Those experts called for the creation of a new agency with ample resources to prevent attacks, protect the nation’s borders and coordinate the emergency response after incidents occur.
Critics feared that Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Ridge, whom Bush put in charge of homeland security, would meet a fate similar to that of those chosen in earlier eras to manage the energy crisis and the drug war–namely, ineffectiveness.
Because those White House officials had little control over the budgets and actions of federal agencies that actually did the work, they were widely viewed as failures, eventually leading in one case to the creation of the Energy Department.
Gary Hart, the former Democratic senator from Colorado who headed a bipartisan commission on national security, told the Senate Government Affairs Committee on Friday that the new Cabinet officer should oversee an independent agency with money allocated by Congress.
A separate agency that combined the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the Coast Guard, Customs Service and Border Patrol would ensure accountability to the president and the American people, he said.
The president’s less ambitious initiative “will merely perpetuate bureaucratic confusion and diffusion of responsibility,” Hart said. “No homeland czar can possibly hope to coordinate the almost hopeless dispersal of authority that currently characterizes the 40 or 50 agencies or elements of agencies with some piece of responsibility for protecting our homeland,” not to mention the private sector.
Warren Rudman, the former New Hampshire Republican senator who served as Hart’s co-chair, said the president’s move was little more than a good start.
“For an enduring solution to what we feel certain will be a long-term problem, we believe the president must move beyond this White House office,” Rudman said. “Without budget authority, command authority, accountability and responsibility to the Congress and to the president, nothing in this government ever works very well.”
Though details from the White House weren’t available Friday, presidential spokesman Ari Fleischer said the president created the White House Office of Homeland Security by executive order.
But Hart, Rudman and others said they would have preferred to see the new office created by legislation. That would give Congress oversight authority as well as sponsors who could ensure the new director got needed resources.
The Hart-Rudman Commission was only one of several blue-ribbon panels that in recent years have warned that the U.S. was largely unprepared for terrorist attacks on American soil.
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All the studies agreed the nation has long lacked a coordinated, coherent approach to deterring, defending against or dealing with the results of terrorist strikes on civilian targets.
But little action was taken by either the current or previous administrations or Congress, as Sen. Fred Thompson (R-Tenn.), the Government Affairs committee’s highest-ranking Republican member, noted.
“We’ve been very slow out of the blocks here with regard to something that you have told us . . . should be the nation’s No. 1 priority,” Thompson said. “You’ve been voices in the wilderness, for the most part.”
While the Hart-Rudman panel recommended creating a new agency, a commission headed by Virginia Gov. Jim Gilmore suggested the approach Bush ultimately took.
“Our belief has been that the answer here was not in bureaucracy but a vehicle for management,” Gilmore said. “The ultimate answer is the coordination, budget authority, planning of a national strategy from a national terrorism office that I believe that the president has now established.”