Homeland security can't coexist with bureaucratic security.

The president's plan to create a new Department of Homeland Security struck a blow against mindless, careerist drones who stand between us and our safety. It did not, however, win the campaign against them.

It's now the bureaucracy's turn to strike back. And the strikes will come all summer in the deep recesses of the Capitol as Congress defines the contours of the new department. Already the 535 congressmen are likely being beset by legions of lobbyists, government workers and union representatives who all have the same message: Don't let this be the end of business as usual.

Winning this battle is essential to victory in the war on terrorism. To do so, President Bush must be in the trenches--and he needs help. He needs foot soldiers who will overwhelm their congressmen with phone calls, letters and personal visits.

The president's plan itself is a brief outline of what needs to be done, but it's short on substance. It calls for cutting to one from three the number of agencies that dispense potassium iodide pills in the event of a nuclear disaster. But no mention of making those pills generally available now, before the confusion of a catastrophic event.

Perhaps the biggest flaw in the plan is that it leaves the FBI and the CIA basically untouched. What's more, the plan assumes the recent spate of hasty FBI reforms corrected all the problems there. The new Department of Homeland Security will evaluate terrorist threats--which is good. One group looking at all the threats is bound to see trends we'd otherwise miss. But the new department will only get the information the FBI and CIA deem worth passing on. And as Special Agent Coleen Rowley made painfully clear, getting FBI headquarters to recognize a real threat was the problem.

There's some talk of forcing the FBI to hand over raw data, but the political culture is already circling the wagons around the CIA. There's a fear that sharing information may reveal the identity of foreign operatives. That shouldn't stop us from changing the culture of these two agencies.

Here's what needs to happen. Homeland Security needs to have a centralized computer database and practice unilateral information sharing. The FBI should use that database and be forced to contribute to it. Information collected via satellite or through other electronic means for the CIA should be handed over to Homeland Security as well. Regardless if the CIA withholds some information, it should still have access to the database. Local police and airlines should also have at least some access to the database.

The database should be far-reaching in scope. It should be designed so any police agency (even state and local) can upload warrants and any number of official documents detailing the activities, convictions and whereabouts of potential terrorists and others. It should include the State Department's watch list, people the CIA is tracking and foreign watch lists. Mr. Bush's plan calls for collecting biometric information on foreign visitors. This should make the database too, as should Border Patrol reports. That agency already collects and stores digital fingerprints on everyone it arrests.

All of these steps are important because if the feds miss someone like Mohamed Atta at the border, the next line of defense may be a local police officer who pulls the man over for speeding. Atta got a ticket in Florida, skipped the court date and had a warrant issued for his arrest. The next line of defense may be the airline ticket counter.

This doesn't amount to a police state. All of this information is already available to any police agent--federal, state or local. The critical difference here is that we would place it at the fingertips of those fighting terrorism, allowing agents to work proactively.

The president should go one step further. We can't afford to wait a decade for the feds to have the computing power most American households have now. Mr. Bush should call on AOL, Oracle, Microsoft and others to design a computer system and database for the new department. Perhaps these corporations would even be willing to donate some of their services. After all, it is their hides being protected too.

Mr. Bush called for creating this department by the end of this legislative session, and all these reforms should work on similarly short timetables. The terrorists are busy with their plans; we must be busy with ours. For inspiration, look at the Pentagon, where workers are determined to finish reconstruction by this Sept. 11.

The plan to restructure the bureaucracy must go further than Mr. Bush has proposed. Example: The Coast Guard would be part of the new department. This is necessary, as the proposal on the White House Web site makes clear, because the many different federal agencies don't talk to each other about ships stopped on the high seas. Sometimes people illegally get into the country after one batch of federal agents inspect a ship. But then a few pages later, the proposal assures us the independent status of the Coast Guard will remain untouched. Its relationship to the bureaucracy isn't changing, it just has a new port to call home.

This has got to stop. If the department is to react to an evolving threat the president must force the bureaucracy to work as a cohesive unit. Walls between agencies need to come down. Managers in Border Patrol, for example, should train with the Coast Guard and be rotated with agents in Customs and Immigration. The FBI should be encouraged to pull more agents from its sister law-enforcement agencies. So should the CIA. These agencies will act more as one when the agents running them have close personal connections to people outside their agency. And managers who are rotated between agencies are more likely to cooperate with an agency they may soon be working for.

We also need someone running the department who feels free to get mad, yell politically incorrect things at the maddening bureaucracy and maybe even break a window--as Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld reportedly did after hearing the lawyers stopped a predator from blasting top Talib Mullah Omar.

The president's plan does call for giving the new secretary somewhat of a free hand in hiring, compensating and holding nonperformers "accountable." What the bureaucracy really needs, though, is a good round of firings. No one likes getting the boot--or giving it--but in the private sector it often turns out to be the creative destruction needed to refocus the workforce and even boost morale, assuming it's done right and the obstructionists get a good hard kick out the door. But giving the homeland security secretary that power would mean undoing the civil service protections afforded federal workers--and that's too high a price for the bureaucracy to pay for our safety.

We saw that with airport security agents, who were federalized and quickly became a national joke. Although, it's not really funny: unplugged medal detectors, screeners asleep at their post and a war hero stopped and hassled for trying to carry his Congressional Medal of Honor onto a plane.

We have a war to win. Federal hiring and firing practices should go out the window. No diversity goals for the new department. No civil service protection. Workers should unionize if they want to, but have only one union to join. We can't waste time with interunion squabbling when madman are boarding planes and crashing them into our buildings--that's a peacetime luxury. The department should be able to hire the contractors it needs, not the ones federal regulations force upon it. Make it the charter school of federal departments.

Mr. Bush also needs to fight for freedom from Congress's normal appropriation rules. Congress should approve a budget for the whole department, not individual agencies within it. This would allow the secretary to marshal resources to deal with emerging threats. The department should also be authorized to keep any money it saves. If it doesn't have to give the money back to Treasury, homeland bureaucrats might thinks of ways to better spend their appropriations.

Some of these things would make the agencies bend to the secretary's will. That's good. We need strong incentives to change the culture of these agencies, something not likely to happen otherwise because the agencies are being moved in largely intact. Some thought, therefore, should be put into who the new secretary is. Tom Ridge is the most likely candidate. But we really need someone like Rudy Giuliani, who's already done the impossible and beaten crime in New York City.

The public now has the opportunity to get in on this fight. But many Americans aren't interested. On Thursday I stopped in a convenience store and the clerk--hearing I was a journalist--asked what the president had to say. He admitted he made it through only a few minutes of the speech before boredom got the best of him.

I explained that we're getting a new Department of Homeland Security.

"Anything interesting?" a customer asked.

"Yeah, a new federal department is pretty interesting."

"No," he replied. " 'We're bombing now': That's interesting."

He's right. But we all have an interest in ending Norman Mineta's grandma searches. Those aren't making the skies any friendlier.