Failure of Imagination Posted by Moira Whelan

I was alarmed today to read a damning article on the “progress” made to secure the country over the past few years. US Assistant Secretary for Infrastructure Protection Robert Stephan had this to say:

“The No. 1 killer in the United States is entrenched bureaucracies that focus more on themselves than they do the collective good.”

And this:

Those people, according to Stephan, “haven’t learned the hard lessons of Sept. 11 and Hurricane Katrina.”

Earlier in my career, I worked as a staffer on the House Select Committee on Homeland Security. One of the things we often reviewed in our oversight efforts were the new people, policies, offices and logos that grew every week to “combat” the terrorist threats we faced. Even our very committee—created by Congress to get around the insufficient oversight of the 26 subcommittees that had jurisdiction on homeland security and terrorism issues—is now one more committee on Capitol Hill. No other subcommittees disappeared. More bureaucracy.

And let’s not forget, this problem with bureaucracy was one of the most important findings of the 9-11 Commission. It was the stove piping, the multiple layers of reporting, and the turf battles that caused memos to be ignored and the FBI to not know what the CIA was doing. Hamilton and Kaine called upon the government to get smarter, and called them out for a “failure of imagination.”

In the early days after 9-11, the bureaucratic in-fighting did diminish, but it never went away, and doesn’t surprise me at all that it’s now (according to friends) worse than it was before 9-11. In certain areas, better cooperation exists, but in order to get there, we had to create new entities such as the NCTC and JTTFs to facilitate that. Each layer can bring about problems…and that’s the problem…we haven’t figured out how to deal with that yet.

Take for instance DHS. It was first proposed as a mechanism to overcome the intelligence failures we saw. The White House opposed it. When they saw that they’d have to accept the reality of DHS in some way due to public support, they sat down and in a series of meetings, 5 bureaucrats—in the new entity the Office of Homeland Security at the White House-- developed the basic outline of what is today’s Department of Homeland Security. Because the DHS legislation that was passed (Bush version) failed to implement the original intent of the legislation (bettering intel), the proposal for ODNI—Office of the Director of National Intelligence—came into being.

DHS now sits on top of offices like FEMA and the Coast Guard who have missions that stretch beyond terrorism. We saw what happens when these missions get ignored with Katrina and Rita. New offices, like infrastructure protection are created without thought to what people who did chemical plant monitoring at EPA might have to offer to make us smarter and better.

This isn’t to say that some new agencies weren’t needed. They were. But when do finally say that we have enough, and need to concentrate on getting them to work rather than creating more? When do we stop giving lawmakers credit for creating entities, and instead pressure them to make sure they’re doing what they should be doing?

After all is said and done, we are left with more bureaucracy and an old Washington axiom that it’s harder to end a bad program than create a good one. With Homeland Security, this is even more stark: any candidate or lawmaker who proposes cutting an ineffective office will instantly be accused of leaving us vulnerable, no matter how sound the decision may be.
Hopefully one thing 7 years will allow us to see is that we need to look at this in a level-headed way.  It’s more important that government works, rather than how big it is and what words are on the door.

Comments

[Peace]

The politicians in Washington stressed military force and jingoism after Septemmber 11, because that is what the people wanted at the time. But lawmakers should have educated the American people that terrorism is a law enforcment problem and there is no military solution. Because it is law enforcemnt problem, Congress should have stressed better cooperation among federal agencies. Instead the Congress looked for what is most politically beneficial and not ignored what really needed to be done

[Zathras]

Buried in this mass of verbiage is the idea that we need to face up to the problem of inertia in government, and be as zealous about killing agencies and programs (and, in Congress, subcommittees) that have outlived their usefulness as we are about creating new ones. I think.

Perhaps I only perceive this because it is what I believe. In any event, I ought to observe here that there is no constituency within the Democratic Party for doing anything like this, and not much of one in the Republican Party anymore, either. Agencies and programs have political support because they service groups of voters or other organized interests; it is a bonus if they address national needs as well, but an agency or program that does the latter and not the former is likely to have fewer passionate defenders than one that does the former and not the latter.

The Democratic Party in Congress can't bring itself to cut spending on anything. This is a significant problem if one's objective is to drop some of the dead weight of inertia that has built up in government over the years. Now, it's fair enough to argue that the Republican Party pretty much shares this orientation (with exceptions for cases in which a program or agency is perceived to be servicing a constituency that tends to vote for Democrats. The flip side of this is that Republicans are never for tax increases, and Democrats share that orientation, with exceptions made for taxes on people most of whom vote for Republicans). The point here is simply that a Democratic administration that did intend to address inertia in government would be starting from scratch, and face immediate, anguished opposition from its own most dedicated supporters.

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