Blue-Ribbon Panel Calls for Expanded FBI Powers

Several key federal law-enforcement agencies should essentially be scrapped as part of a wholesale restructuring aimed at better coordinating the nation’s fight against terrorism, drug-trafficking and other growing threats, a blue-ribbon commission concluded Tuesday.

The commission, headed by former FBI Director and CIA Chief William H. Webster, recommended the virtual abolishment of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms and the Drug Enforcement Administration as they now exist. Their central duties should be folded into the FBI, the panel recommended after a two-year study mandated by Congress.

“The federal law-enforcement community is structured to cope with the crimes of the past, not the emerging crimes of the future,” the commission said in its report, which drew immediate criticism from several of the agencies studied.

With about 89,000 sworn officers, the massive federal law-enforcement establishment carries out some of the world’s finest policing, the commission said. But, at the same time, the bureaucracy “is unwieldy, not adequately prepared to meet the rising threats and--most of all--not sufficiently marshaled or coordinated,” the report said.

“Serious questions arise about who is in charge of what in federal law enforcement,” it said.

Sen. Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah), head of the Senate Judiciary Committee, plans hearings on the commission’s findings Thursday. But he did not commit himself to any of the group’s recommendations, and Webster acknowledged that the panel faces a difficult challenge in selling such reforms to Congress.

One concern, Webster predicted, will be that the commission’s proposals would turn his old agency--the FBI--into a national police force with even broader power than it has now.

“We know there are different perspectives on this. . . . But we can’t afford the luxury of inefficiency,” said Webster. In 1992, Webster headed a commission that took the Los Angeles Police Department to task for its slow response to the riots that year.

Past proposals to merge or eliminate a host of prominent federal agencies, including ATF, DEA and the Immigration and Naturalization Service, have all died, and an ATF official predicted that this proposal will do the same.

“I don’t think this is anything new,” said Bill Kinsella, a spokesman for the ATF. Because of controversy surrounding gun control, “we’re always in the middle of it. People have wanted to do away with us since the Carter administration,” he said.

Pointing to the agency’s successful roles in the investigation into the Oklahoma City bombing, a spree of recent church arsons and other crimes, Kinsella said: “We’ve proven that we are a viable organization with specific abilities in enforcing the laws. . . . I don’t believe there will be changes.”

Indeed, just two weeks ago, President Clinton proposed hiring about 500 new ATF agents as part of a large-scale expansion of the agency’s efforts to seize illegal guns.

But Webster, in arguing for a phasing out of the ATF, said that its focus duplicates the work of other agencies, including the FBI, and its areas of responsibility--alcohol, tobacco and firearms are unrelated to each other. That grouping is not “logical,” he said.

The Webster commission’s proposals seem certain to provoke widespread debate in Washington’s legal and law-enforcement communities, officials said, in part because of Webster’s stature as head of the FBI from 1978 to 1987 and head of the CIA from 1987 to 1991.

“Whenever Judge Webster speaks, the law-enforcement community will listen, no doubt,” said Hubert Williams, head of the Washington-based nonprofit Police Foundation, who testified before the commission.

A proposal essentially to do away with two agencies as deeply entrenched as the ATF and the DEA--with combined budgets of nearly $1 billion--”is a major step and the commission must have a strong rationale to support a recommendation of that nature,” Williams said. “This report could have a major impact on the direction that we go but no one can predict for sure.”

The commission also spoke out strongly against the trend toward “federalization” of crimes. While there were perhaps a dozen crimes punishable under federal law at the time of the country’s birth, the list has now grown to more than 3,000, including such oddities as disrupting a rodeo, it noted.

The trend has spread federal law-enforcement agencies “much too thinly” and, if it continues, “the United States will develop the type of national police force that we have traditionally avoided,” the report said.

If overlap and duplication were eliminated among the 148 federal agencies involved in federal law enforcement, the commission predicted, about 40% of those agencies could be eliminated “practically overnight.” It was particularly critical of overlap among about 60 different offices of inspector general at the various agencies.

The key to an effective federal law-enforcement bureaucracy, the commission concluded, is to strengthen the position of the attorney general, giving that office clearer and broader authority to coordinate the activities of all crime-fighting agencies.

While the proposal would expand the powers of Atty. Gen. Janet Reno’s office, Reno and Treasury Secretary Lawrence H. Summers, who oversees ATF, said in a joint statement that they did not see the need to merge ATF or DEA into the FBI. Such a move, they said, would be “unnecessary and would be detrimental to our law enforcement efforts.”