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Analysis: Why is the DHS so badly run?
By MARTIN SIEFF
UPI Senior News Analyst
WASHINGTON, Aug. 2 (UPI) -- Why is the U.S. Department of Homeland Security so badly run? And can anything be done about it?

The miserable management record of the DHS was the subject of an article in he Washington Post last week. And hardly a week goes by without the Government Accountability Office issuing a new report documenting how yet another DHS program is years behind schedule or running vastly over budget, or both at the same time.

Last week, DHS Secretary Michael Chertoff suffered a series of stinging rebukes on Capitol Hill. A new bipartisan report Thursday requested by Rep. Tom Davis, chairman of the Government Reform Committee of the U.S. House of Representatives and ranking Democrat Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., identified 32 DHS contracts worth $34.3 billion that were filled with wasteful spending or plagued by mismanagement.

In many respects, the DHS -- formed in March 2003 from 23 different government agencies -- should be having an easier time of it than the Pentagon. The security and intelligence services of the United States have in fact been working well in defending the homeland. There has been no major terrorist attack on the U.S. mainland since Sept. 11, 2001.

DHS programs seldom require breakthroughs to be made on applying cutting edge technology, unlike, for example, the ballistic missile defense programs run by the Department of Defense. Nor does the DHS have to run any foreign wars, unlike the DOD, which is currently having to deal with two at the same time in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The DHS is not starved of resources. Congress has poured funds on it since it was set up. Nor has it been plagued by partisan politics. Democrats have vied with Republicans in Congress in their efforts to fund and empower it.

But the DHS first of all is big and clunky. It is the first major consolidation of existing U.S. government agencies in a gigantic umbrella department for the first time in a quarter of a century, since the Department of Health and Human Resources was assembled under President Jimmy Carter. And in the past, when such bureaucratic behemoths were created by Presidents Lyndon Baines Johnson, Richard Nixon or Carter, the results were always expensive, inefficient and an administrative nightmare.

What made things even worse for the DHS was that it was set up by a president and dominant political party that deeply believed less government was better than more. In a sense, therefore, their hearts were not in it.

Leading Republicans in both the current Bush administration and the GOP majority in Congress had a long track record in distrusting government bureaucrats as being self-interested, corrupt, inefficient or partially liberal. But making huge new bureaucracies like the DHS run relatively well requires listening to people with a lot of experience and expertise in dealing with them. Instead, President George W. Bush chose as his first two Homeland Security secretaries people who lacked any of the key experience and qualities the job needed,

Tom Ridge, the former Republican governor of Pennsylvania, appeared to have the administrative clout for the job. Bush in his first administration had a great faith in getting conservative Republican governors like himself to run major national departments of the federal government. After all, if they could run major states like Pennsylvania or Wisconsin, surely it was only a natural step to running large chunks of the federal bureaucracy.

But for at least 70 years, since the start of the New Deal, federal bureaucracies have been larger by orders of magnitude than state bureaucracies, except, maybe, in a handful of major states like New York, California or Illinois. Ridge soon found himself totally out of his depth. He had no prior experience of Washington politics, nor of dealing with the national media. He had never run a major business enterprise. His color-coded alerts about the likelihood of terrorist attacks rapidly lost all credibility and left him a national laughing stock.

Chertoff had a legal background in law enforcement and was an experienced judge. But he has failed to prove himself a skilled -- or even competent -- administrator, his critics charge. At first he appeared to both the national media and Congress a welcome contrast to Ridge: At least he was not coming new to issues of law enforcement or national security. Nor did he make the early huge PR blunders that Ridge had.

But the Hurricane Katrina disaster and the flooding of New Orleans last year turned the national spotlight on something experts in homeland security issues and the few members of Congress who focused on them had become all too aware of already -- Chertoff, his critics charge, is a poor administrator, lacks the ability to inspire or energize his huge department and fails to adequately monitor closely major programs in his department or to prioritize between them.

Chertoff has proven a poor choice of management talent, his critics charge. They say he practices too much cronyism and political favoritism, and that as a result his department lacks enough competent administrators and expertise in major areas at his highest levels of management. The Senate Homeland Security Committee last week indicated it agreed with some of that criticism when it approved legislation mandating that the future head of FEMA had to have at least five years experience in relevant fields. The two heads Ridge and Chertoff had chosen for it and kept running it had none.

Chertoff proved disastrously slow and out of touch in his response to the flooding of New Orleans. He resisted the growing popular and congressional demands for sweeping reform and looks like getting the changes forced down his throat by Congress anyway. The DHS is here to stay. There is no significant sentiment in Congress to disassemble or scrap it. But everyone wants it to run far better. And Congress is paying far more critical attention to it than ever before. Change and improvement look unlikely to come while Chertoff runs the department. But it cannot be long delayed after he is gone.