Brian Balogh, Ph. D.
Co-director, American Political Development Program
Associate Professor of History
University of Virginia
"Organizing Homeland Security: A Historical Perspective"
September 25, 2002

Brian Balogh: In 1937, during America's deepest and prolonged economic crisis, and in the midst of disturbing trends toward dictatorship abroad, a team of America's leading social scientists and public officials issued a report entitled, "Administrative Management in the Government of the United States." The Brownlow Committee Report, named for the committee's chair, Lewis Brownlow, began by considering the purposes of executive reorganization. The goals of reorganization drew upon cherished values with deep roots in American history, economy, efficiency, the application of better business methods and fiscal controls. In the end, however, the committee concluded that there was but one grand purpose animating reform, "to make democracy work today in our national government."

Making democracy work has indeed been the overarching goal of efforts to adapt the nation's administrative capacity to changing political, social and technological developments ever since the first congressional forayed into reorganization. Today I would like to consider the recently passed legislation to create a Homeland Security Department in the context of other major executive reorganizations over the past hundred years. As you know, by any standards, this reorganization is a large one. It will consolidate almost 170,000 employees who currently work in 22 federal agencies. It will be the third largest employer within the federal government behind Defense and Veterans' Affairs. Although the final budget has not yet been settled, it will likely be over thirty five billion dollars a year. The key mission of the new department entail coordinating intelligence and warning about terrorist attacks through a new information and analysis unit, protecting border and transportation security, protecting critical infrastructure in key assets from terrorist attack, defending against catastrophic threats from chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear weapons, and emergency preparedness and response.

Major reorganizations have been achieved through three distinct mechanisms over the past century. The most straightforward and the most common mechanism is enabling legislation. This is the course that both the Chair of the Senate Committee on Government Operations, Senator Joseph Liebermann, and President Bush chose when they introduced legislation that would create a cabinet level department responsible for homeland security. This produced a bill that President Bush will sign into law today.

Enabling legislation has been the mechanism of choice when creating most new departments in the 20^th Century, or when reforming personnel and purchasing procedures. Granting broad emergency powers to the President is the mechanism that has been used the least. During World War I, World War II and the Korean War, Congress passed legislation that gave presidents broad discretion in reorganizing the executive branch of government. Only once did peacetime legislation delegate the president the kind of emergency discretion contained in the Overman Act and the War Powers Act of 1941. The amendments to the Economy Act of 1932, which were passed in March of 1933, proclaimed that, "serious emergency exists by reason of general economic depression." To free the president's hand for action to remedy the situation, the amendments granted the president permission to conduct broad ranging, reorganization in the executive branch, without obtaining Congressional permission.

The third mechanism for affecting broad scale executive reorganization is legislation granting presidents sweeping authority to submit plans or executive orders to Congress in order to reorganize the executive branch, but subjecting such plans to congressional scrutiny through legislative veto.

Although he is often associated with conservative opposition to the expansion of the federal government, it was Herbert Hoover, of all people, who advocated for and eventually obtained the crucial device that made such broad grants of discretion possible during peace time. Hoover was the first president to receive Congressional permission to reorganize, subject to Congressional veto. This power was embodied in the Economy Act of 1932. It was Hoover, again, now in the role of private citizen, who helped institutionalize this device when he chaired the first Hoover Commission after World War II.

Presidents submitted over one hundred reorganization plans to Congress between 1949 to 1980. The vast majority were implemented. The scope of the reform contained in these plans ranged from house keeping matters to innovations of seminal importance.

President Jimmy Carter's reorganization plan number one of 1979 is a good example of the housekeeping. It set up a federal inspector for the Alaska Pipeline--not really a monumental change in the structure of the federal government. On the other hand, the Department of Health, Education and Welfare was created in 1953 via reorganization plan. President John F. Kennedy proposed the creation of a new department of Urban Affairs and Housing via reorganization plan, a proposal that was vetoed by Congress. President Richard Nixon used his reorganization authority to propose major changes in the executive office of the president when he transformed the Bureau of the Budget into the Office of Management and Budget and formed the Environmental Protection Agency. But by the early 1980's, Congressional concerns about an imperial presidency and the Supreme Court's ruling that the Congressional veto was unconstitutional crippled the use of broad legislative grants of discretionary authority to the president for the purpose of reorganization.

During the 20^th Century, the initiative for executive reorganization shifted from Congress to the president. The objectives of reform evolved as well. Early reforms were directed primarily at reducing the costs of government through elimination of duplication and waste. For the middle third of the century executive reorganization expanded broadly, the definition of efficiency. Focusing on effective management and granting the president greater political control in order to achieve increasingly ambitious public policy objectives. The New Deal's ideals could not be achieved if its programs were not efficiently managed and coordinated by a president who had the staff and skills at his disposal and a management hierarchy in place to make good on its policy promises.

The United States would not be secure in its twilight battle with the Soviet Union if the president could not count on well coordinated and unified national security establishment to carry out his defense policies. The great society would be mediocre, at best, without effective management of its wide ranging programs.

Advocates of this approach, which centralized executive office of the president, also argued that these innovations would strengthen democracy since Congress was incapable of coordinating policy effectively. Americans could hold the only office that they all voted for--the presidency--accountable for delivering upon political and public policy promises.

In the aftermath of Vietnam and Watergate, however, the thrust of executive reorganization shifted once again. To be sure, there was a return to calls for economy and savings, given the huge budget deficits that had begun to mount. This earliest objective of reorganization--that of cost savings--had never been entirely forsaken as the second Hoover Commission demonstrates and Ronald Reagan's Grace Commission confirmed.

But there was a new element in many of these reorganizations as well--a call for "compassion" in government, as Jimmy Carter put it, or "customer satisfaction," to use the market oriented language of reform that pervaded Bill Clinton and Al Gore's efforts to reinvent government.

Having centralized authority, many Americans were now concerned with making it responsive to individual needs. Although Carter and Clinton never used the language of George Wallace, who made a political career out of threatening pointy-headed bureaucrats, they both responded to a shift in public attitudes, business practice, and public administration theory, that favored decentralization and empowerment of both clients and middle-level decision makers. As David Osborne and Ted Gabler, authors of Reinventing Government put it, "in today's world things simply work better if those working in public organizations--schools, public housing developments, parks, training programs--have the authority to make many of their own decisions."

Any summary of the history of executive reorganizations must conclude that large scale reorganizations are not easy to enact. If they are needed, ever so often, to make democracy work, the past record of legislative failure underscores just how delicate a mechanism democracy really is.

Executive reorganization in 20^th Century America has entailed an uncomfortable mixture of public administration ideals, policy preferences and brass knuckles politics, particularly when powerful interest groups, Congressional oversight committees or agency turf have been threatened by the reform.

Despite the heightened sense of crisis created by the terrorist attack of 9/11, proposals to reorganize the executive branch of the federal government, to create a department of Homeland Security, were not immune to the cross-cutting pressures that have framed most debates about reorganization over the course of the last century.

Even partisan ties did not protect the plans from the centrifugal forces that reorganization proposals often run into, as George Bush discovered when the House of Representatives distributed his Homeland Security proposal to a host of committees in mid-July. Although the votes were non-binding, they signal potential rough sailing for Bush's vision. The House Judiciary Committee voted to make a number of changes in the president's plan, rebuffing his proposal to transfer the Federal Emergency Management Agency to the new department, for instance.

The Armed Services Committee, on the same day, rejected the transfer of Lawrence Livermore, National Laboratories intelligence analyst, to the new department. As the Chair of House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee Don Young put it, "we are not happy, and if they go to far they are going to have a revolution on their hands." These are republicans talking to the republican president in a time of ostensible crisis.

Young tried to block transfer of another proposed piece of the Homeland Security puzzle--the Coastguard. The battles that were fought this summer, sometimes within partisan ranks, are characteristic of the role that Congressional turf and its connection to special interests, play in executive reform. To Young, for instance, protecting the Coastguard's responsibilities to his Alaskan constituents maritime needs trumped more distant concerns about terrorist attacks.

The Brownlow Committee's proposal ran into the same kind of opposition from partisan allies of Roosevelt in his own cabinet. Arrayed functionally across the public policy landscape, interest groups offered powerful resistance to Roosevelt's plan, fearing that hard fought access, clout or merely routine familiarity might be lost if the administrative deck was reshuffled. Many of the very interest groups that had benefited from the New Deal, and that could usually be counted upon for support, feared that reorganization would harm the benefits they enjoyed under the current system. Groups were sympathetic to the issue of reorganization, but were only willing to support reform if they were exempted, themselves, from the change.

Groups that did not oppose reform generally remained neutral on the matter. Bureaucrats and members of congressional committees also sought exemption for their turf as they feared the loss of political clout. All three players in the relationship that political scientists call "iron triangles," feared the loss of the networks and relationships they had built up under existing executive mechanisms.

The scope of the Brownlow Committee's reform and, perhaps even more significantly, the underlying philosophy of presidential control using policy objectives and administrative responsibility prompted interest groups and public patrons to circle the wagon as they squared off with the president. For example, Roosevelt's proposal to create a department of conservation met with resistance from the Department of Interior and the Department of Agriculture as well as from interested parties such as forestry associations, lumber groups, grazing interests, farm groups and conservation groups.

This scene was familiar over in the Department of Labor, where Secretary Francis Perkins proved tenacious in her defense of the existing administrative arrangements. When Harold Smith, Director of the Budget Bureau, informed the secretary of plans to relocate several bureaus currently in labor, Perkins lectured Smith for an hour on the historical and philosophical conception of the Labor Department.

The secretary's position might have been influenced by her interest group patron--organized labor. The American Federation of Labor sought to protect the employment service, housed within the Department of Labor, as AFL President William Green informed Roosevelt, "We wish that we might have a larger Labor Department. We certainly protest against its curtailment and any reduction in its standing and influence."

Partisan differences, of course, also loomed large. During the New Deal Era, each party sought to connect executive reform with the most potent symbols available. For FDR and his democratic supporters, the Brownlow Committee's reforms represented a chance for the federal government to make good on its promises. It sought to empower the president to deliver those social goods that the New Deal Legislative Coalition worked hard to secure.

Republicans turned the symbolism around, stressing that the executive reforms were a power-grab that mirrored Roosevelt's court-packing scheme. Together, these New Deal experiments would destroy the traditional balance the three branches of government enjoyed and pave the way for an autocratic executive, the republicans argued. This struggle for partisan advantage almost derailed the Homeland Security executive reorganization as well.

There was relatively little dispute over the basic structure of the new agency. Democratic Senator Joseph Lieberman introduced legislation first. The President weighed in with his own bill in the house that did not look all that different. But, differences soon emerged over the details. These details, in turn, resonated symbolically with millions of voters.

The republican draft, citing the need for managerial flexibility in an uncertain and rapidly changing security environment, sought to wave a number of civil service rules in the new agency that would grant managers far more flexibility to hire, fire, promote and sanction employees. For Republican Senator Phil Graham, workers protecting the nation in the new Department of Homeland Security should be no different than the marines. "They should be sent where they are needed and go where they are told to go," as Graham put it. Graham contrasted this flexibility with the existing rules for border patrol agents, who are subject to an elaborate transfer process, or civil service workers who are difficult to fire or demote.

To Senator Lieberman, these changes were a minor matter that the administration should address once the crucial legislation was passed. As Lieberman put it in August, as the legislation bogged down in partisan squabbling, "I wonder whether someone in the White House may have convinced the president to make this a larger issue because of some partisan ideological agenda that has not place here."

But, two could play at this game of partisan name calling, and it appears that the republicans got the last word in as the November election loomed. Correctly perceiving that the issue exposed a core democratic constituency--public sector unions--that did not necessarily appeal to all democrats, not to mention independents and the electorate at large, republicans charged that it was democrats who were playing fast and loose with the nation's Homeland Security, in order to please a special interest--those public service unions. As Homeland Security Director Tom Ridge put it, "at this challenging time, we believe that it is not logical, especially in this time of war, for the president to have this critical national security authority for each of the fourteen existing cabinet departments, but to have that authority effectively stripped from him when it comes to the department created for the very purpose of protecting the homeland."

The republicans got the better of this argument politically for the same reason that sweeping homeland security legislation will be signed into law today. In a word, that reason is crisis. There is a stark contrast between executive reorganizations initiated in response to crisis and those initiated during periods of relative tranquility. Crisis reorganizations have a much better chance of passing, and this, more than any other factor, explains why President Bush has a Homeland Security Bill to sign today.

When it comes to major executive reorganization, effectiveness ultimately turns on implementation. In the case of homeland security, four challenges lie ahead.

First, the ability of Congress to reorganize itself in order to effectively oversee the new department. We have reorganized the executive branch. We now have to see whether Congress can reorganize itself. Second, continuing administrative discretion within the new department. Third, the resources to accomplish the mission that Homeland Security is tasked with. And fourth, the challenge of intergovernmental relations.

Congress will have the final say on all of these crucial tests, and in the final analysis, Congressional response is likely to turn on the perceived severity of the ongoing threat from terrorism. In other words, a sense of crisis explains how such a massive reorganization was accomplished in such a short time. The degree to which the legislation achieves its ends will turn on whether that sense of crisis persists.

Let me conclude by saying a brief word on each of the four challenges faced in implementing the new department. Congressional reorganization first. According to the Bush Administration, 13 full committees in each house and 88 committees and subcommittees overall share responsibility for homeland security. Consolidating executive responsibility will accomplish little if Congress fails to coordinate its oversight of the Homeland Security mission. Adapting the committee structure in Congress to reflect executive branch reorganization is crucial to the success of executive reform.

The historical record is filled with examples of executive reorganization that is enacted, legislatively, but that fails to gain traction because Congressional oversight and appropriations responsibility is left unchanged. FEMA is a good example. Now held up as a model agency, it is easy to forget that, in its early years, FEMA did not just respond to disaster--it was a disaster. One of the principal reasons for this is that FEMA originally reported to 20 different committees in Congress. It was only after FEMA was reorganized, itself, and the Congressional oversight responsibility for FEMA was organized that FEMA began to function more effectively.

Because the agencies that will comprise the new Department of Homeland Security currently report to dozens of committees and subcommittees, Congress faces a significant challenge of its own if it is to avoid pulling the new department in competing directions.

The second challenge--administrative discretion. The scope and nature of the terrorist threat is likely to evolve dramatically over the next decade. We can anticipate that the terrorists will adapt their strategies as they seek to defeat our response to it. For this reason, it is essential that the new department be given ample administrative discretion to evolve as well. This is particularly important because the department is expected to play a crucial preemptive role, detecting and anticipating attacks.

Granting administrative discretion, however, erodes legislative control and, as we have seen in the case of civil service work rules, is highly contested. The dust-up over work rules is small potatoes compared to some of the huge constitutional issues concerning the trade-off between security and civil liberties that are likely to be broached by the new department

Third challenge--resources. Many of the battles fought over consolidating the National Defense Establishment, from the late 1940's up until today, have turned on how many resources have been allocated to this function. Some of the new Department of Homeland Security's most ambitious programs have already been delayed as a result of the budget deadlock in Washington today. The budget deadlock has frozen initiatives ranging from increased federal aid to first responders, to programs to inspect cargo containers overseas.

Fourth--intergovernmental relations. As the example of federal aid to first responders suggests, intergovernmental relations will be crucial to the success of the new department. In fact, no executive reorganization has ever carried greater implications for relations between the federal government and state and local governments. This presents a major challenge because executive reorganization generally disrupts relationships with state and local governments during the implementation phase. One promising sign is that FEMA was included in the new department. It is well positioned to create a foundation for long-term connection of National Homeland Security objectives with state and local jurisdictions, building on FEMA's now well established network.

As in the case with the balance between executive and congressional power and the constitutional trade off between security and civil liberties, however, the degree to which the federal government dictates to the states will surely be a source of tension.

With the longstanding pattern of crisis and non-crisis reorganizations in mind, and with the battle for enabling legislation behind us, the president and congress have the opportunity to break the historical mold, by forging a compromise on their institutional prerogatives. It will take courage and the shared conviction that the threat this nation faces is real and is likely to grow. And it will take political leadership.

The potential is there, however, for a compromise that does grant the department an extraordinary degree of flexibility in return for guarantees that privileges will be exercised on a temporary basis and only for the duration of the crisis. The crisis may well last longer than any the nation has ever faced. Nonetheless, acknowledging that it is a crisis and that the executive branch does require greater flexibility during times of crisis, may well stave off the need for the president to ask for those emergency powers, which would most likely be granted and, undoubtedly, would hand the president far more sweeping authority than even the most capacious interpretations of those implied in the current Department of Homeland Security legislation.

Failure to reach such an agreement presents a conundrum that will most likely be resolved by the "bad guys," as President Bush likes to call them. The more time that passes without terrorist incident, the stronger the pressure to treat this reorganization like the dozens of others that have inched their way towards completion over decades. Yet, if the threat is credible and if it is likely to increase over time, as many believe, squandering any time or assets in the race to detect, prevent and respond to terrorist attack may prove costly, indeed.

Can our political leaders muster the courage to work cooperatively in the gray areas between crisis and business as usual? Or, must we once again leave it to our enemies to define the severity of the threat?