Among the earlier and more prominent proposals for centralization is
that of the Hart-Rudman Commission, released in early 2001. Prophetic
in its anticipation of an "end [to] the relative invulnerability of
the U.S. homeland to catastrophic attack", the commission put forward
"organizational realignment" as the centerpiece of its recommendation:

The President should propose, and Congress should agree to create, a
National Homeland Security Agency (NHSA) with responsibility for
planning, coordinating, and integrating various U.S. government
activities involved in homeland security. The Federal Emergency
Management Agency (FEMA) should be a key building block in this
effort. . . . The President should propose to Congress the transfer
of the Customs Service, the Border Patrol, and the Coast Guard to the
National Homeland Security Agency, while preserving them as distinct
entities.

The commission further proposed to divide managerial responsibilities
within the new agency among three directorates responsible,
respectively, for border security, critical infrastructure
protection, and emergency preparedness and response. These proposals
were put forward in legislation by Representative Mac Thornberry
(R-TX), originally introduced in March 2001; since the September 11
attack, they have been endorsed by Senators Joe Lieberman, Arlen
Specter and Bob Graham, who propose the establishment of a new
cabinet department.

Advocates of consolidation are right to say that excessively
dispersed authority is a serious problem, but, on its own, their
solution is inadequate to the task. The homeland cannot be secured by
pulling three significant but second-order operations--the Border
Patrol, the Customs Service and the Coast Guard--into an enhanced
FEMA, a well-regarded agency, but one whose prime role has been
response to natural disasters. Inevitably, most of the forty-plus
Federal offices with pieces of the problem would be left outside the
walls of the new entity. As a result, the head of that agency cannot
be assigned principal responsibility for homeland security in the
manner supporters of consolidation advocate. Even with full Cabinet
status, the secretary of a new Department of Homeland Security will
not be able to coordinate the activities and actions of his many
cabinet colleagues who have an interest in and share responsibility
for protecting the American homeland. To be effective, interagency
coordination and operational responsibility must, to the maximum
extent possible, remain in separate hands.

As the Hart-Rudman Commission recognized, many institutions and
functions that are critical to the task cannot, by their very nature,
be included in a consolidated agency. The FBI will necessarily remain
in the Justice Department (and resistant even to its authority). The
CDC, indispensable to combating bioterrorism, should remain, albeit
loosely, within the Department of Health and Human Services. Perhaps
most important, the intelligence arms of domestic law enforcement and
the vast and relevant resources of the CIA and the NSA cannot
possibly be brought under the direct authority of Governor Ridge or
any future Cabinet-level homeland security official. This means that
time-sensitive information requiring priority border or immigration
attention will have to come from somewhere other than any conceivable
homeland security agency.

The intelligence connection is part of a daunting broader reality:
the need for domestically-oriented security authorities to coordinate
with international policy agencies and activities under the aegis of
the National Security Council. Looking in the other organizational
direction, coordination also has to link downward effectively with
police, health, rescue and other units under the authority of
governors and mayors throughout the land.

Even for organizational units brought within a new agency, formal
inclusion would not automatically guarantee effective integration.
Upon his appointment, Ridge alluded to the problems of
intra-governmental conflict when he declared, "The only turf we
should be worried about protecting is the turf we stand on." This
warning, alas, applies inside as well as outside organizational
walls. The Hart-Rudman Commission sounded a cautionary note when it
recommended integration with a caveat: "Transfer of the Customs
Service, the Border Patrol, and Coast Guard" should be undertaken
"while preserving them as distinct entities." But this apt
recognition of the value of each unit's internal coherence was also
an acknowledgement that centralization can, and should, only go so
far.

Leadership and Coordination

To re-iterate, the basic organizational need of homeland security is
to address activities that are highly diffused and decentralized. How
to ensure that a border guard makes the right decision is more
important than whether his boss is responsible directly to a central
homeland security official. In the end, the real need is to have the
right people in the right places with access to the right
information, and who can cooperate in ways that make their individual
efforts larger than the sum of the parts. This requires senior
government officials working together: synchronizing their activities
and sharing necessary information and developing a process that
maximizes incentives for them to do so.

Forging such a process must be Ridge's central goal. He must engage
and re-inforce his senior colleagues in their efforts to make their
departments instruments of presidential counterterrorism policy. The
attorney general, for example, is an absolutely critical player in
homeland security, with oversight for the FBI, INS, and law
enforcement generally. He is likely to see himself as the plausible
government-wide leader in the domestic response to September 11, just
as the secretary of state sees himself, not without cause, as the
leader (short of the president) in U.S. foreign policy. The attorney general could very well be threatened by how the homeland security adv
isor plays his role--after all, successive secretaries of state waged
bitter battles over foreign policy with the Henry Kissingers and
Zbigniew Brzezinskis who were housed a thirty seconds' walk from the
Oval Office. If Ridge appears to be mounting a broad challenge to
Attorney General John Ashcroft's authority, the prospects for an
effective, integrated campaign against terrorism will plunge
precipitously.

The opposite scenario, a homeland security advisor who cannot assert
direct authority, poses different problems. Drawing on his own, very
different experience as "drug czar" in the Clinton Administration,
Barry McCaffrey expressed concern that Ridge "has an inadequate
mechanism to do the job. Six months from now, there's a danger that
he will turn into little more than the speaker's bureau for homeland
defense." Fortunately, the executive order creating Ridge's position
also established the Homeland Security Council (HSC) and tasked it
with "advising and assisting the president with respect to all
aspects of homeland security [and] ensuring coordination of homeland
security-related activities of executive departments and agencies and
effective development and implementation of homeland security
policies." The HSC is headed by the president, and the attorney
general is prominent among its members. The homeland security advisor
is simultaneously a council member and the official tasked with
managing the HSC process. This offers him a vehicle for engaging
senior colleagues--the attorney general above all--at a time when he
has maximal presidential support and attention. He can model his
approach on the successful efforts of others in parallel roles.

Learning From the NEC

A highly relevant example is the role played by Robert Rubin
at the beginning of the Clinton Administration. LikeRidge,
he was assigned responsibility for a new coordinating
council--the National Economic Council (NEC). Like Ridge, Rubin was
tasked to get the government moving in a policy area of top
presidential priority, peopled with senior officials holding strong
mandates and strong views. Had Rubin seen his role as the new
president's "economic czar", one of issuing orders for other Clinton
economic officials to carry out, his governmental life might have
proved nasty, brutish and short. Instead, he took the initiative in
organizing internal debate on key issues. He developed a process
designed to force presidential decisions even as he assiduously
reached out to the secretary and deputy secretary of the Treasury,
the director of the Office of Management and Budget, and the chair of
the Council of Economic Advisors. He gave them key issues to present
at a pivotal, pre-inauguration meeting with the president-elect in
Little Rock, Arkansas. The meeting ended with one key decision made,
with all the Cabinet and deputy-level economic players engaged, and
with Rubin's NEC neatly ensconced at the center of the economic
policy process.

Rubin gave the leaders of the economic agencies something they wanted
and needed--visible participation in and influence over the most
important decisions of Clinton's early presidency. In so doing, he
strengthened their credibility and influence within their agencies,
and also in Washington generally. Moreover, this seems to have been a
conscious, calculated strategy on Rubin's part: rather than the
sparring for turf typical of all too many debates among senior
officials, he shaped a positive-sum process in which all would come
out feeling like winners even though they could not, of course, win
all of the policy arguments. Ridge can do likewise with the HSC. By
taking the initiative but exercising power collegially, the homeland
security advisor can achieve much more in coordinated anti-terrorist
action than he could through any conceivable organizational
consolidation.

Learning from the NSC: The Bush Administration can draw even more
upon the experience of the oldest and most successful of White
House-based coordinating councils, the National Security Council.
Emulating proven NSC practices, Ridge has used the HSC as an umbrella
to establish a network of formal and informal interagency
coordinating structures. Giving him authority to do just that was
President Bush's Homeland Security Presidential Directive (HSPD) 1,
which directed that the organization and operation of the Homeland
Security Council be modeled on the NSC process that Bush established
at the outset of his administration. Under this directive, Ridge
chairs the HSC "Principals Committee", composed of all regular
members of the Homeland Security Council except the president and
vice president. Ridge's deputy chairs the HSC Deputies Committee,
composed of the deputies of all departments and agencies that have a
seat on the HSC. Senior officials on Ridge's staff chair 22 different
assistant secretary-level Policy Coordinating Committees (PCC),
covering such policy areas as: detection, surveillance and
intelligence; law enforcement and investigation; weapons of mass
destruction consequence management; domestic transportation security;
medical and public health preparedness; and domestic threat response
and incident management.