The Department of Homeland Security, created to better safeguard the nation from terrorist strikes after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, has garnered mixed reviews, many negative and some positive, on accomplishing that goal.
In existence for a mere six months, the new department has been dogged by charges of penny-pinching, failing to consolidate terrorist watch lists, and unstable leadership.
But it has also received praise for meeting difficult, congressionally-mandated deadlines, restructuring immigration agencies, and aggressively working to improve security at the nation's ports.
"We are more secure and better prepared than we were two years ago," Secretary of Homeland Security Tom Ridge said last week.
"Each and every day, we rise to a new level of readiness and response," he said.
Some experts, however, say that many of the department's efforts are cosmetic, as exemplified by the five-color terror alert system started last year to help guide government response to terrorist threats.
"For the most part, it's pretty meaningless to average Americans," said Charles Pena, director of defense policy studies at the Cato Institute, a conservative think tank in Washington.
Sometimes, the department sends out warnings about different threats, and the level doesn't move. Other times, it warns people about an imminent threat and tells them to go on with their lives and do nothing, he said.
"It smacks of the government just covering itself to make sure it doesn't get caught with its pants down like it did on 9-11," he said.
Alarming alerts
The alert system was criticized from the beginning for being too vague and geographically broad to be of much help to law enforcement or the public. But comedians and political cartoonists had a true field day earlier this year, after an orange "high" alert was accompanied by a government advisory that families buy duct tape and plastic sheeting to ward off a chemical attack.
One man in Connecticut covered his entire house with plastic. Hundreds of others emptied shelves at supermarkets and home delivery stores, stocking up on emergency supplies such as batteries and water.
"It was one of the worst things they could have done in terms of telling people how to prepare," Pena said.
Orange alerts have also been costly for cities and states, who complained for months that they were not getting promised federal money to pay for the increased security. Some towns pulled officers from jails to guard ports and other key infrastructure.
Ridge, who now makes light of the duct tape fiasco but never backed down from the recommendation, has acknowledged that the alert system may need a change, and said recently that future alarms might be narrowed to a specific city, state or region.
Uproar over the costs has eased somewhat as many cities and states have finally received millions in homeland-security grants previously stuck in bureaucratic pipelines.
But the distribution of homeland-security money is still a source of controversy as some states, such as Montana have received more per capita than others with more likely targets.
"Clearly that's a problem," said Phil Anderson, a senior associate for homeland security at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a think tank in Washington.
"If you don't have a platform for risk management, you can't allocate resources effectively," he said.
The department has also been criticized for:
-- Failing to consolidate terrorist watch lists. A July report by the General Accounting Office, the investigative arm of Congress, showed that a dozen lists existed in nine different federal agencies.
The problem could be technologically solved in less than four weeks and is symbolic of a lack of leadership in the administration, said Rob Atkinson, vice president of the Progressive Policy Institute, a think tank.
But some experts said that consolidating the lists is a monumental task that will take much longer because every agency has it's own customized watch list compatible with its own computer system.
-- Lack of intelligence sharing with local law enforcement. Police chiefs and sheriffs continue to say that they are not getting enough information from the federal government about possible terrorism threats.
-- Unstable leadership. Although Ridge has been in charge of homeland security -- as a presidential adviser and later a Cabinet secretary -- since shortly after the Sept.11 attacks, his deputy secretary Gordon England recently announced that he is leaving the post and returning to his old job as secretary of the Navy.
"It's always a bad thing when your deputy secretary leaves within four months of arriving," said Paul Light, a professor of public service at New York University.
"It sends the signal that being secretary of the Navy is more important than being deputy secretary of homeland security and that's a bad signal to send," he said.
In addition, Paul Redmond, the department's assistant secretary for information analysis resigned earlier this year citing health reasons, less than a month after he upset lawmakers at a contentious hearing saying that his office had not hired enough intelligence analysts because it had no place to put them.
Redmond also told the House Select Committee on Homeland Security that his office was not receiving certain classified intelligence from other agencies because it hadn't expanded its "computer capabilities to cope with it."
The department said Redmond's resignation was unrelated to the congressional testimony.
Light said that the high-level departures should concern the administration.
"This is a leader-driven reorganization, it has to come from the top," he said.
Twenty-two agencies were merged into the Homeland Security Department, making it the third largest.
Dodging enemy fire
Despite the leadership woes, Ridge has escaped the heavy criticism directed at others in the administration, such as Attorney General John Ashcroft, who is under constant fire for pushing enhanced law-enforcement powers in the war on terror that critics say violate civil rights.
When summoned to Capitol Hill, which is often, Ridge is treated well by lawmakers from both parties and is generally well-liked.
"I think Ridge is the right guy for the job," Anderson said. "He has a very good grasp of the problem and ... the leadership ability to do what needs to done."
The department also won praise for its efforts to improve cargo security such as equipping every cargo inspector with a hand-held radiation detector, requiring every freighter ship bound for the US to transmit a detailed list of its cargo 24 hours before setting sail, and establishing partnerships with major ports around the world to facilitate inspections of US-bound cargo.
Some experts also say the department passed an important test of its emergency response systems last month when the northeast US and parts of Canada experienced a massive blackout. Ridge used a new secure video conference link to speak with the White House and with high-level officials from various agencies and the department's war room became the central hub of information during the power outage. The department also activated numerous response teams which were ready to go into disaster areas and set up command centers to coordinate federal response.
Lawmakers also praised the Bush administration for disbanding the troubled Immigration and Naturalization Service which was merged into separate agencies under the homeland security umbrella including a new Bureau of Customs and Border Protection.
Although the INS is history, another agency is emerging as the new Congressional punching bag and the lightening rod of controversy -- the Transportaton Security Administration (TSA), responsible for safeguarding the nation's 429 commercial airports.
The first head of the TSA, John Magaw, resigned under pressure last year amid charges of poor management and lavish spending. The agency has had to fire hundreds of airport screeners because they were found to have criminal records.
In addition, the Homeland Security Department's inspector general is investigating why the TSA paid a contractor to house recruiters for airport screeners at expensive hotels with golf courses and spas.
More recently, the agency angered lawmakers in August when reports about trimming money from the federal air marshal program coincided with an alert that the al-Qaeda terrorist network may be planning more hijackings.
But some experts defend the agency, saying that the Congressionally-mandated deadline to create an entire airport security workforce within one year couldn't be met without some trouble.
"They tell TSA to hire and employ some 50,000 federal screeners by a given date, and then they get mad because they spend a fortune doing it," said Craig Bambrough, a former major general with extensive government experience who now works for AMS, a consulting firm that helps clients secure computer systems.
"Decisions have been made ... that are not necessarily the best decisions because of these timelines," he said.
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