Retooling Cabinet No Easy Task

Even with the full weight of the presidency in support, creating a streamlined, fast-moving Cabinet department to fight terrorism is harder than you might suppose.

Never mind Al Qaeda. You’re up against the National Turkey Growers of America.

President Bush had no sooner finished announcing his plan to establish a Department of Homeland Security than lobbyists for the turkey farmers, along with representatives of the National Cattlemen’s Beef Assn., the National Milk Producers Federation and a dozen other groups, were on the phone Thursday night planning a war council for the next day.

They didn’t want to be left behind when the government’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, which protects farm animals from diseases and pests, moved to the new department.

“It’s one of those silent agencies ... but a very important agency,” said Chandler Keys of the cattlemen’s association. “We want to make sure its historical mission is carried out, as well as any new mission.”

Terrorism or no, the creation of a Cabinet department is an enormous and inevitably slow process, not least because of the effect on interested parties, ranging from poultry farmers to the entrenched bureaucracies of the executive branch and the proud barons of Congress.

If the terrorist threat remains high and the public remains concerned, as most experts predict, then the Department of Homeland Security could join Defense, State and the Treasury among the super-departments whose reach and responsibilities make them powerful players in Washington and influential forces in the country at large.

History suggests, however, that achieving such a result will be a long, contentious and frequently messy process.

Bush himself drew a parallel last week between his proposal to create a single Cabinet department to guard against terrorism and President Truman’s decision in 1947 to create the Defense Department to unify a fragmented military establishment that had endured almost unchanged since the Civil War.

While the Defense Department has proved that such a large-scale government reorganization can achieve positive results--after all, the Pentagon now presides over the world’s only military superpower--that’s not the only lesson for those who would create a Department of Homeland Security.

More than half a century after Truman and Congress brought the armed forces under one roof, the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines still fight each other almost as fiercely as they do foreign enemies. Making them work together remains one of the toughest jobs in Washington.

And, once created, the department would almost certainly be revamped and fine-tuned regularly for decades to come--as were the Defense Department, the CIA, the National Security Council and other products of the 1947 reorganization, to deal with the Cold War.

Randy Larsen, director of a homeland security research group called the ANSER Institute, calls the Bush proposal “a great second step in a long evolutionary process of preparing this nation” to deal with terrorism.

Bush, in his weekly radio address Saturday, said the new department was needed to “unite essential agencies that must work more closely together.”

Already, however, abundant signs suggest what a daunting task the reorganization would be, how many knotty issues would arise and how many battles would have to be fought.

Just designing and carrying out the basic reorganization is a herculean bureaucratic chore. With about 170,000 employees, Homeland Security would be the third-largest Cabinet department in the federal government. Where would its people work?

Creating the Defense Department entailed constructing the Pentagon, a 3.7-million-square-foot structure that still boasts the largest roof in the world and accommodates a mere 23,000 workers.

The question of space is one of the least recognized but most difficult issues in any government reorganization, said Donald F. Kettl, a University of Wisconsin specialist in how government agencies function. “You want to make it so people can connect the dots, but can you actually move people so they can work together? Simply finding space is difficult.”

Since the whole point of the new department is to focus and accelerate the normally plodding pace of government, pulling together at least a fair number of its widely scattered components into one place is particularly urgent.

But the landscape of the nation’s capital has become much more crowded since the 1940s, when ground was broken for the Pentagon in a 583-acre patch of weeds on the west bank of the Potomac River.

A far larger challenge arises from the fact that Homeland Security would be constructed from bits and pieces of existing departments, each with its own sense of mission, its own culture and its own galaxy of interest groups.

Creating a department, especially one as potentially powerful as Homeland Security, means breaking into “the Iron Triangle”: the interlocking relationships established among government officials, congressional leaders and lobbyists.

Hence Friday’s meeting of lobbyists for 15 livestock, poultry, crop and animal health groups concerned about the fate of the Agriculture Department agency commonly called APHIS, for the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service. APHIS was included in the new department because it watches the nation’s borders for foreign agricultural diseases and pests, but it also provides a host of other services that the interest groups don’t want to lose.

At the National Turkey Federation, for example, officials had their eyes on what APHIS’ new future might mean for its National Poultry Improvement Plan. “We want to make sure that continues to operate,” said Joel Brandenberger of the federation, who attended the industry meeting Friday. “But this whole proposal is not raising any alarms here,” he insisted loyally.

Beyond the level of bureaucratic headaches, the new department must create a common culture among extraordinarily disparate workers--Border Patrol agents working alongside nuclear scientists from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, for instance, and security guards responsible for protecting government buildings winning the respect of FBI agents. “How to get people to work and act as a team is an enormous issue,” Kettl said.

The cultural divide is more than psychological. “You have to make sure that different pieces of the organization can share information and make sure that other things don’t get lost,” he said.

Yet different organizations have different ways of doing things. All FBI background checks, for example, must be typed onto certain forms. Typewritten information is more cumbersome to use, harder to share and more susceptible to error than computer data, but that’s how the bureau does it. Efforts to give it a duly modern computer system have foundered for years.

Bush Wants to Move Entire Agencies

In the case of the Homeland Security Department, the task is complicated further by a provision of the Bush proposal: Instead of moving only those parts of existing agencies that deal with homeland security, Bush proposes to move the whole agencies and all their functions--many of them totally unrelated to terrorism.

If those unrelated responsibilities are given due attention by the new department’s leaders, critics are already suggesting, they will distract those employees, as Bush put it Saturday, who are supposed to “come to work every morning knowing their most important job is to protect their fellow citizens.” More likely, the peripheral duties will come out on the short end of budgetary resources and management attention.

James Lee Witt, who was director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency during the Clinton administration, agrees that homeland security should be a Cabinet agency, but he worries about unrelated responsibilities of agencies folded into it.

“A lot of local FEMA programs will be lost” in a homeland security department, Witt said. “What would they define as a priority?”

Livermore Laboratory Is Slated to Move

For California’s Lawrence Livermore lab, which is also marked to move to the new department, homeland security accounts for only a small part of what it does. “They do develop some technologies, sensors to detect dangerous gases in subway stations and things like that,” said a congressional aide who is familiar with the laboratory. “But they’re primarily a nuclear weapons lab.”

The proposal must have been “developed by someone in the White House who really didn’t understand” what the lab does, the aide said. “As more details come out, we’re very doubtful that Livermore will be part of the new agency.”

Bush also named the Coast Guard as one of the first agencies to be transferred--from the Transportation Department--because the Coast Guard patrols harbors and coastal waters. But the Homeland Security Department will also inherit the Coast Guard’s responsibilities for enforcing fishing treaties, dealing with oil spills and rescuing hapless boaters.

Gordon Johndroe, the spokesman for the Office of Homeland Security, insisted that agencies moved to the new department would continue to carry out peripheral programs.

“Homeland security functions are the most important, but the other functions are not going to get lost,” Johndroe said. “There are some non-homeland functions that will get done by this agency.”

Original Proposal Likely to Change Dramatically

In the months ahead, congressional committees--and the relevant interest groups--will pore over the fine print of the new department’s constituent parts, detail issues such as these and negotiate compromises. The final product, if experience is any guide, will be substantially different from the original proposal.

Unless a new terrorist threat regalvanizes the public, the process is expected to proceed at its traditional pace, which can seem frustratingly slow but is the likeliest way to deliver a final product with broad support.

Within the bureaucracy, the president’s unequivocal support for reorganization will reduce resistance from his own team.

At the Department of Transportation, for instance, Secretary Norman Y. Mineta said Friday that he had no reservations about losing the fledgling Transportation Security Administration as well as the Coast Guard to Homeland Security. “I think what we have today is a clear vision by the president that really deals with a comprehensive approach,” Mineta said.

The Transportation Security Administration, created several months ago in response to Sept. 11, is in the midst of taking over security at 429 airports, under a tight schedule set by Congress. Mineta said that work would continue as planned over the summer and fall, and he said he did not expect any delays in meeting congressional deadlines. “We’ve got to stay focused on doing our business.”

Even if turf and other problems can be solved, some experts questioned whether creating a new Cabinet department would really make the country safer.

“I don’t think it’s necessary to create a new intelligence superstructure. That is exactly opposite the lesson learned from the intelligence failures before 9/11” or from the complaints of stifling bureaucracy from Minneapolis FBI lawyer Coleen Rowley, said Juliette Kayyem, executive director of the Harvard Executive Session on Domestic Preparedness, a think tank organized by the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.

Unquestionably, one of the big weaknesses of the government’s pre-Sept. 11 intelligence system was a lack of coordination, Kayyem said. But that was not for lack of structure, she said: “The structure was flawed by actions of individuals.”

“Changing the chains of command doesn’t itself necessarily change anything,” said Michael O’Hanlon, a Brookings Institution scholar and coauthor of a report released this spring. It criticized homeland security operations for focusing too much on preventing another Sept. 11 and not enough on predicting and preventing other types of terrorist attacks.

Reorganization May Not Make Nation Safer

The Department of Homeland Security proposal has many of the same weaknesses, O’Hanlon said.

“We’re really just focusing on trying to keep bad people out and dealing with the consequences of an attack after the fact,” he said. “It doesn’t answer the hard questions about vulnerability and how to protect” weak spots.

Reorganizing the government is a lot different from increasing homeland security, he argued, and “to confuse the two would be a big mistake.”

Still, defenders of the reorganization effort think it’s worth trying. The ANSER Institute’s Larsen recalled an observation by then-Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower: “The right organization will not guarantee success. But the wrong organization will guarantee failure.”

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Times staff writers Jonathan Peterson, Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar and Aaron Zitner, and Times researcher Robin Cochran contributed to this report.