Transcript
MR. JAMES STEINBERG: Good morning and welcome to Brookings. Thank you all for coming out at this early hour on a Monday morning. We're going to be presenting today our new study on homeland security.
Many of you know about two months ago we released our first study called Protecting the American Homeland which looked comprehensively at an overall strategy for homeland security, and in our second report which we're releasing this morning we focus particularly on the issue of reorganization and how reorganization can or might not contribute to the overall homeland security mission.
We welcome people here and the people viewing this by WebCast. We're going to go for about an hour and 15 minutes or so. I may have to step out a little bit early, but if the conversation is still going my colleagues will continue the discussion.
As I mentioned, this is a follow-on to our earlier homeland security report. I think it reflects the increasing pace of attention that both the Administration and the Congress are giving to these urgent questions of homeland security. I think our general view is that the Administration should be commended for taking the process one step forward. As you all know, the original plan focused exclusively on an interagency coordinating body in the White House, the Office of Homeland Security, and we argued last April, and many members of Congress have argued during this time that there are some important further steps towards consolidation that can and should take place so I think the Administrative's Administration?s initiative should be seen in the context of I think a growing consensus that there is a need for some consolidation and reorganization, but just what form that should take is a matter of debate and that's what our contribution focuses on.
There are four major points I think in our study that we want to stress today and you'll hear more detail from my colleagues about the various parts of it. The first is that reorganization by itself is not a panacea. Good organization is necessary but not sufficient condition for carrying out this important task. Most important of all there's a need for strategy of homeland security to drive the organization not vice versa. We've been concerned that there has been a sort of slow-motion movement towards developing an overall homeland security strategy. Meanwhile the Administration has tried to move forward both on the budgetary and reorganization front and we think there's a danger of the tail wagging the dog here and that there is an important need for that strategy to be forthcoming so that Congress and the American people can debate it and see the reorganization in the context of that strategy.
The second point that we make in the study is that while consolidation can be useful, it's important to think carefully about both the costs as well as the benefits. That is that there are clear benefits from bringing common functions under the same roof but there are also costs in terms of administrative time, in terms of distracting from the main mission at hand, and that each element of the consolidation needs to look very carefully at that cost/benefit perspective.
The third major point is that Congress needs to step up to the plate as well. That while the administrative reorganization is obviously at the center right now, as we've seen from the efforts by Congress to deal with the Administration proposals, that there is a clear need for streamlining and reorganization in Congress and Jim Lindsay will talk in more detail about that.
Finally, there is a need to focus on coordination not only at the federal level but also at the state and local level and the interface with the private sector. This is an effort that will take place to a very large degree and in ways that I think have not gotten sufficient attention by state and local officials, by the private sector itself, and this reorganization effort needs to be paralleled with appropriate attention towards the state and local effort.
As you'll see in the study, our focus in terms of thinking about the strategy and how the reorganization should relate to it, focuses on prevention. We focus primarily on consolidating border agencies that are designed to stop dangerous people and dangerous things from coming into the United States and on increasing our capacity to identify threats. While we obviously recognize as we did in our original study that dealing with the problem of emergency response is a critical homeland security feature. We're not persuaded that consolidating at this time into the preventive functions of the border security activities will necessarily produce real benefits.
We also focus in some detail in our study on the intelligence function, a debate which has been going on in the Congress for some time as you all know. The Congress has decided for the moment to defer the questions of how to deal with the FBI and the CIA. We take that on a bit in the study and argue that there is a need for a single, consolidated threat fusion center that can look at all the dimensions of the threat invulnerabilities and have access to all relevant information including raw intelligence and law enforcement data. So we also argue that as far as intelligence collection goes, that particularly the domestic intelligence collection function, not the analysis function, but the collection function should remain at the FBI.
Let me now turn it over to my colleagues. Ivo Daalder will talk generally about our overall approach to reorganization. Paul Light will talk about the management choices in an alternative way to address the kinds of flexibility that are needed without unduly damaging the system. And finally, as I said, Jim Lindsay to talk about the Congress.
Ivo?
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