Homeland Security

Real Audio of Briefing

       MR. FALKENRATH: Thank you very much, and good morning. I wanted to explain to you some of the developments that have happened in the White House and the U.S. government since 9/11, starting really with the very beginning.

       Immediately after the attack on 9/11 we found ourselves dealing with two enormous struggles: one at home simply to deal with the repercussions of the attack and all of the different vulnerabilities that need to be protected and all the response systems that needed to be monitored at home. And then abroad the beginning of building of an international coalition to deal with this threat abroad, ultimately resulting in the war. And this was a huge challenge just structurally for the White House itself. We really weren't structured at that time to deal with this volume of activity focused on international terrorism and then homeland security and homeland response.

       So, as a result of that, the vice president of the United States recommended to the president that he create an Office of Homeland Security, a separate entity within the White House itself that would be a parallel structure to the National Security Council, where I worked before 9/11, and which historically had handled both issues. But the vice president's recommendation to the president was that we needed a new structure in the White House to deal with the domestic side, the homeland security side exclusively. The president accepted that recommendation. He announced it to the world in an address to the joint session of Congress on September 20.

       And he also announced that Governor Tom Ridge of Pennsylvania had agreed to take on the leadership of that new office within the White House, giving up his governorship in Pennsylvania to come down during this time of national need to lead that office.

       So the Office of Homeland Security was created on October 8th, initially with a very small staff. And you will recall that at that same time while the office was being created was also America's first major bioterrorist incident. The anthrax letters and the resulting outbreaks of inhalation anthrax began in very early October. So Governor Ridge really had to hit the ground running, dealing not only with the ongoing response to the 9/11 attacks, but also this completely unprecedented bioterrorist attack involving three letters with very sophisticated powderized anthrax imbedded within them. It was a huge challenge to stand that up.

       The office grew rapidly. I was asked to come over from the National Security Council at the end of October. But we remain only about 100, 120 people in that office, and our responsibilities are extensive and broad.

       We went about not only dealing with the immediate response to the 9/11 attack and to reducing our vulnerability at certain key targets, to dealing with the anthrax attack; the office worked very closely with the Office of Management and Budget to put together the president's budget for fiscal year 2003, which included an almost doubling of how much money we are spending on homeland security. That's about $38 billion the president requested for '03.

       Then the office began to work on what's called the national strategy for homeland security. The president directed the office to produce a national security for homeland security in his executive order creating the office. It was a major task for us to pull together all the different things that the country was doing -- not just the federal government, but also state and local government, private sector, citizen groups, to pull that together, to identify how it related to our homeland security goals, and then to set priorities among the different tasks that we had to accomplish. That was one of my major responsibilities, and I was directly involved in that process.

       In the course of that effort, which was really from winter to the summer of this year, it became clear to many of the people involved in the study that the present structure of the federal government was ill-suited for the demands of homeland security. We really had too many different agencies trying to accomplish the core tasks of homeland security, and that the agencies and departments that were doing it often had vital homeland security missions, but they were sort of peripheral to the core responsibility of that department. So I'll give you an example.

       The agency of the U.S. government with primary responsibility for preventing the introduction of a weapon of mass destruction into the United States is the Customs Service. And the Customs Service is part of the Department of Treasury, whose core responsibility is fiscal policy. And so it just doesn't make a lot of sense in our view to have such a vital function, guarding our borders against weapons of mass destruction, as part of a department that has an entirely different priority.

       So the president asked a small team of people to put together a proposal to create a Department of Homeland Security, and we did that in the spring. And he made that proposal to the country on June 6th. And ever since then the administration has been working very closely with the Congress to put together that legislation, to create this new department. The legislation has moved very fast -- has enormous momentum. And we are hopeful that a good bill will emerge out of the Congress and come to the president's desk some time before they adjourn and go off for the elections, and he can sign that and create this new cabinet agency.

       We would like that agency to have four main responsibilities. The first is border and transportation security. This will be a unit of the department that brings together all of our major border and transportation security functions. So it will bring together the INS, Customs Service, the Coast Guard, agricultural inspectors, the Transportation Security Administration which does airport security, and also will have control over visa issuance to everyone. So one person, one division of the U.S. government will have total control over the borders, and will have responsibility for making every decision about who can come in. There will be no fracturing of those responsibilities under the president's vision. That's one major area.

       The second is emergency response and recovery. This will be built around the Federal Emergency Management Agency. But we think the ability to respond to an incident is an integral part of homeland security, since sometimes that's how you are going to save lives, as we learned on 9/11, and as the Japanese experienced in March of 1995 when the Tokyo subway was attacked by nerve gas. Shows response matters a great deal.

       Third, there will be a science and technology division which will pull together a lot of the research and development effort related to homeland security.

       And, fourth, a new unit that will do intelligence analysis for threats to homeland security -- critical infrastructure protection which will be responsible for understanding the vulnerabilities of our cities, our stadiums, our subways, our dams, our electrical grids, the Internet -- and we'll keep those together under one roof so we can compare threats and vulnerabilities and figure out what are the areas that are of greatest danger in our society, and then systematically going about reducing those vulnerabilities. And all of this will report to a secretary of Homeland Security, who will be one of the most important members of the president's Cabinet.

       There will still be a White House office -- small, not operational, just doing policy, coordinating the activities. But this will be a very large and powerful department responsible -- trying to fulfill the expectations of the American people on the federal government, which is to secure our country against another terrorist attack such as the one that occurred on 9/11. It is a very daunting challenge -- I'll be candid with you. We are a free and open society. We have a tradition of very porous borders and the tradition of great welcoming to visitors from abroad, and also immigrants. We live in densely-concentrated cities, with lots of people living very closely together, and we rely intensively on a few key infrastructures like the transportation grid, the electrical grid, agriculture and water systems. And these are vulnerable in many ways, because they are very efficient and they are very accessible, and they are very concentrated geographically.

       Further, we know that the terrorist threat to us is a very intelligent threat. They are strategic actors who attack us in areas where they think we are most vulnerable, where we are weakest. And they are also growing increasingly capable. The rise in capability to cause mass destruction or disruption by terrorist groups is steady, and every year that goes by they are going to be more and more capable of causing grave harm to any of us -- to any developed country that is free and open in its tradition. And we believe in the United States it's the responsibility of our government to do its best to protect the people against that strategic and that increasingly threat, growing threat of terrorism.

       Terrorism is not just international that we have to worry about. There is also domestic terrorism that could occur -- in fact, it has occurred recently in some cases. So this is not just against the rest of the world. This is about protecting ourselves even against American terrorists if they try to do something like Timothy McVeigh did in April of 1995, attacking the Oklahoma City Federal Building.

       So that's what we've set about doing. The president has no higher responsibility than to protect the people, and a great deal is under way to do that. It is a mission that we take with the utmost seriousness, and we are building a new department of the federal government which will have 170,000 to 200,000 employees and a budget of about $38 billion. We are building a new department to do that. It's a major undertaking, but we think it's essential for the long term. So, with that, I'll take any questions.

       MODERATOR: I'll just remind you to use the microphone please.

       Q This is Mr. -- (inaudible) -- I am a AP reporter for Latin America. What kind of coordination is the new department going to have with the foreign governments? And the second question is: What kind of Department of State duties is absorbed in this new department?

       MR. FALKENRATH: On your first question, what relationship will the new department have with foreign governments -- we will do that as a government entirely, so the department will adhere to the basic principle that the State Department is who runs our foreign relations. They are our primary representative to foreign countries. So everything that the new department will do will be done with or through the State Department.

       There are a number of things it's going to need to do, however, primarily related to borders and border security and border management. Our agenda for border security is really a sort of revolutionary one, where we see a different border of the future where we work with our international partners to develop cooperative mechanisms so that we can together screen out the low-risk traffic, the people and the cargo and the vehicles that really present no threat whatsoever to the United States -- and that's the vast majority of it -- screen that out so we can move it quickly and expeditiously across the border. And then zero in on the higher-risk people and vehicles and cargos, so that those are the ones we can inspect and look at. And we know we cannot do that unilaterally.

       We can only do that in cooperation with our trading partners and with our -- the countries that -- where people move back and forth a lot. So, we will be pursuing that agenda, the -- we'll do it in cooperation with the State Department at every step. But I expect that the new department will have a small office of international affairs that will be in charge of that sort of liaison, will have some contact with foreign governments. But I think the new secretary will be at pains to not get out of step with our overall foreign policy. It's a very important principle.

       I'm sorry -- I don't remember the second question.

       Q Well, it's about the duty -- this new department is absorbing from the Department of State.

       MR. FALKENRATH: Okay. There's only one, and it's about visas. And historically, American law has -- has divided up the authority over controlling who enters into the country. On the one hand you have the secretary of state and the Department of State who issues visas to foreign nationals to come into the country. A visa -- and a visa is basically a right to approach the border and ask for admission. The attorney general, through the Immigration and Naturalization Service, has historically been the one who decides whether you come in as a foreign national and then what are the terms and conditions under which you can stay -- may you work, what sort of work, when do you have to leave, may you become naturalized, et cetera. So, you have this split between the department which issues the visa and the department which controls your entry and then the terms and conditions of your stay. And further, as you -- on the visa side, that power has been historically devolved down to the consular officer who has a non-reviewable right to make a visa issuance decision to foreign nationals. So, we have this rather complicated split.

       And what the president proposed to do in creating a new department was to bring those powers together and vest them in the secretary of homeland security. So, the cabinet official, the same department that will control your entry as a foreign national into the country, and then the terms and conditions of your stay, will also be the ones vested with the authority to issue the visa. So, there's no risk of a split or a difference and then we can simplify and facilitate things.

       The State Department and the Foreign Service officers will still be in the consulate and in the embassies administering that process and taking the interviews, and taking applications, and making determinations, but they will do so on the basis of authorities and guidelines given to them by the department of homeland security. So that's the only one change that related to the department of homeland security for the State Department.

       Q Sonia Shu -- (inaudible). You said that -- what about the international cooperation in the region, in Latin America? (Inaudible) -- with countries like Venezuela when President Chavez was accused to have some contacts with the Colombian guerrillas and Saddam Hussein?

       MR. FALKENRATH: An issue like that, my -- I wouldn't expect the department of homeland security or the Office of Homeland Security would be involved in dealing with an issue like that. That's a foreign relation issue. And, it's handled by the National Security Council, the National Security Advisor, Dr. Condoleezza Rice, the secretary of state and in some cases the secretary of defense. And so they're involved. The -- if it were in a cabinet meeting they were discussing that, the secretary of homeland security would be there as a member of the cabinet, but it won't be his principal responsibility.

       If a Venezuelan citizen wants to come into the country under the new circumstances, once this department is created and it, you know, it doesn't exist yet and we've got a way to got -- they, you know, that's when the department of homeland security starts to have an impact, because it will be that department which will control the granting of visas and then the admittance into the country and the terms and conditions. And one thing that we will do in exercising our sovereign right to control who comes into the country is we will be looking -- we will have systems for checking against individuals who apply against various watch lists to see if the pose any sort of threat, and we do that today. There -- it's an area where we're working on it to do it better, to do it more effectively and more efficiently, and we will continue to work on it. Under the new configuration, it will be the department of homeland security that will have to make sure that everyone who comes in, into our country, particularly if they're in any sort of expedited system, is not on any of those watch lists.

       Q Australian Broadcasting Service. An author on terrorism topics prior to your current position, and now given you're working in homeland security, how great do you judge the risk that nation states might pass on weapons of mass destruction to terrorist players, and that they in turn might be able to directly threaten the United States?

       MR. FALKENRATH: Well, I'm very worried about it. There's no way to put a probability on it that it will happen, but what we know is that the consequences of a terrorist group getting its hands on a weapons of mass destruction, from whatever source, including a complicit state, would be devastating, would be extremely damaging, not just to the United States but to whatever country happened to be the target of their use. So, we're worried about it. We have noticed that there is a nexus between the countries who are pursuing weapons of mass destruction and the countries who are sponsors of international terrorism, and that's a very worrisome nexus. So, Iran and Iraq are obviously in that category, to a certain extent though, decreasingly in the last -- North Korea certainly -- (inaudible) -- weapons of mass destruction. So, there is this nexus that we worry about. There's no way to assess the probability that they would make -- that these governments would voluntarily allow that capability to go into the hands of a terrorist group, but it's not zero.

       Q (Inaudible) -- Egypt. You mentioned that this department is going to have about 170- to 200,000 people. My first question is related to -- are these people are going to be hired or it's going to be moved -- they are going to be moved from other departments, like when you mentioned INS or visa issuing at the embassies? The second question -- (inaudible) -- this department, as much as I remember the concern from the other side of the Pennsylvania Avenue is that people are worried about the accountability of this department because it's getting like it's going to be the biggest department after the Department of Defense, and in the same time there are some concerns about the hiring and firing of the people. And of course there is a third issue which is related to -- you mentioned one of the tasks is the intelligence analysis -- I mean, is part of this department is to gather information too, or intelligence gathering, or what?

       MR. FALKENRATH: On your first question, all the people in the new department, or the vast majority of them will come from -- are right now government employees working for the different units -- Customs, INS, Border Patrol, FEMA, Coast Guard, and we're just bringing them together. So, there will be a few new hires but not too many. The vast majority are right now government employees.

       Second, this new department will be fully accountable to the Congress. I mean, that is one of the -- one of the virtues of having a department rather than a little office in the White House which is excluded by our doctrine of separation of powers, a department that Congress will have to -- the Senate will confirm its senior most officials, so they can't have their jobs unless the Senate says they may. The Congress will write its budget at whatever level of detail it chooses to do so, and can call up its officials for testimony at whenever they decide to do so, and can examine and request information from their files, and from their record, and the rest, and see what they're doing to make sure it really matches. So they -- they will be fully accountable to the Congress. There's really no risk about that.

       However, the one -- you are hearing, and there's a -- there's a controversy right now between the president and the Senate, the majority part of the Senate, the Democrats right now, is about how much flexibility will the new secretary have to make his department work. And we want a lot of flexibility. And the reason is we are taking 22 different agencies, entities, and we want to merge them. And we want to make them greater than the sum of the parts. We want to make it more efficient and more integrated, and leaner, and meaner, and with more people out in the posts and less people back at headquarters, with more money moved around to the places that really need it, and with the ability to give the workers really good incentives to perform. We want to reward them when they do well. We want to be able to get rid of them when they are not performing.

       We in the United States have a very old civil service system. We have very distinguished civil servants, people who have worked -- spent their whole lives working for the government, and the vast majority of them who are terrific. There are a few who are not performing well, like there are in any large organization. And we have a system right now that makes it extremely difficult to hold into account and to basically fire them if they're not doing their job. And we want that ability.

       By the same token, someone who has the exact same job right now as a poor performer and performs superbly well, this other person, we have no ability to reward that person and to give them extra pay or to give them a better work assignment, or increase their -- because the rigidities and the antiquated nature of our civil service system. So, we would like to reform that. It's not an ideological issue, it's just pragmatic. It's that we think that greater flexibility with our personnel will give us a better ability to secure the homeland. And it's becoming a partisan struggle and we regret that. It really shouldn't be.

       You've noted that I am an academic before I came into the government, and I have gone through the expert literature on the civil service in great detail, on the U.S. Civil Service, and the remarkable thing about this is that virtually every expert who has studied our civil service system and who cares about how well our government works, agrees that the system is flawed and it is not performing at acceptable levels and needs reform. It's an absolute unanimous opinion by the expert community. And so this is not a -- it's turning into a partisan issue here between the Congress and the White House in Washington, but if you go out you'll find out it's a completely non- partisan, bipartisan view among the expert community, if you simply take the time -- and it takes a lot of time -- to read what they've written and to study the commission reports that are out.

       Q (Inaudible) -- intelligence.

       MR. FALKENRATH: Oh, I'm sorry. The -- as we -- our proposal was for the department to have a information analysis unit. And one thing that it will do is look at threat information. It will not be really a primary gatherer of threat information and intelligence -- that will still be the FBI at home and the CIA abroad. But it will be a consumer. It will get all the information. The department will gather some information, kind of incidentally. For instance, by controlling the border, you're going to have lots and lots of data of who is coming and going. Right? And that's -- that's information that's coming from within the department, and we will gather that, analyze that as the units do right now. But there will be no new intelligence gathering powers added to the department, just the ones that exist today.

       Together with that threat analysis division, we also want a vulnerability analysis division. And this will be -- this is something that we don't really have in the U.S. government today, but it's a unit that will look out at America, and look internally and say "Where are we weak? Where are we vulnerable? What are the particular areas where if attacked could do great harm to us?" And we'll combine those two forms of analysis. In the -- in the military they call it net assessment, offense versus defense, enemy versus friendlies, and how do they compare. And that's what we want in this department because it doesn't -- we don't really have that right now. It's kind of a new thing and we need to create it.

       MODERATOR: (Inaudible.)

       Q This is -- (inaudible) -- from AP again. As you know, the drug trafficking has been termed as a national interest concern for the U.S. administration officials. And in this field the DEA is a leading international player. Is the DEA going to be moved out from the Justice Department to be placed in this new department?

       MR. FALKENRATH: No. The DEA is a law enforcement agency and our top law enforcement officer is the attorney general at the Department of Justice and it's going to stay there where it is. The main impact is the -- in one part of our war on drugs is what's called interdiction -- it's, you know, interdicting the actual ships or the aircraft or whatever that are coming into the country, and the lead agent for that right now in the current structure is the Coast Guard. And so the Coast Guard is coming to the department of homeland security and so it will have a role in the war on drugs, but it's basically a support role, and the lead will remain at DEA and under the attorney general.

       MODERATOR: (Inaudible.) Okay. Thank you very much. We appreciate having you.

       MR. FALKENRATH: Thank you.