Insecurity Complex

Leave it to Sen. Robert Byrd, the last of the old-school senatorial orators, to put it best. In a tirade that won him an arched eyebrow from the New York Times -- a sure sign that he was onto something -- the senator from West Virginia, now serving his 50th year in Congress, uncorked all the ire he'd been saving up since the latest sumo-sized version of the homeland security bill had hit his desk with a crash two days earlier, leaving scarcely any time to examine it in detail before the scheduled vote.

"How is it that the Bush administration's No. 1 priority has evolved into a plan to create a giant, huge bureaucracy?" he demanded on the Senate floor on Nov. 19, just before 90 of his colleagues gave the nod to the bill. "How is it that the Congress bought into the belief that to take a plethora of federal agencies and departments and shuffle them around would make us safer from future terrorist attacks?"

Everything about the bill offended Byrd's sensibilities--its size (484 pages), its haste ("Our poor staffs were up most of the night studying it. They know some of the things that are in there, but they don't know all of them"), and its last-minute inclusion of provisions benefiting private corporations in general and a presidential alma mater in particular.

Most of all, Byrd took umbrage at the bill's subject: the creation of an enormous cabinet-level bureaucracy gathering under its awkward roofline 22 wildly divergent agencies, 170,000 civil servants and $37 billion worth of goods and services, making it the third-largest department in the government; only the Department of Defense and the Department of Veterans' Affairs are bigger.

"Never have I seen such a monstrous piece of legislation sent to this body... this is a hoax. This is a hoax. To tell the American people they are going to be safer when we pass this is to hoax," Byrd fumed. "We ought to tell people the truth."

The truth is that no one expects the Department of Homeland Security to be very good at securing anything, except funding, for quite some time.

In July the General Accounting Office, the government's internal watchdog, cautioned that "the potential exists for an uncoordinated approach to homeland security that may lead to duplication of efforts or gaps in coverage, misallocation of resources, and inadequate monitoring of expenditures."

Tom Ridge, the president's nominee for secretary of the new department, has acknowledged that launching it will be a nightmare. And anyone nervously hoping that Homeland Security gets it together in time to prevent terrorist attacks in the event of a messy war in the Middle East need only read about the difficulties of getting the agencies' computers linked up to know that won't happen.

But the Department of Homeland Security is so far pretty good at one thing: transforming the character of the agencies under its roof by funding massive increases for military and security operations, while other services remain in a holding pattern. It's a hawk's dream project -- a blank slate, generous funding for intelligence and defense, and an ever-present threat to ensure a long life.

Nowhere is that more obvious than in the case of the new department's two largest bodies, the Immigration and Naturalization Service and the Coast Guard.

Enforcement Mentality INS

The second-biggest agency to be folded into the new Department of Homeland Security is the Immigration and Naturalization Service. Currently the INS resides within the Department of Justice, where its two branches -- enforcement and services -- coexist somewhat unhappily, one charged with barring entry to the U.S., the other with facilitating it. On March 1, these two branches will escape their troubled marriage and move into separate quarters in the Homeland Security building.