Turf Battles Could Snag Bush’s Security Proposal

It was a crisis-ridden day at the White House. An alleged “dirty” bomb terrorist plot had been revealed. Israel’s prime minister was in town for talks on the volatile Middle East. The India-Pakistan dispute remained tense. And where was President Bush’s right-hand man?

Andrew H. Card Jr., Bush’s chief of staff, was on Capitol Hill, urging committee functionaries to put aside petty turf wars and support the president’s plan to create a new Department of Homeland Security. Card’s focus on massaging House and Senate aides was a measure of how large congressional power struggles loom as an obstacle to quick approval of Bush’s plan.

House and Senate leaders ended their initial work on the plan this week by setting an ambitious timetable for acting on legislation to carry out the reorganization. But they face widespread skepticism that they can meet the Sept. 11 deadline some have set. And even to get the job done by the end of the year, the leaders face the prospect of hand-to-hand combat with other congressional power brokers.

“The biggest obstacle is parochialism,” said House Majority Leader Dick Armey (R-Texas).

Indeed, many lawmakers wondering what the new department would mean for the nation’s security also are asking a second question: What does it mean for me?

At stake is not just the shape of the federal bureaucracy but the power structure in Congress. That’s because the reorganization would affect the committees that give lawmakers their institutional identity, the home-state interests they were elected to protect and the issues they have built their careers around.

Thus, leaders of the House Transportation Committee balked at the new department subsuming two of the biggest agencies the panel oversees. Californians wrung their hands about the apparent effort to make Lawrence Livermore Laboratory, located east of San Francisco, part of the new agency. New Mexicans jockeyed to keep their state’s federally financed labs out of the plan. Farm-state lawmakers similarly questioned plans to move into the new agency animal and plant inspection programs now administered by the Agriculture Department.

It took congressional leaders all week just to figure out how to handle the bill that would set up the new agency, juggling the competing claims of committee barons who wanted a hand in drafting it.

Such turf wars arise from an understandable instinct to hold onto the clout and expertise lawmakers spend their careers acquiring. But Bush wasted no time turning the spotlight on that dynamic. Since proposing the new department in a nationwide speech June 6, he and his aides continually have warned that self-serving congressional power struggles threaten to derail it.

In doing so, Bush has laid the groundwork for blaming Congress if the government fails to deter a future terrorist attack. That, in turn, should give lawmakers a powerful political incentive to suppress their natural instincts to guard their turf.

“The terror of being on the wrong side of a terrorist attack will motivate Congress,” said Norman Ornstein, an expert on Congress at the conservative American Enterprise Institute.

At the same time, Bush paid homage to the barons of the status quo when he invited key congressional committee leaders to the White House on Wednesday to discuss his proposal. When one senator asked him how he thought Congress should organize its handling of the bill to create the new department, Bush demurred. “I’m not going to touch that,” Bush said, according to one source at the meeting.

Committee chairmen jockeyed for position throughout the week, as congressional leaders decided whether to create a new committee to handle the bill or allow it to be debated by the dozens of committees and subcommittees with jurisdiction over the various functions that would be merged.

Senate leaders decided to stick with the current system. House leaders chose a middle course that allows existing committees to make recommendations to a special committee appointed by the leadership.

Whatever the venue, drafting the measure will require lawmakers to resolve not just big questions--such as whether to keep the CIA and FBI separate from the new department, as Bush advocates--but also a welter of more parochial concerns.

For example, loud complaints have come from the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, which oversees some of the biggest agencies that would be transferred to the new department. These include the Coast Guard, the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the Transportation Security Administration, which is overseeing the new airport security work force.

Rep. Don Young (R-Alaska), chairman of the transportation panel, opposes putting the Coast Guard into the new department because he fears the guard’s non-security functions will be given short shrift in a department whose primary mission is homeland security. The Coast Guard’s non-defense functions--including oil-spill response, icebreaking and enforcement of laws against fish poaching--are especially important to his home state.

Young said he worries that if the Coast Guard is supervised by officials “whose primary focus is security, you can forget about search and rescue, you can forget about fishing patrols.”

He also is concerned about transferring the Transportation Safety Administration just a few months after it was created in post-Sept. 11 legislation crafted largely by his committee.

Rep. James L. Oberstar (D-Minn.), a committee member, joined Young in airing such complaints at the Wednesday meeting with Bush.

Oberstar also raised questions about the wisdom of moving FEMA into the new department when so much of FEMA’s work is disaster aid unrelated to homeland security.

Some lawmakers say they plan to resist raising home-state concerns as part of a debate on national security. “I don’t think parochialism is going to stand against Bush’s leadership,” said Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.). He said he would not fight to keep Alabama’s center for domestic preparedness from being transferred to the new department.

But other members have not been so shy. Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) proposed that a special office be established within the new department to address New York’s special needs.

Senate Agriculture Committee Chairman Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) is among lawmakers from farm-belt states concerned about putting the Agriculture Department’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service into the new agency. The service plays a role in biological warfare defense, but it also enforces animal welfare laws and conducts research that has nothing to do with homeland security. Harkin is worried about the effect on an animal disease laboratory in his home state that is partially run by the service.

Rep. Ellen O. Tauscher (D-Alamo) has been a leading supporter of a homeland security department. But she swung into action when she learned that the Bush proposal seemed to call for including in it the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory, which is in her district. She asked Rep. William M. “Mac” Thornberry (R-Texas) to convey her concerns to the White House. By Wednesday, she won assurances from Tom Ridge, Bush’s homeland security director, that the lab would not be subsumed.

Sen. Jeff Bingaman (D-N.M.) wrote to Bush urging him to leave his home state’s two national labs in the Department of Energy.

The array of such concerns is what makes many lawmakers dubious that Congress can reach the goal of finishing the bill by Sept. 11. “That is just not a reachable goal,” said Rep. Ray LaHood (R-Ill.). “It’s too much heavy lifting.”

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Times staff writer Richard Simon contributed to this report.