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Release Date: 03/29/04 00:00:00
March 29, 2004
Thank you very much. Let me begin by thanking President Bush for his steadfast support for me throughout my entire career in politics and government. I am grateful to him for once again calling upon me to fill a critically important position in his administration. Thanks to him, I have now served as the Inspector General of the nation's oldest cabinet department, the Department of State, and, the newest, the Department of Homeland Security.
Mr. Secretary, thank you for taking time out of your extraordinarily busy schedule to be here today. You honor me and my family by being here, and your presence lends special meaning to this ceremony that will help to make it an even more memorable day for us in the years to come than it would otherwise be. I join millions of other Americans in commending you for taking on the most important and most difficult job in the Cabinet, protecting our nation against another terrorist attack, and I salute you for the leadership that you have shown to date.
I want to thank the various other special guests who are here today, including, my friend HUD Acting Secretary Jackson, the various Under Secretaries, Assistant Secretaries, and Deputy Assistant Secretaries in both the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of State, and the members of the White House staff. Thanks to many of my fellow Inspectors General for being here. Thanks to my congressional representative back home in Houston and my longtime friend, who was more successful in electoral politics than I, Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee. And, many thanks to my old friend, the Deputy Chief of Protocol at the Department of State, Jeff Eubank, for agreeing to serve as today's emcee. It seems like only yesterday that it was the fall of 2000 and we were back in Texas, sitting in our favorite Austin burger joint, plotting the friendly takeover of the United States government. It's all worked out just as we planned it, hasn't it, Jeff?
I am delighted to be joined today by the delightful lady I affectionately and accurately refer to as the Inspector General's Inspector General, my darling wife, Carolyn Harris. I'm grateful also for the presence of my dear mother and big brother, my parents-in-law, my brothers and sisters-in-law, and most of our many nieces and nephews. A big thank you to all Ervins and Harrises for being here. And, I am delighted by the presence today of so many friends and associates from far and wide, including, even, my politics tutor from graduate school days all the way from Oxford, England. I am grateful to each one of you for being here today to share this special moment with me and my loved ones.
And, last but not least, a word of sincere gratitude to the 450 or so inspectors, auditors, investigators, information technology experts, lawyers, paralegals, administrative personnel, and congressional and media affairs staff here in Washington and 19 offices throughout the country who make up the Office of Inspector General. I am fortunate indeed to have such a stellar team.
On September 7, 2001, Secretary Colin Powell officially swore me into office as the Inspector General of the State Department. Four days later, for the first time in our nation's history, terrorists carried out a horrific and devastating attack on our homeland, killing thousands, and, in Shakespeare's apt and chilling phrasing, "wreaking havoc and unleash(ing) the dogs of war." I remember having to rush from my office to attend the monthly Inspectors General meeting in the White House conference center just minutes after hearing that a second plane at hit the World Trade Center, only to hear from the car radio as I approached the White House that it was being evacuated for fear of being attacked by an incoming plane. Racing back to the State Department, the car radio advised at almost the moment I approached that the State Department was being evacuated due to a bomb threat. Racing on foot to the nearest hotel to watch television news coverage, I saw Secret Service agents, guns drawn, stop a suspicious looking Ryder truck driver. Eventually, after waiting for hours in a crowded and chaotic Georgetown hotel, I finally managed to get back to the State Department, pick up my car, and inch my way back home, a trip that normally takes 15 minutes taking three hours that day. And, then, finally, I reached home, with home being literally across the street from the then still flaming Pentagon.
As I watched the towers fall, the Pentagon burn, and that Pennsylvania field smolder that day, I knew that our country and the world had changed forever. I could not know and did not know that my own life would also change as a result.
In time, the Administration and the Congress would agree to pull together into one department the disparate agencies and sub-agencies throughout Washington involved in homeland security, constituting the largest and most complex reorganization of the federal government in half a century, if not in history. There was little doubt as to whom the President would tap to lead the new department, our esteemed Secretary, who had ably served as the President's chief White House adviser on homeland security matters in the months after 9/11 and before the creation of the department.
But, as I settled into my job at the State Department and watched from a distance as homeland security developments unfolded, I had no idea that the phone would ring one otherwise uneventful fall afternoon and the White House would be on the other line asking me to put my name in contention for Inspector General of the new department.
However flattering the call, under normal circumstances, I would likely have said no to the invitation. I had only begun to implement my agenda at the State Department's Office of Inspector General, and I knew that there was a lot more that I wanted to do. But, these weren't normal circumstances. The nation isn't normally attacked by terrorists, thank God, and the government isn't normally reorganized on such a massive scale to confront terrorism or anything else, for that matter.
I then reflected upon the mission of Inspectors General - through our audits, inspections, and investigations, to make the departments we are statutorily responsible for overseeing as effective, efficient, and economical as they can be. And, then I quickly concluded that I owed it to my country to do anything and everything I could do to help to make not just any department, but this department, the one charged with protecting our country against another terrorist attack, as effective, efficient, and economical as it could be.
After all, every day, millions of people cross our borders by air, land, and sea. Any one of those people could be a terrorist. Every day, countless tons of cargo arrive at our seaports. Any one of those containers could carry a weapon of mass destruction. Every day, the 250 million Americans depend upon what we call the nation's "critical infrastructure," that is, computer networks, the banking system, the stock market, the energy sector, the food industry, to provide essential goods and services. An attack on any one of these systems could be devastating.
And, so as Secretary Ridge so rightly often points out, the odds are decidedly in favor of our enemies. The Department of Homeland Security inspectors, screeners, and air marshals who guard our borders, the Department of Homeland Security liaisons who work with private industry to safeguard our critical infrastructure, the Department of Homeland Security intelligence analysts who work with their colleagues in the intelligence community to divine and analyze threats against the homeland, and the Department of Homeland Security law enforcement personnel who work with their counterparts in other departments to break up terror cells and track down criminal aliens all have to get it right every single day, every single moment of the day. Would be terrorists, on the other hand, have to succeed just once to visit devastation on us once again. So, while Washington is admittedly a town full of hyperbole and exaggeration, it is no hyperbole and no exaggeration to say that DHS has literally no margin for error.
So, while every department should be as effective, efficient, and economical in its programs and operations as possible, it is a must that DHS be effective, efficient, and economical. A defect in a DHS program could be exploited by terrorists to kill people. An inefficient process or an uneconomical operation wastes time and money when there is no time or money to spare.
This is why I have attempted in the past year as Acting Inspector General to be a vigorous, even, aggressive Inspector General. This is why I have charged my able team of auditors, inspectors, and information technology experts with evaluating every single one of the department's most important programs and initiatives, sometimes even when those programs and initiatives have only just begun. Indeed, that's when our objective reviews and detailed recommendations can be of the greatest value, before irremediable mistakes are made and before irretrievable dollars are misspent. This is why I've charged my investigators with taking the lead on investigating the most serious allegations of criminal and non-criminal wrongdoing on the part of the department's 180,000 plus employees and numerous contractors and grantees. While criminality or misconduct in any government agency is intolerable, criminality or misconduct in the department charged with keeping us safe from terrorism is simply inexcusable.
Now, I know that we Inspectors General aren't likely to win any popularity contests. Our jobs require us to point out the weaknesses we see in government programs and operations, and, since the programs and operations are run by human beings, and since human beings are, well, human, our criticisms can be difficult to hear and difficult to accept. Why the other day someone summed up the feeling about Inspectors General in some quarters by saying, "They're kind of like a 'necessary evil,' except that they're not necessary."
Well, now that is Washington hyperbole and exaggeration. We're not evil, of course, and, as I've tried to show in my remarks today, we ARE necessary, especially in a department like this one. As our founders recognized, the genius of our system of government is the recognition that watchdogs like Inspectors General and other such checks and balances are the essential guardians of the public's security, liberty, and trust.
That said, we Inspectors General must be objective and dispassionate, non-partisan and apolitical, jealously independent yes, but never gratuitously confrontational or vindictive. We must never blindside or grandstand. We are here not just to point out problems, but also to help to solve them. And, it is incumbent upon us to give the departments we oversee due credit for their achievements and successes, and to put any shortcomings we point out in context. I have tried to strike this delicate balance throughout my tenure, and I will continue to do so. Let me take this opportunity now to say that there is no question in my judgment that, for all the challenges that remain, the Department of Homeland Security has made our country better prepared against terrorism than ever before. And that is a tribute to the leadership of the Secretary and his management team and the hard work of the thousands of DHS employees here in Washington, throughout the country, and abroad.
That said, the challenges that remain are formidable. We are up against a shadowy, wily, hydra headed, relentless, and ruthless, enemy. And, if the challenge was not formidable enough, we must meet the challenge in a way that is protective of our civil rights and civil liberties and that preserves our privacy. Ours will be a pyrrhic victory if in the process of defending freedom we sacrifice liberty.
As the former DHS Deputy Secretary put it the other night at a gathering of Inspectors General at the Naval Academy, we are fighting against the third "ism" to confront freedom loving people in modern times. First, there was fascism (and, its spawn, nazism), then communism, and now, terrorism. However long it may take, I am confident that we will prevail over this challenge, too, just as we triumphed twice before in our history.
As you and others in the department work to meet this challenge, Mr. Secretary, you will find in me and my team an eager partner in a shared effort to make the Department of Homeland Security, the newest federal agency, and, in my judgment, the most important one, a model for the rest of government to follow and a government agency that all of the American people can be proud of.
Thank you very much.
This page was last reviewed/modified on 03/29/04 00:00:00.