The homeland security bureaucracy.

WHEN a nation seeking to protect itself finds diplomacy, war, and foreign intelligence gathering insufficient, it can undertake three other types of activities to defend itself. It can control the movement of potential terrorists entering the country or traveling within it; it can capture or neutralize terrorist plotters within its borders; and when all else fails, it can mitigate damage from terrorist attacks. These three activities--access control, law enforcement, and disaster mitigation--comprise the essentials of homeland security. Congress and the Bush administration have consolidated many federal efforts to accomplish these three tasks in the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). In so doing they hope to protect the nation from future terrorist attacks.

Certainly, much good work has been accomplished. But thus far, not enough thought has been given to the considerable structural impediments to serious reform. DHS's vast reach coupled with its lack of bodies on the ground, the checkered history of American bureaucratic reform, and the difficulty DHS's constituent agencies have encountered defining new missions all suggest that homeland security is at best a work in progress. DHS's various bureaus are still too limited in scope, too committed to their legacy missions, and too unlikely to change for the existence of a Department of Homeland Security to modify the way America confronts terrorists.

The directorates

DHS carries out an enormous number of duties. At the highest level of its, organizational chart, DHS consists of four collections of related programs called directorates: Border and Transportation Security (BTS); Emergency Preparedness and Response (EPR); Science and Technology (S & T); Information Analysis and Infrastructure Protection (IAIP); and Management. The Coast Guard, U.S. Citizenship Service and Immigration Service (which issues visas and grants citizenship), the Secret Service, and the new Office of State and Local Coordination (which administers grants) all report directly to the Secretary of Homeland Security. Outside of the Management Directorate, which handles payroll, computer systems, and human resources, DHS's major programs were all transferred from other agencies.

All of the directorates carry out varied missions. The Border and Transportation Security Directorate has the biggest budget and the highest public profile. It includes the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) and two border agencies created from pieces of the Border Guard, Customs Service, Agricultural Inspection Service, and Immigration and Naturalization Service. The first, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), enforces immigration law within the borders of the United States by catching people in the country illegally. Customs and Border Protection is the second; it secures the borders. More than half of all DHS employees work for the Border and Transportation Security Directorate, and over 70 percent of these work as baggage screeners. The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), which dominates the Emergency Preparedness and Response Directorate, serves four functions. It funds rebuilding after disasters, offers expert advice on preparing for disasters before they happen, gives operating and capital assistance to local emergency response agencies, and runs some secret facilities designed to help the federal government survive a catastrophic attack. Emergency Preparedness and Response also administers a vaccine stockpile program transferred from the Department of Health and Human Services and programs intended to mitigate nuclear, chemical, and biological attacks formerly belonging to the FBI and Department of Energy. The Science and Technology Directorate is DHS's smallest: It runs four major labs that mostly concern themselves with developing countermeasures for weapons of mass destruction. It also funds university research.

The Information Analysis and Infrastructure Protection Directorate, on the other hand, attempts to improve our handle on information about terrorist threats, drawing together six separate programs from agencies ranging from the FBI to the Department of Energy. It runs the much-derided color-coded warning system, and produces the daily Homeland Security briefing for the president. It creates the briefing by analyzing information from the nominally independent Terrorist Threat Integration Center (TTIC) created by the president in January 2003. This center--theoretically a joint venture between the FBI, CIA, and DHS--has a staff drawn largely from the CIA and is housed at CIA headquarters. DHS's top officials are not always privy to the sources and methods the ...