moussaoui, a disagreement that became national news thanks to FBI whistle-blower Coleen Rowley, who testified last week on Capitol Hill. Instead, intelligence officials suggest, the information the Homeland Security analysts get is likely to be a partial version of what is already being analyzed by the CIA's 1,000-person Counter-Terrorism Center. "The problem is not just analysis," complains Vincent Cannistraro, the center's former chief of operations. "It's collecting the right information. This [proposal] leaves the two main agencies responsible for collecting intelligence still with divided authorities and a clash of culture."

For all the sweep of Bush's plan, it falls well short of the fundamental intelligence reforms that might have changed the culture of the intelligence community--and certainly would have ignited bureaucratic warfare among the national-security fiefs. Though the threat has changed, with cold war states replaced by transnational terrorists, the intelligence community has not. To help remedy that, George H.W. Bush's National Security Adviser, Brent Scowcroft, recommended last fall that some of the country's best-funded intelligence agencies, including the NSA and the imagery producers at the National Reconnaissance Office, be wrested from the Pentagon and brought under the control of the CIA. That proposal has languished--largely because of the friction it would create between CIA Director George Tenet and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, a supremely powerful bureaucratic player who shows no sign of wanting to part with any of his chess pieces.

Nor would Bush's new department be a model of streamlined efficiency. Swept into it would be many agencies whose jobs have little to do with what the President described as its "overriding and urgent mission." The Federal Emergency Management Authority would still have to clean up after tornadoes and floods; the Coast Guard would still be in charge of search-and-rescue operations. And fighting terrorism would be just one of the jobs at the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, whose other duties include the eradication of the screwworm, the boll weevil and the golden nematode, as well as the enforcement of the Horse Protection Act. "There's a spectacular lack of focus in this agency," complains Congressman David Obey, the ranking Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee. "It's going to need a lot of work if it's going to work."

That work seems certain to overshadow everything else on Congress's agenda this year--which is just fine with Republicans, who had feared spending an election-year summer talking about a prescription-drug benefit and defending themselves on Social Security reform. "Bush finally has a domestic agenda," says a relieved White House adviser. But that doesn't mean there won't be arguments. The leaders of the House and Senate will be busy quelling the turf fights that have already begun. The biggest losers will be the Treasury Department, which would give up the Secret Service and Customs, and the Transportation Department, which would shed the Coast Guard and the TSA.

The turf belongs not just to the shifting bureaucracies themselves but also to their employee unions, the lobbyists who do business with them and their patrons on Capitol Hill. Even before the President gave his speech Thursday night, House Transportation Committee chairman Don Young served notice on Speaker Dennis Hastert that he had no intention of giving up his committee's jurisdiction over the Coast Guard and the TSA. And California Democrat Ellen Tauscher, who supports most of the Bush plan, insists his decision to include her district's Lawrence Livermore nuclear-weapons lab in the new department is a mistake and that the lab is better off as part of the National Nuclear Security Administration. (All the nuclear labs just underwent a major reorganization.) While Lieberman and Thompson contend that Senate rules give their committee the job of drafting the legislation that will create the new department, Republican Orrin Hatch says it should fall under the Judiciary Committee on which he sits. Hastert, meanwhile, is thinking about creating a new committee to do the job in the House. In discussions over the past week, advisers raised the idea of creating a select committee, but Bush knew better than to go there. "I'm not going to tell them how to do their job," he told aides.

While it has been Bush's preference to float above other fights on Capitol Hill, leaving him in a position to take credit for whatever emerges, both Democrats and Republicans say this is one fight that promises to be so big and complicated that he will have to engage. His surprise announcement created a surge of momentum behind his proposal, but it could quickly disintegrate. "Only the President has the power to 'crack heads,'" the centrist Democratic Leadership Council noted in its daily bulletin. "If he doesn't do so, then reorganization won't accomplish much, especially in the crucial short term."

The White House has already gone to work soothing conservatives who would normally have rebelled at the spectacle of a Republican President creating a huge new government department. Before the announcement, White House officials who knew about the plan delicately tested the idea on conservative opinion makers; after the President's speech, officials and allies such as Ohio Congressman Rob Portman blitzed conservative radio stations. But privately few are buying Bush's reassurances that the new operation will "enhance operational efficiencies" without consuming an additional dime of the federal budget. Says a senior House Republican aide: "I don't know how they can say it with a straight face."

With an eye on the intense jockeying that will shape the new department, Bush deliberately left until later one of the touchiest questions of all: Who will head it? (One popular favorite for the job, former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani, is said by friends not to want it.) Ridge might seem the obvious choice, although some Republicans fear he has been damaged by his own unimpressive performance, as well as by the White House's refusal to allow him to testify before Congress earlier this year. So far, Ridge's best-known accomplishment as Homeland Security chief has been a color-coded alert system that gave the late-night comedians weeks of good material. Now Ridge is being dispatched to Capitol Hill to lead the fight for the new department. How well he does in midwifing the department could be a crucial test of whether he is the right person to run it. That means the next time he calls a key Senator, it won't be such a surprise. --With reporting by Massimo Calabresi, James Carney, Matthew Cooper, John F. Dickerson and Mark Thompson/Washington

With reporting by Massimo Calabresi, James Carney, Matthew Cooper, John F. Dickerson and Mark Thompson/Washington