Homeland Improvement

The Bush administration is toasting the overwhelming passage of what the president himself has called the "historic and bold" Homeland Security Act. The law brings about 170,000 federal employees in almost two dozen agencies (including the Coast Guard, Border Patrol, and the Immigration and Naturalization Service but not the FBI or CIA) under the supervision of a new cabinet department.

"This is the best conceivable reorganization of people and assets to protect America," Tom Ridge, President Bush's adviser on homeland security and the leading candidate to run the new agency, told the press. It's "the most extensive reorganization of the federal government since the 1940s," Bush said, adding the department "will help our nation meet the emerging threats of terrorism in the 21st century."

In its final iteration, Senate Republicans were forced to strip out several provisions, including one that would have retroactively exempted pharmaceutical companies from lawsuits related to vaccines and another that would have prohibited the Homeland Security department from doing business with firms that leave the U.S. for tax purposes. The final version also dropped the creation of a university-based "homeland security research center" at Texas A&M, widely criticized as a final pork project for retiring Sen. Phil Gramm (R-Texas), a former faculty member at the school. In a process that underscores how compromise works in the federal government, the location of the center will now be decided by open competition.

Given such a dynamic, it's not surprising that the bill ballooned from an original 35 pages to 484 pages, almost one for every member of Congress. Sen. Joseph Lieberman (D-Conn.), widely credited with creating the idea of a new agency, feared "some of my colleagues have seized upon the likely passage of this bill as an opportunity to load it up with unwise, inappropriate and hastily considered provisions, many of which protect special interests." Still, Lieberman praised the legislation, announcing, "This is an historic day in this new age of insecurity that we entered September 11th."

Whether the department will actually increase national security remains to be seen. Conservative estimates say it will take at least a year before the reorganization is fully realized. And even then, it's far from clear exactly how adding a new level of federal bureaucracy to existing operations will work. More important, since the FBI and the CIA—the two agencies most important to fighting terrorism—are not part of the new department, the new department may have little impact where it is needed most. Indeed, the FBI's and CIA's reflexive resistance to change and longtime rivalry are likely to remain more significant security issues than how quickly the new department cranks out its official letterhead.