Bordering on Total Chaos

Following up Bill Clinton’s campaign pledge to “reinvent government,” a special Administration panel headed by Vice President Al Gore is weighing proposals to make sweeping changes in federal law enforcement.

Some, like merging the Drug Enforcement Administration into the FBI, are likely to be controversial and will need study. But one merger proposal being considered in Gore’s so-called National Performance Review has already been studied, and should be implemented as soon as practical: creating a new border management agency to replace the Border Patrol, Customs Service and other, lesser-known agencies. Such a move is sure to be widely applauded in California and other border states where public concern with illegal immigration and other forms of illicit border traffic is especially acute.

In recent years, as the need for better border management became clearer, many careful observers have concluded that our current border agencies may be part of the problem. Last June, for example, Congress’ General Accounting Office reported that there is a “long history of interagency rivalry coupled with ineffective cooperation and coordination” between the Justice Department’s Border Patrol and the Treasury Department’s Customs Service.

The GAO concluded that these problems “are deeply ingrained in the management culture of these agencies” and recommended creation of a new, independent immigration and customs agency. Only a new agency would be able to cope with the flow of goods and people in “a modern world characterized by increasing business competitiveness and growing migration.” Strong words, and a remarkably farsighted recommendation. But the GAO report is the seventh federal study in the last 20 years to reach practically the same conclusion!

Since 1973, congressional committees, the Office of Management and Budget and President Ronald Reagan’s Grace Commission have also recommended a new border agency. The fact that so little has changed along the border in all that time is a sobering illustration of just how resistant to change the federal bureaucracy can be. And it should serve as a reality check to any members of Congress who think border problems can be solved simply by throwing more money at the agencies currently working there.