Quagmire

Politico has a good piece up this morning explaining how the Department of Homeland Security's efforts to beef up management have run afoul of House appropriators. Apparently, the situation's gotten so bad that former DHS chief Michael Chertoff is speaking out to get successor Janet Napolitano's back. There are a couple of issues here: first, appropriators are cutting the very funds that DHS needs to increase staff in critical management areas like procurement. And second, lawmakers are insisting on earmarking significant parts of the department's budget for disaster management projects in their own districts, an effort that simultaneously smacks of pork-barrel politics and distrust of the ability of DHS components to make good evaluative judgments about where that money should go.

To a certain extent, I can understand lawmakers' frustration. The creation of DHS was politicized from the beginning, especially on collective bargaining and human capital issues. The performance of component agencies like FEMA have dismayed lawmakers. But DHS was given an almost impossible brief when it was created, to protect Americans under an extremely tense atmosphere, with absolutely no lead time or margin for error. Of course there were going to be problems. But cutting funding dedicated to management staff doesn't seem to be the proper response to those problems.