Count the Wall Street Journal’s ($) George Melloan as skeptical that the 9/11 Commission’s recommendation of a new cabinet department headed by a “National Intelligence Director” is a good idea:
The late William E. Simon, Treasury secretary in the Nixon and Ford administrations, once described to a small group of Journal editors the origin of what would later become the U.S. Department of Energy.
As deputy to Treasury Secretary George Shultz in 1973, he had been sitting in for his boss at a Nixon cabinet meeting and offered a report on the energy “crisis.” Mr. Nixon chewed on his pencil for a moment and then, inspired by a thought, told Mr. Simon that he was putting him in charge of a White House energy policy office, a job that later earned him the title of “energy czar.” In 1977, Congress and Jimmy Carter created a full-blown cabinet-level department to try to deal with the still-unsolved “energy crisis.” Today, the DOE has wide-ranging powers and a budget of roughly $20 billion.
The interesting thing about this story is that it was a clumsy attempt to correct a problem the government itself had created. The “energy crisis” had been caused primarily by the price controls President Nixon adopted in 1971 as a response to inflation, also of the government’s own making. That’s one way government grows, or metastasizes if you will. It adds new functions to try to correct the problems of existing functions. This new cell growth is always popular inside the Beltway, because it creates jobs and opportunities.
Mr. Melloan notes that the Commission’s recommendation of bringing all intelligence under one master and coordinating the exchange of information sounds like a good idea on the surface, but is it really?:
A new department, Homeland Security, was created under Secretary Tom Ridge only two years ago. It already has spent $70 billion and wants $40 billion more next fiscal year, notes Forbes magazine. The DHS is hard at work, organizing better security for nuclear plants, arranging point-of-origin certification of shipboard containers, asking banks to monitor transfers from places like Saudi Arabia. But Forbes still rates these risks at the “yellow” level and gives a high-risk “red” to the threat of computer network hacking.
Mr. Melloan then points out that more government bureaucracy may be the problem, not the solution:
It wasn’t that the U.S. had no defenses [before the 9/11 attacks]. It has many thousands of law enforcement officers at all levels of government and as many as 20,000 people in the CIA alone. But all of these people, many of them very able, were trapped in a morass of government bureaucracy.
Some of the restrictions are mind-boggling. Most big cities in the U.S. have “sanctuary” ordinances, pressed on them by “civil rights” groups, which prohibit city employees, especially the police, from checking with the Immigration and Naturalization Service on the immigration status of anyone who runs afoul of the law. As a result, thousands of illegal aliens are at large in the U.S. and encounter no trouble with the INS even if they are picked up for theft or drunken driving. And of course, airport screeners, under the same “civil rights” pressures, are barred from “profiling” passengers and thus, in the words of one critic, must accost a “blue haired 70-year-old woman with an aluminum walker” and nine other average travelers for every able-bodied 30-year-old Mideast male.
The INS also has little coordination with the overseas consular offices of the State Department, which approve visas for visitors to the U.S. The State bureaucracy is responding to homeland security fears by tightening up on visa grants, but with no evident system for distinguishing between possible terrorists and innocent students, business travelers and the like. The CIA’s failure to insert spies into al Qaeda was a major shortcoming. One wonders what it does with its estimated $40 billion budget.
Congress is itself fragmented, politically polarized and mired in the oversight methods of yesteryear, and so is not up to the requirements for legislating a more streamlined and efficient defense against terrorism. For example, Secretary Ridge has had to testify to 80 committees and subcommittees since taking office. What they do with all that duplicative information and how he finds time to do anything else is a mystery.