THOMPSON
ADVOCATES FOR INCREASED FLEXIBILITY IN HOMELAND SECURITY
LEGISLATION
Tuesday,
September 4, 2002
Washington,
DC – Senator Fred Thompson, Ranking Member of the
Governmental Affairs Committee, opened debate today on S.
2452, the National Homeland Security and Combating Terrorism
Act, by outlining his concerns with the lack of management,
personnel, and budget flexibility in the proposed legislation.
Thompson also reiterated his opposition to the bill’s
creation of a Directorate of Intelligence, which separates the
Department’s information analysis functions from the
critical infrastructure protection.
“Few
need to be reminded why we are here.
While September 11 was not the opening salvo, it was
the event that forced us to confront the scope of the threats
to our country and to recognize the need to do something
significant and meaningful to address those threats,” said
Thompson. “According
to the legislation before us today, the mission of the new
Department is to ‘promote homeland security,’ ‘prevent
terrorist attacks,’ and ‘reduce the vulnerability of the
United
States
to
terrorism.’ I
question how this new Department will possibly be able to
fulfill its mission if it is bogged down by the same
persistent management problems that face the rest of our
government.”
Thompson
argued that the current management paradigms are out-of-date
for the modern, technological workforce needed by the federal
government to meet the challenges of the 21st
century, and that the current management structure puts no
premium on accountability.
Managers find it difficult to reward good performers,
and even more difficult to sanction poor performers, according
to Thompson.
“I
fear that we are setting ourselves up for failure if we do not
provide the new Secretary with the flexibility to manage the
Department properly. We
simply must give this new Department and this new Secretary
the management tools with which to carry out this new massive
and vitally important job,” Thompson said.
The
creation of a Department of Homeland Security will consolidate
22 federal agencies composed of almost 70,000 employees, 17
different unions, 77 existing collective bargaining
agreements, 7 payroll systems, and 80 different personnel
management systems.
“Others argue that the Secretary does not need
additional managerial tools or flexibility to take on this
monumental task. And
I agree with them that flexibility is not needed to set up
another federal bureaucracy that resembles the rest of our
federal government, or to replicate the problems that pervade
our government in terms of federal workforce management,
financial management, information technology management, and
program overlap and duplication,” Thompson said.
“Our goal in this new Department must not be to
replicate failures, but rather to make improvements. If we can
not improve our well known operational shortcomings now, that
our nation’s security is at issue, when in the world will we
ever be able to do so?”
Authority to exercise limited discretion over the
Department’s budget is another managerial authority that
Thompson believes is essential for the new Department.
Similar to personnel flexibility, budget flexibility is
not revolutionary. Congress
often recognizes that, at times, there may be legitimate
reasons to provide funding flexibility to agencies, as
circumstances might occur that were not anticipated when an
agency submitted its budget over a year or more ago.
“By maintaining the status quo, we are prohibiting
the Secretary from accessing a single cent of the unexpended
funds from agencies that are transferred to the new Department
to assist in the transition.
Instead, the Secretary must appeal to Congress to enact
enabling legislation each and every time the new Department
needs some flexibility to reorganize or to get the Department
up and running successfully,” said Thompson.
On
a separate issue, Thompson reiterated his opposition to the
proposal’s creation of a Directorate of Intelligence.
S. 2452 would separate the Department’s information
analysis functions from the critical infrastructure protection
by creating a separate directorate for each.
The purpose of such a division was to create a new
national-level information fusion center.
The President proposed that the new Department contain
a component to assess the Nation’s vulnerabilities to
terrorism, analyze information regarding threats to our
homeland, and match the threat assessments to the nation’s
vulnerabilities to help prioritize our homeland security
efforts.
“While a number of agencies conduct a variety of
threat assessments, and a few agencies conduct narrowly
focused vulnerability assessments, no one in the federal
government married the threats with the vulnerabilities to
develop national policy,” said Thompson.
“The Committee substitute differs from the
President’s proposal by splitting the intelligence analysis
component of the new Department from the infrastructure
protection component and creating two distinct organizations
within the new Department.
I support the establishment of an intelligence
capability in the new Department, but I believe the
President’s proposal is more sound than the Committee’s
approach.”
Thompson intends to offer several amendments during the
Senate’s deliberations of legislation to create a Department
of Homeland Security, many of which will focus on how the
Department will be run.
“We clearly need innovation and flexibility.
We need to look at things differently.
We should do what is best for the American people,”
concluded Thompson. |