Federal Agencies Rushing to Meet New Demands

Individually, the changes now underway in agencies across Washington are remarkable. Cumulatively, they are virtually unprecedented.

Rarely in U.S. history has the federal government been asked to ramp up its efforts in as many different areas, as quickly, as it is now doing in the war against terrorism. Perhaps the only comparable surges in government responsibility came in the New Deal--Franklin D. Roosevelt’s response to the Depression--and the national mobilization for World War II.

“This is as dramatic a change in the size and the role and the function of the federal government as we have seen in history,” says Donald Kettl, a University of Wisconsin political scientist who specializes in the structure of the federal government.

Not all experts would go quite that far. But by any measure the new demands are enormous. The Federal Aviation Administration is rushing to revamp its oversight of airport security. Leading legislators are pressing the Immigration and Naturalization Service to establish unprecedented systems to track the hundreds of thousands of foreigners who enter the country on temporary visas. Congress has directed the Border Patrol to vastly expand its surveillance of a northern border that is now so lightly defended that some crossings from Canada are closed at night with only an orange rubber traffic cone. The FBI and CIA are shifting their focus toward detecting and disrupting terrorist networks at home and abroad; the Pentagon is trying to learn, on the fly, how to make war against an enemy without a standing army.

And there’s more. Agencies such as the Bureau of Reclamation and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission are under congressional pressure to greatly increase security at dams and nuclear power plants, respectively. Public health officials are scrambling to stockpile vaccines in quantities unimaginable six weeks ago--and are being asked to begin monitoring all laboratories that use dangerous biological materials. The Transportation Department is pursuing background checks on truck drivers licensed to haul hazardous waste. All 2 1/2 million of them.

Some of these new demands represent entirely new responsibilities--like the possibility that the federal government will assume responsibility for hiring all airport security workers. Most, though, involve asking agencies to perform at a much higher level of competence, precision and thoroughness than the nation has ever asked before. “We are going to have to dramatically improve performance of these agencies,” says Bruce Reed, former President Clinton’s top domestic policy advisor.

Consider, for instance, the monitoring of foreigners in the United States on student visas. The INS, through a limited pilot project, currently is monitoring foreign students on about 20 campuses to ensure that they are still enrolled and haven’t overstayed their visas. Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) has introduced legislation that would require the agency to produce quarterly reports on all 500,000 foreign students in America.

Similarly, until Sept. 11, the FAA was planning background checks on employees just at the nation’s 20 largest airports; now it is beginning security checks on every employee with access to secure areas in every airport. The White House is ordering agencies across government to explore comparable advances in their own approaches.

In the drive to improve federal performance, some of the most daunting problems may be the most intangible. The past month has exposed a consistent lack of coordination and communication between agencies. Missed signals between the CIA, FBI and INS allowed two of the hijackers to enter and then vanish into the country even though they were on a border watch list. Beyond those conventional bureaucratic breakdowns are more structural problems. When deciding whether to grant visas to foreign applicants, the State Department uses a different computerized watch list than the INS does in deciding who to let in at the border, notes Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies. Finding ways to patch these communication breakdowns has become a top White House priority.

Even more fundamentally, the terrorist threat is demanding sweeping changes in the culture of entrenched government organizations. Agencies such as the Border Patrol and the FBI are shifting from old priorities--interdicting drugs, chasing spies--to apprehending terrorists. At a news briefing last week, Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft said the challenge is demanding an even more basic change in federal law enforcement agencies: A shift in attitude from slowly assembling enough information to build a prosecution toward rapidly disseminating information to prevent future attacks.

The other periods of rapid government expansion offer some hints of the potholes ahead. One is the inevitability of waste and mistakes. Trying to do so many new things at once, government will do some of them badly. It will spend money on projects that, in retrospect, will appear misguided. The key for Congress and the public is to demand continuous improvement without an obsession over minor missteps. “The insurance policy that we are, in effect, trying to buy against future attacks is going to require that we have defense in depth,” Kettl says. “That means we are going to have to tolerate, to a point, bureaucratic waste and overlap and all the things we complain about.”

Another lesson is that the initial government structures established to deal with this crisis are likely to need mid-course revisions. In 1933, Roosevelt established the National Recovery Administration as his centerpiece agency for lifting America out of the Depression; by 1934, it was moribund, outstripped by rival agencies with more carefully focused responsibilities. The same could happen to the new White House Office of Homeland Security, which will probably need to grow into a full-fledged Cabinet department if it is to have any real impact.

In the end, structures matter less than performance. Americans should tolerate some mistakes and confusion. But a sustained failure to prevent future terrorist attacks could produce a collapse of confidence in government--and a society that is more uneasy, fearful and panicked into overreaction. “We are turning to the federal government because in a time of crisis that’s the one place we can all trust,” Reed says. “If the federal government makes a grave mistake and people lose confidence there, then we are in real trouble.”

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Ronald Brownstein’s column appears every Monday. See current and past Brownstein columns on The Times’ Web site at: https:// www.latimes.com/ brownstein.