Steve Quayle News Alerts

June 6, 2002

WASHINGTON (AP) — In a major restructuring, President Bush will propose creation of a Cabinet post for homeland security that would swallow up scores of federal agencies - including customs, immigration, the Secret Service and the Federal Emergency Management Agency. ''The purpose is to protect the homeland from terror,'' White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said. He said Bush is pleased with stopgap reforms enacted since Sept. 11 but, ''We can and will do more.''

The proposal, which Fleischer called the biggest government restructuring plan since 1947, will be announced by Bush in a Thursday night address from the White House. Bush aides asked television networks to broadcast the speech.

Requiring congressional approval, the proposal is part of a stepped-up effort to shield Bush from criticism that his administration did not do enough to prevent the attacks. Not coincidentally, FBI Director Robert Mueller was testifying before Congress Thursday about the agency's failure to anticipate the terror attacks.

Mueller recently announced a major restructuring of the FBI.

On Capitol Hill, House Minority Leader Richard Gephardt, D-Mo., welcomed the proposal.

"We have made some progress on homeland defense but not nearly enough," he said. "We have a long way to go."

Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., said he wasn't sure an internal reorganization is needed. "The question is whether shifting the deck chairs on the Titanic is the way to go," he said.

Former Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Ridge is the current homeland security adviser, and is virtually certain to be Bush's choice to head the Cabinet department, aides said.

Congress has been pushing a reluctant Bush to elevate the office to Cabinet status because lawmakers would have oversight authority over the new agency, which Bush wants to call the Department of Homeland Security. As an adviser, Ridge has been able to avoid formal testimony before Congress.

With pressure mounting, the White House signaled this spring that it would make the domestic security office a Cabinet agency. Ridge had planned to unveil his strategy in the fall, but the schedule was pushed up in part to counter the congressional hearings, one senior White House official said.

Bush will ask for congressional approval of his plan by year's end.

Fleischer said the plan will not cost more money; it will shuffle current operations within the government without expanding the bureaucracy.

The new Department of Homeland Security would have four divisions:
* Border transportation and security, which would take over the Immigration and Naturalization Service from the Department of Justice, the Customs Services from Treasury and the Coast Guard from the Department of Transportation.
* Emergency preparedness and response, which would include FEMA, now an independent agency.
* Chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear countermeasures, which would take over the Lawrence Livermore National Lab in Livermore, Calif. The Departments of Health and Human Services and Agriculture would lose divisions to this office.
* Information analysis and infrastructure protection, which would draw from several agencies including the FBI. The FBI's national infrastructure protection program will be part of the division.

The Secret Service, which specializes in threat assessments, would be a separate entity within the new department.

Fleischer said the FBI and CIA would remain independent agencies, not seeing major changes under the proposal. White House officials privately conceded they face a tough sell in the turf-conscious Congress, where 88 committees and subcommittees have power over the affected agencies.

A senior White House official said the new department would likely get its own building, though some of its agencies might continue working out of their current structures.

Fleischer said "recent noise" about counterterrorism failures at the FBI and CIA did not precipitate the president's plan. But, the spokesman added, "There is the recognition that we still need to keep the FBI and CIA working closely together and this new entity will be one place where information will get pulled together."

Ridge and White House congressional liaison Nicholas Calio have been consulting members of Congress. "The initial reaction from the Hill has been good but reorganizing the government has never been easy; it involves turf," Fleischer said.

Bush, who had expressed support for the FBI and CIA in the early days of the controversy, acknowledged for the first time this week that the agencies failed to communicate adequately. But he said there was no evidence that better communication could have prevented the attacks.

Mueller conceded for the first time recently that a better analysis of warning signs might have prevented the attacks.

Ridge has been working on a restructuring proposal since his appointment last fall — meeting heavy resistance from law enforcement and intelligence bureaucracies.

One senior White House official familiar with the tightly held plan said the proposal will include elements of Ridge's push to consolidate border-security agencies.

With 100 executive branch entities and 88 congressional committees and subcommittees now sharing jurisdiction over homeland security, coordination has become unmanageable, the official said. This source described one scene illustrating the problem: When Bush summoned relevant committee chairmen and ranking members to the White House last October, they had to be divided into two groups for separate meetings that still filled the Cabinet Room beyond capacity.

The new intelligence entity would supplement efforts of the FBI, the CIA and other intelligence agencies, not replace them, the officials said.

The idea is to have one office that helps the intelligence agencies analyze the data they gather.

http://www.usatoday.com/news/attack/2002/06/06/attacks-bush.htm