Bush releases homeland security strategy

President Bush officially unveiled the nation's first strategy for homeland security on Tuesday in a document that broadly outlines how government and the private sector should counter the threat of terrorist attacks. "This comprehensive plan lays out clear lines of authority and clear responsibilities; responsibilities for federal employees and for governors and mayors and community and business leaders and the American citizens," Bush said at a White House ceremony. The much-anticipated document comes almost five weeks after Bush proposed a new Cabinet-level department to lead the government's homeland security effort. Critics in Congress and academia have questioned why the reorganization proposal preceded the strategy. The 88-page plan seeks to organize the government's far-flung security activities around a few strategic goals and spells out what agencies must do to protect the country in the future. It provides the first federal definition of "homeland security" and outlines current and future efforts in six mission areas: intelligence and warning, border and transportation security, domestic counterterrorism, critical infrastructure protection, defending against catastrophic terrorism and emergency preparedness and response. On a practical level, the strategy commits the government to developing vaccines and new chemical and biological sensors, and creating an overarching information architecture that will enable federal, state and local agencies to share data. The plan supports modernizing the Coast Guard and reorganizing the FBI to fight terrorism. The proposal also envisions a series of research labs to develop homeland security technologies. Many of these activities would be run or coordinated through the proposed Department of Homeland Security, although the plan outlines the security duties of other federal agencies as well. For example, the Interior Department would retain responsibility for protecting national monuments, while the White House Office of Homeland Security would continue to certify agency budgets for homeland security. The Critical Infrastructure Assurance Office, which would be moved to the new department under the president's proposal, would develop a national infrastructure protection plan and coordinate vulnerability assessments of key infrastructure owned by the private sector. The office is now in the Commerce Department. The plan offers less detail about the responsibilities of state and local governments. "It calls on states to develop their own action plans and support first responders, but exactly how this happens is not clear," said Donald Kettl, a professor of public administration at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. "For instance, what should the city of Madison do to prepare, and how are we going to ensure the city does all it needs to?" Other initiatives involving state and local governments are not fully defined. The document urges state and local agencies to use a secure intranet to share federal information, but the strategy does not say who will develop or fund it. The plan also includes no strategic measures that would show the quality of homeland security being provided by the government. Such targets are common in agency performance plans required under the 1993 Government Performance and Results Act, but defining measures for homeland security--essentially, defining what is an acceptable level of homeland security--is extraordinarily difficult, according to Kettl. "It's hard for the administration to say we're going to hold all federal agencies to a series of performance targets and then put out something that doesn't hold the administration's single most important initiative to the same standards," he said. "But this is one of the hardest, most politically difficult issues to define targets for." One of the most far-reaching sections of the strategy involves information technology, where the administration wants to link the databases of dozens of agencies that collect terrorist and intelligence data. The plan would achieve this through a "system of systems" that would share information among different levels of government and industry.