The Bureaucratic Mind

Everyone in Washington to the right of John Conyers--which means everyone--is applauding President Bush's proposal for a new cabinet-level Department of Homeland Security. We'll join the applause, if only with one hand clapping.

It certainly makes sense to bring together under one roof, and under the authority of one individual, the government agencies dedicated to homeland security. The reshuffled bureaucrats will now know that their main mission is fighting terrorism, which may help change their incentives. The critical challenge, though, isn't changing where the bureaucrats sit but changing the way they think. Too bad the latter seems to be a lesser political priority.

As proposed, the new department will be one humongous bureaucracy, uniting 22 government agencies into the third-largest cabinet agency after Defense and Veterans Affairs. It will have a staff of 169,000 and a budget of $37.5 billion. The mergers of Manufacturers Hanover, Chemical, Chase and J.P. Morgan were kids' stuff by comparison.

Cabinet-level status means the Homeland Security chief will have line and budget authority, two important levers of power. As a White House adviser, Tom Ridge's main political tool has been his relationship with the President, a card he can play only on the big issues. White House budget director Mitch Daniels, one of the designers of this change, adds that a single department will make it easier for the President to control homeland security spending, which has grown like kudzu with the task spread out over many departments. We can only hope.

That said, security won't improve unless the bureaucracy can be moved to change its mindset. That means being open to new ways of thinking and challenging politically correct assumptions. For example, this means being open to explanations for the anthrax terror other than the FBI's favorite "lone wolf" theory; ethnically profiling airline passengers; and changing the FDA rules and regulations on vaccines to protect Americans against smallpox, anthrax and other biological threats. The entire government, in short, could use more of the transformational thinking that Donald Rumsfeld has brought to Defense.

One way to promote this kind of thinking is for Mr. Bush to fire someone. That would certainly get the bureaucracy's attention. Our first candidate would be Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta, who won't let guns in cockpits, won't allow common-sense ethnic screening of airline passengers and is presiding over a new airline security agency that was supposed to have 30,000 employees but is already heading north of double that.

And don't forget Congress, where bureaucracy congeals into morass. Eighty-eight committees and subcommittees currently have jurisdiction over the 100-plus federal organizations that will comprise the new Homeland Security Department. If Congress is serious about homeland defense, at least 85 of the 88 ought to give up oversight authority. Don't bet on it. Most Members of Congress are genetically incapable of ceding power, and the turf wars and pork barreling are already beginning. Senator Chuck Schumer (D., N.Y.) was first off the mark, demanding a special New York office for the new department.

Perhaps the best thing about Mr. Bush's proposal is that it shows a seriousness about dealing with the threat. Terrorists with weapons of mass destruction are the biggest danger to national security since the Cold War, even if the ACLU doesn't yet believe it. And as Mr. Bush said Thursday, it "requires us to act differently," much as Harry Truman prodded the government to confront Soviet ambitions in the late 1940s.

On this point, we'd say Mr. Bush's most important recent speech wasn't last Thursday's but was the one he delivered 10 days ago at West Point. That's when he laid out his new policy of "preemption," or acting first before terrorists strike. "The war on terror will not be won on the defensive," he told the cadets, and "We must take the battle to the enemy." In other words, the terrorist threat won't be defeated by bureaucratic reshuffling at home, however helpful that might be, but by attacking the terrorists abroad, before they can strike us. That's the way to ensure real homeland security.