U.S. Response:  Proposed Security Department Too Large, Report Says

A new report by the Brookings Institution says the White House plan to create a homeland security department is too large and would probably cause many problems, the New York Times reported today (see GSN, July 12).

The Bush administration and Congress should instead create a smaller department to focus on border and transportation security, intelligence and threat analysis and infrastructure protection, according to the report, which was released Saturday.  Congress should also postpone any decision on whether to include research for WMD countermeasures in the proposed department, the report says (see GSN, June 28; Elizabeth Becker, New York Times, July 14).

According to the report, the proposed homeland security department needs to have more access to raw intelligence information than the Bush administration has proposed (see GSN, July 2).  Rather than creating a new center to analyze information gathered by U.S. agencies, the department should control an FBI unit that focuses on terrorism-related intelligence analysis, the report says (Bill Miller, Washington Post, July 14).

Also counter to the Bush administration’s proposal, the report recommends keeping the Federal Emergency Management Agency separate from the proposed department, according to the New York Times.  The department’s mission would be compromised if it had to take on FEMA’s natural disaster response efforts, according to the report.

“Fortunately, terrorist attacks are rare, but you can count on national disasters every year — right now there are floods in Texas, fires in Arizona — so why should the Department of Homeland Security be pulled away from its mission and worry constantly about those disasters?” asked James Lindsay, an author of the study.

The Bush administration does not agree with many of the recommendations in the Brookings report and President George W. Bush “looks at homeland security in total,” said Homeland Security Office spokesman Gordon Johndroe in response to the report.

“Our mission is not only to prevent against attacks, but to respond to them, and FEMA is the response mechanism in the government,” Johndroe said (Becker, New York Times).

Congress Continues Work on Proposed Department

Both houses of Congress are expected to hold hearings on the proposed homeland security department this week to finalize legislation to create it, CongressDaily reported.

The House Homeland Security Committee, a special committee created to oversee homeland security department legislation, is expected to hold a series of hearings featuring testimony from Homeland Security Director Tom Ridge as well as the heads of the agencies that might be transferred to the new department.  Leaders in the House of Representatives hope to be able to vote on the homeland security department legislation next week — the last week the House is in session before the August recess — if the committee can get a bill out by the end of this week, according to CongressDaily.

The Senate Governmental Affairs Committee plans to finish producing a version of proposed homeland security legislation next week and move it out of committee, CongressDaily reported.  The Senate Agriculture, Finance and Health, Education Labor and Pensions committees are expected to hold hearings on the proposed department this week.  Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle (D-S.D.) has said he wants the Senate to vote on the proposed department by Aug. 2, the last day the Senate is in session before its August recess, CongressDaily reported (CongressDaily, July 15).

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