The Fight at Home

In this special issue on homeland security, Government Executive examines the most ambitious reorganization of the federal government in five decades. That reorganization, of course, ranges beyond the confines of the huge new Homeland Security Department, which merged 22 agencies employing more than 170,000 people. Major changes are coming as well to such large and important institutions as the FBI, the CIA and the U.S. military. And then there's the question of how the federal government should assist state and local governments as they seek to improve their own defenses against attack.

At the level of the mundane, there's a lot to do. Before the Transportation Department flag in front of Coast Guard headquarters was struck for the last time, decisions had to be made about who would provide no less than 170 different services to Coast Guard employees once they joined the new Homeland Security Department. Who would approve security clearances, issue purchase cards and manage payroll operations? And who would claim ownership of assets from printers to paper clips?

A level up on the importance scale, how would the new department put together an effective border security operation? That's been under intense study at Homeland Security headquarters, as Jason Peckenpaugh reports. From the field, Brian Friel reports that Detroit-based border security inspectors are burned out after months of six-day weeks at the busiest crossing on the Canadian border. And it's no easy task to integrate customs, immigration and agriculture inspectors, whose long-standing identities are symbolized by different uniforms and by this disarming assertion by the president of the agriculture inspectors' union: "We're food people. We're not gun people."

Elsewhere in this issue, Katherine McIntire Peters examines a number of important homeland security challenges. She reports on the complex and frustrating negotiations to establish a reasonable federal budget for security needs. That long debate has addressed, but not resolved, the question of how federal agencies should help state and local governments. Peters illustrates how very difficult it is for local communities to meet the problem while their own budgets are in the red. Peters also reports on the U.S. military's growing role in domestic security, manifested in part by the establishment of a new Northern Command-one of whose challenges, Peters reports, is to move beyond the old "need-to-know" approach to information dissemination to a new "need-to-share" model.

If these stories don't offer enough testimony to the difficulties of achieving significant change in long-established institutions, Shane Harris' article about the FBI underlines the point. As Harris reports, the FBI's problems in shifting its emphasis to counterterrorism left it a loser to the CIA in the contest for bureaucratic control of terrorism intelligence efforts.

This issue ends with profiles of 20 officials who will play important roles in organizing government's homeland security initiatives. Their assignments in many different agencies, and the breadth of their experience, are sobering reminders of the magnitude of the task.