DHS IG says bureaucracy unable to fight terrorism

In the aftermath of the EunuchBomber’s botched attack, Janet Napolitano assured Americans 48 hours later that “the system worked”.  When the entire nation scoffed at that assertion, the DHS Secretary amended her remarks to assert that she just meant her system worked — even though that had nothing to do with the conversation at hand with CNN’s Candi Crowley or with the concerns of Americans.  Now, the Inspector General of DHS says that Napolitano is as wrong as she can be about her amended assertion, and that DHS is failing miserably at counterrorism:

The Homeland Security Department’s National Operations Center (NOC) is “unable” to do its job of ensuring coordination among the 22 federal agencies that make up the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and focuses too much on disaster management rather than terrorism prevention, according to its own inspector general.

The National Operations Center, in fact, functions largely in name only, and current operations apparently have diminished its ability to respond to terrorist threats.

These assessments are presented in a redacted report from the DHS Office of Inspector General released in November and entitled “Information Sharing at the National Operations Center.”

The main problem?  Bureaucracy, and the alphabet soup of agencies blended into DHS.  Despite the mandate from Congress, DHS’ NOC has little authority to compel cooperation.  They must “politely ask” agencies to work with them even within the DHS structure.  Meanwhile, the component agencies continue to pursue turf protection and their own goals.

Even more disturbing, the IG reports that DHS hasn’t been focused on counterterrorism for a long period of time.  Instead, they have responded to the post-Katrina mandate to focus on emergency response to disasters.  This is precisely the problem critics of the creation of DHS predicted when Congress married national security to disaster response.  They are two different tasks with completely different approaches, and having one organization splitting its focus weakens both efforts.

This mirrors the issue of intelligence after the EunuchBomber, which came from a lack of information sharing within another conglomerated bureaucracy created by Congress to solve that specific problem.  In that case, Congress kept all of the component agencies as is, added a central clearinghouse for data gathering, and slapped several layers of bureaucracy on top of it all.  That’s exactly what DHS and NOC did as well.

Congress has to revisit both and eliminate the problems it created over the last eight years.  National security and disaster response should be two separate entities, with streamlining to eliminate bureaucratic boundaries and turf wars and with better focus on both missions.  This is not a failure of the Obama administration, which really did inherit both problems, but it’s Obama’s responsibility to fix it — and Obama should have been more proactive in doing so rather than waiting for a terrorist attack that thankfully failed.

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