Homeland Security Watch

Comment by William R. Cumming

January 21, 2009 @ 11:47 am

Will be interesting to see if the new Secretary’s drive for a unified vision for DHS stresses law enforcement and prevention, mitigation and recovery, specialized agencies with express statutory charters such as Secret Service, and Coast Guard, or the most important of all DOMESTIC CRISIS MANAGEMENT for large-scale domestic emergencies. At the moment in my judgement the silence is oppressive and virtually nothing significant learned from the Secretary’s confirmation hearings. Let’s just see what week by week and month by month progress is made on the unified mission. Personally, I think Secretary Chertoff’s greatest accomplishment was almost getting passage of Immigration Reform which was killed by the Republicans. Perhaps Senator McCain will pick up the torch. The rest of the time since March 1, 2003 when DHS was formed was largely reactive to events, oversupplying DHS with political appointees, and really never coming to grips with the basics. But hey could be wrong. Certainly a new FEMA will only be known if and when there is a wide-scale domestic disaster with mulitple geographic impacts. By the way while I view Katrina as a natural disaster in Alabama and Mississippi, I view Katrina as largely a wide scale man-made or enhanced greatly by human action events. Time will tell on DHS’s evolution. Also will the DEMS conduct the “Ferocious” oversight that the Republicans did while in the majority before 2006? Have not seen any substantive accomplishments through oversight by the DEMS yet even though in Majority in both Houses. Perhaps DHS could publish a comprehensive version of all the Executive Orders, HSPD’s, statutes and other mandates that it thinks it has responsiblity and authority for. But hey knowing what the legal mandates are never stopped the Republicans. Real question is of interest is what OLC/DOJ rulings were issued that impacted DHS in the period after its creation (or even before)? Did the GC of DHS ever request OLC advice? That might be an interesting transition document!