The Heat Is On

As I write in mid-July, familiar rhythms of summer sport are in comforting play. In baseball's All-Star game, pitcher Roger Clemens has been humbled in the first inning, just tonight. Cyclist Lance Armstrong is well positioned for a record sixth title in the Tour de France. Andy Roddick may have lost at Wimbledon, but we can hope he will do better at the U.S. Open, which starts in late August. Tiger Woods is honing his game for the British Open at Royal Troon in Scotland. And the quadrennial summer Olympic Games are soon to start, this year in Greece.

The once-comforting rhythms of a presidential election year are upon us as well. The Democratic and Republican national conventions in Boston and New York will be followed by much-anticipated candidate debates running up to the general election-all mileposts of our democracy.

One wishes that these events might not be burdened with the depressing baggage of modern times. Baseball, professional cycling and the Olympics are plagued by drug investigations. The Olympics probably will have 10 police officers for every athlete. Boston is all but shut down by the Democratic convention. In mid-July, the network news speculated that the presidential election might be delayed by a terrorist attack.

We all yearn for more innocent times, perhaps especially government leaders who must make expensive, controversial, risky decisions about measures to protect our society against murky dangers.

In the name of combating terrorism, they have waged an expensive war, enacted laws that many think trample on U.S. constitutional rights, reorganized large swaths of government, and engaged in a spending spree unparalleled in modern times. Senior civil servants and military officers confront challenges of a lifetime-as one can see in this issue of Government Executive.

How, for example, can we secure our 4,000-mile northern border, patrolled by only 1,000 Border Patrol agents, one-tenth the number who patrol the 2,000-mile southern border? As our cover story reports, long stretches of the American border are federally owned, exacerbating the challenge of coordinating security activities of the departments of Homeland Security, Interior and Agriculture, and tribal staffs.

Homeland Security still is in the beginning stages of shaping an organization that can communicate, coordinate and act expeditiously. Technology, in the form of a new "enterprise architecture," is playing a leading role in the effort. Department leaders are wrestling with the difficult problem of rationalizing differing pay, benefits and retirement regimes among law enforcement personnel, differences that exacerbate retention problems for some agencies. And the department's Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, finding that its detention facilities can't house all the people it arrests, has been releasing some illegal immigrants.

You will find a foldout feature on the airport of the future, showing technology's promise of easing passage while increasing security. It seems that "lie-detector glasses" worn by security personnel will be able to tell if someone's voice indicates nervousness. Perhaps this and other inventions will ease the long airport waits of summer. But they won't bring back the lazy days of yore.