Border agencies should be merged in new security department, say scholars

The Bush administration's first step after creating a new Homeland Security Department should be to merge federal agencies responsible for border and transportation security into a single organization within the department, according to three public administration experts.

The White House supports moving the border agencies to the proposed department, but has not said which agencies could be combined after the department is created. Bush's proposal would move 22 agencies into four broad divisions in the new department: border and transportation security; emergency preparedness; information and infrastructure; and chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear countermeasures.

The Customs Service, Border Patrol, Coast Guard, Transportation Security Administration and the enforcement wing of the Immigration and Naturalization Service should be combined to improve coordination in border management, scholars Donald Kettl and Gregory Treverton argued in a recent report for the Century Foundation, a New York-based think tank. Kettl is a professor of public affairs at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, while Treverton is a senior policy analyst at the Rand Corporation.

"These organizations must be combined to begin the urgent task of providing coordinated border management," they wrote in the report, "The Department of Homeland Security: An Alternative that Will Work."

Elaine Kamarck, a former director of the Clinton-era National Partnership for Reinventing Government who is now a professor at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, said that combining all these agencies-including the Coast Guard-would make field operations more efficient.

"The reason these [agencies] are all different entities is just historical accident," she said. "Look at what happens right now. Suppose an INS agent finds something; they don't go to Customs, they have to go up the chain of command before sharing that information."

The idea of creating a single border agency isn't new. In 1993, Kamarck and other reinventing government leaders supported combining Customs and the Border Patrol into a single agency, but the proposal was derailed by the Justice and Treasury Departments, Kamarck wrote in a June report from the PricewaterhouseCoopers Endowment for the Business of Government on homeland security.

The Bush administration supports moving the border agencies to the proposed department, but has said the Coast Guard should remain a distinct organization. At a July 15 speech to the Heritage Foundation, Customs Commissioner Robert Bonner said there were no plans to combine Customs and the Coast Guard.

"There's no proposal here to, in any way, integrate the Coast Guard with U.S. Customs," Bonner said. "Nobody's proposing that; the president isn't proposing that, the new [homeland security] secretary isn't going to do that, but it does make sense to put the Coast Guard and U.S. Customs…under the same roof."

Kamarck, Kettl and Treverton argue the administration must take the further step of merging agencies to ensure they work together. In their view, simply creating a new department will not solve the essential management challenge at the heart of homeland security: improving coordination among all the agencies that have homeland security missions.