Please find below an example of UPI's continuing coverage of Homeland Security and related issues. A much shorter version appeared on A6 of the Washington Times Monday. I hope you find the full-length version interesting. You may link to it on the web here:
http://www.upi.com/view.cfm?StoryID=20050130-055741-1490r If you have any comments or questions about this piece, need any more information about UPI products and services, or want to stop receiving these alerts, please get in touch. Thank you, Shaun Waterman UPI Homeland and National Security Editor E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Tel: 202 898 8081 Analysis: Chertoff faces uphill battle with DHS bureaucracy By Shaun Waterman UPI Homeland and National Security Editor WASHINGTON, Jan. 31 (UPI) -- If Michael Chertoff is confirmed by the Senate as Homeland Security secretary, he will take the reigns of a department beset by a dismal catalogue of management problems, policy challenges and structural failings, experts and lawmakers said -- and at a time when the extraordinary growth of its budget looks set to end. If that were not enough, several powerful senators with oversight of the department are weighing a major re-organization, less than two years after it became the newest -- and third largest -- Cabinet-level agency. Supporters say Chertoff, who has a reputation as a hands-on detail-oriented prosecutor with a razor sharp legal intellect, is up to the challenge. "I have worked with many fine and talented lawyers," Matthew Martens told United Press International, "none of them even came close to him." Martens was a clerk to U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice William Rehnquist in 1997-98, and worked for Chertoff in the private sector at the end of the 1990s. He followed Chertoff to the Justice Department to be his chief of staff, and has been tipped by the National Journal as someone who might be recruited to the new Homeland Security secretary's staff. Martens told UPI that one of Chertoff's key strengths was "his ability to take a mass of complex information and immediately cut through to the key issues." He will need it. A consistent complaint from senior officials at the department has been that they report to too many congressional masters. The Sept. 11 commission recommended that congressional oversight of the department be vested in a single committee in each hours of Congress. After a bruising session on the Senate floor last year, the newly named Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee won oversight over the organization of the department -- though only some of its activities. Nonetheless, it is the committee that will preside over Chertoff's confirmation hearing Wednesday. But the committee's chairwoman, Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, chose to kick off the 109th Congress with a hearing last week that focused on the department's management problems, foreshadowing some of the issues that Chertoff will doubtless be asked about at his confirmation hearing this week. A panel of experts, including think tank fellows and the department's acting inspector general, told the committee that, while Homeland Security had made the nation safer, it had a long, hard way to go and that internal weaknesses and flaws necessitated much of the heavy lifting. The problems in management are critical, argued the conservative Heritage Foundation's James Carafano, "Because they cut against the core rationale (for the department) -- gaining the synergy of (merging) the key federal agencies with homeland security responsibilities." Collins said she was considering a major overhaul of the department's structure, including a new office of strategic policy and planning and merging two of its largest law enforcement components -- Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which work the country's interior, and its border counterparts, Customs and Border Protection. The Homeland Security Act, which established the department's current structure, "was not the last word" on how it should be organized, she said. An administration official predicted to United Press International that Chertoff would try to finesse some of these organizational questions, if they came up at the hearing. "There'll be a lot of 'I'll have to look into that and get back to you.'" But Chertoff may not find that such an easy furrow to plough. When his nomination was first announced, the mostly positive reaction from both sides of the aisle was clouded only by some questions about whether his experience as a manager was sufficient to the task of running a huge sprawling entity like the Department of Homeland Security. His supporters say the challenges he faced running the criminal division of the Justice Department after the Sept. 11 attacks were as good a preparation as anyone could have for such a unique job. "That was a very pressured environment," said David Israelite, the deputy chief of staff at the Justice Department, who worked closely with Chertoff during that period. "He demonstrated a great ability to build consensus and show leadership at a time when a lesser manager might have had serious problems." One administration loyalist on last week's panel, former White House homeland security adviser Richard Falkenrath, now based at the centrist Brookings Institution, was aghast at suggestion that the committee should embark on another legislative overhaul, so soon after the department had been set up. "This is exactly the wrong time for a statutorily driven re-organization," he said, arguing that the new secretary needed time to find his feet, and that "re-organization always imposes a near-term penalty on performance." If lawmakers wanted to assist the new secretary, said Falkenrath, they should give him more authority to reorganize the department himself. Besides, Falkenrath said, the problems at the department were not "significantly worse than ... at any other major federal department or agency -- none of whom had had to cope with the unique challenges" Homeland Security had. Nonetheless, two days later, outgoing Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge, whose last day at work is Monday, told journalists in a conference call that he agreed with some of the proposals for "internal changes that will make us more effective," including the establishment of an office charged with doing the department's strategic planning and policy development. His comments were the latest on a series of occasions when Ridge has departed from the etiquette traditionally observed by outgoing Cabinet officials when asked to offer counsel or reflection to their successors. In mid-January, shortly after Chertoff's nomination was announced, Ridge told an audience at the Center for Strategic and International Studies that his successor should argue for U.S. passports to include records of all 10 of the bearer's fingerprints, to show leadership to the rest of the international community on the issue. "It's a lot easier to negotiate with your allies if you've already done what you're asking them to do," he said. Internally, the fingerprint question is also the subject of a stalled inter-agency policy debate in relation to the department's greatest success story to date -- the US-VISIT system for biometrically verifying the identity of foreign visitors. The system currently uses two fingerprints, but this has caused compatibility problems with the FBI's 1970s-era fingerprint database, which requires 10 prints to tell whether an individual is on its wanted list. But because of the size of the readers required to take 10 fingerprints, and because of the cultural associations of the 10-print process with criminality, it has proved hard to convince the State Department that the move is practical at this stage. At the same CSIS seminar, Ridge referred to organizational changes he planned to "recommend" to the incoming secretary, "but I'd rather reserve the specifics until I can have that conversation with a very, very accomplished lawyer who enjoys a terrific reputation for strong intellect," Ridge said. Department officials, who asked not to be named because details of the rollout were still being finalized, said the changes would be announced within a week or so -- while Chertoff will be almost certainly be still awaiting confirmation -- presenting the incoming secretary with a fait accomplis. One GOP observer accused Ridge of "softening the ground," for the incoming secretary by implementing a number of last-minute fixes and leaving key issues like the fingerprint question open. Chertoff's supporters see him in his element on such issues -- where competing equities have to be balanced and policy has to be hammered out in great detail. "That was exactly the skill set that made him such a successful prosecutor," said Israelite, "He was very hands on. He always had a detailed familiarity with the ins and outs of the issues being handled by his staff." "He's not an ideologue," said a former colleague who asked not to be named, "He's a very pragmatic, very practical guy... He has no agenda except getting the job done." Although the secretary has some limited authority to reprogram funds and re-organize the department, any larger changes would require congressional approval. A possible legislative vehicle for such changes is the 2006 Homeland Security budget proposal, which will be rolled out Feb. 6, again before Chertoff is likely to be in office. But whatever the administration proposes, it is Congress that ultimately decides what gets spent, and one of the senators who holds the purse strings warned that there could be no more growth in spending, presaging a no-raise budget for the department next year. "(The Department of) Homeland Security's had as much money as we can possibly afford since Sept. 11," Sen. Ted Stevens, R-Alaska, said. Stevens, noting that funds appropriated for the department had risen every year since it was established, said the current budget round would be a different story. "I don't think there's going to be more money," said Stevens. "In fact, I know there's not going to be more money." As the immediate past chairman of and still second-most senior Republican on the powerful Senate Appropriations Committee, Stevens is in a good position to make definitive statements about the department's spending, but his comments were also a caution to the panel of experts -- and some senators -- who had accused the Bush administration of failing to adequately fund security measures, especially at the nation's seaports, and on its railways. "We have not made the necessary investments," said Sen. 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