How to Improve Homeland Security

From DHS Secretary Michael Chertoff's roundtable with bloggers Sunday:

Question: What else would you propose that Congress do, just to make the functionality of the department work better?

Chertoff: I think consolidating us; I think funding our budget requests for the not-particularly-glamorous-but-indispensable things having to do with management, acquisition capability, IT capability. You know, this is stuff which -- you know, when they're trying to make the budget at the end, and often, in order to have more money for grants, they cut that stuff. And the problem is when you cut that stuff, invariably what happens is, six months later, we get a criticism for, we're not managing our acquisitions well. Well, you can't manage your acquisitions well if you can't hire people to do it.