Life After Terrorism

No one needs reminding that much has changed in America since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. The evidence is everywhere, from screeners at airports to concrete barriers and security forces seemingly everywhere else.

As we've become used to all this, we've managed to find a bit of humor amid the grim news. In what might be called a case of familiarity breeding contempt, the government's terror alert system was parodied this summer in The New Yorker by humorist Andy Borowitz, who wrote:

"Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge announced today that the Homeland Security Department would soon replace the much-maligned terror alert color code with an official cry of 'wolf.' Mr. Ridge demonstrated five different cries of 'wolf' to correspond to the various threat levels, from a barely audible whisper of 'wolf' meaning 'low' to a full-throated scream of 'wolf' indicating 'severe.' These new wolf cries will go into effect tomorrow, assuming there is a tomorrow, Mr. Ridge said."

Laughter is healthy, but for people in government, who have been affected more than most by post-9/11 change, work in the age of terrorism has become more demanding, difficult and dangerous.

For our cover story this month, Denise Kersten asked a small group of federal employees to reflect for a moment on the indelible mark that deadly day left on them and their colleagues. Along with this, we publish a time line showing the dramatic actions and sweeping reforms that have reshaped government in the aftermath of Sept. 11.

For many, institutional changes are affecting work and working conditions. Critics of bureaucracy have long hoped for more mission-centered and "agile" government organizations. But between promise and reality, there's a long way to travel, as we report in two homeland security stories in this issue.

The impulse to keep power centralized in Washington is seen in the Transportation Security Administration's approach to airport security: It allows regional officials to hire but not fire airport screeners, and won't let an airport open a seventh security lane to diminish passenger delays without approval from headquarters. As Beth Dickey writes this month, one congressman calls TSA a "Soviet-style centralized bureaucracy."

And as Jason Peckenpaugh reports, administrative consolidation of such vital functions as hiring and firing, procurement and technology management remains hugely controversial at Homeland Security.

As stifling of individual initiative as these systems may be, there is sometimes room in the bureaucracy for action-oriented mavericks. Such a man is former Army deputy public affairs chief Charles Krohn, colorfully profiled by Shane Harris. In Iraq, Krohn took it upon himself to give reporters the story of how badly the American operation was going, helping to shake free bottlenecked reconstruction funding.