Study: Bureaucratic obstacles may hobble Homeland Department

As Bush administration officials merge more than 22 federal agencies into the Homeland Security Department, complex bureaucratic and organizational challenges could distract them from meeting more urgent counter-terrorism requirements, according to a Brookings Institution report released Thursday.

"The terrorists are not going to wait for us to organize," Ivo Daalder, a Brookings senior fellow in foreign policy studies, said during a briefing on the report. "They're going to strike when they're going to strike, and the challenge ... is to make sure that as we reorganize, we also continue to keep our eye on what is truly important to protect [Americans] against terrorist attacks."

One important requirement is to enhance and integrate many federal, state and local information systems, according to Michael O'Hanlon, a senior fellow in foreign policy studies who co-authored the report with Daalder and five other Brookings scholars.

"We need to use information technology much more assertively," O'Hanlon said. "The federal government ... is not spending much money trying to network different agencies together, trying to share information with local law enforcement, trying to get hardware and software compatible."

O'Hanlon noted that the Bush administration has made progress in integrating various federal watch lists of suspected terrorists. But he said "connecting the dots" to effectively combat terrorism requires many other complex tasks.

"To look for patterns of illicit activity, to try to anticipate what terrorists might do in the future ... requires a lot more data processing and a lot more data sharing," O'Hanlon said. "The infrastructure is not available to do that, and the administration appears to be in no hurry to construct it."

Constructing that infrastructure requires policymakers to "accept the principle that information is going to be shared" between federal entities-such as law enforcement and intelligence agencies-that have a long history of, and cultural resistance to, that type of communication, according to James Steinberg, vice president and director of foreign policy studies.

"I think it's a mindset issue," Steinberg said, adding that many federal agencies will have to re-think their classification systems in order to share crucial counterterrorism data with state and local agencies, the private sector, and foreign allies. "It's largely a bureaucratic and organizational problem, and not a technology problem."

Homeland security officials also should establish an independent, domestic counter-terrorism agency to collect and analyze information on potential threats, according to the Brookings report.

And it recommended that the Homeland Security Department focus its initial organizational efforts on border and transportation security, protecting critical infrastructures, and improving communications among federal, state and local agencies and the private sector.

The federal government also should spend about $45 billion on homeland security efforts in fiscal 2003, which is about $7 billion more than the Bush administration's request, the report said.

"Senate Republicans this month are ... being unwisely frugal, or flat-out unwise, in their efforts to penny-pinch on some of these homeland security efforts," O'Hanlon said. "We need more resources for agencies that are overburdened now, like the Coast Guard and Customs [Service]."