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Guest Commentary July 19, 2002
Current Domestic Security Structure Is Clearly Inadequate
The Honorable Tom DeLay
Our current domestic security structure is clearly inadequate to meet the demands of an age in which the primary threats to the United States have shifted. While the threat of a conventional clash with a foreign power has diminished, new threats have surfaced. We now must grapple with asymmetrical warfare directed by rogue regimes and the related dangers posed by the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and terrorist organizations with global reach.
What America needs today is an overhauled, comprehensive agency that is engineered to accommodate the serious dangers unique to our time. We need to move beyond the bifurcated, scattered and dysfunctional dispersion of domestic security responsibility. We need to apply our ingenuity and experience to craft a combined agency whose employees will arrive at work each morning with a solitary defining mission: Protecting the people, resources, and institutions of the United States.
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To be organized effectively and function efficiently, the Homeland Security Department must be consolidated, flexible, and readily accountable to its Secretary. We simply cannot afford to invest this new department with the ponderous inefficiency that hobbles much of the federal bureaucracy.
The safety and security of the United States is reason enough to design a Homeland Security Department that is responsive, adaptable, innovative, and aggressively focused on a single defining mission.
For a host of reasons, the process of combining the respective components of the federal government into a combined entity will be difficult and contentious. But we can't allow our security to be sidetracked to preserve political fiefdoms or compromised by parochial concerns -- there's simply too much at stake.
Although this process will be grueling we often find that our most difficult assignments produce the work from which we draw the greatest pride and satisfaction. And, if it is successful in preempting a catastrophic attack, the creation of this new Department may eventually be seen as the most important step taken by Congress in many decades.
Tom DeLay, a Republican, represents the 22nd Congressional District of Texas in the U.S. House of Representatives and is the House Majority Whip. The above commentary has been adapted from remarks Rep. DeLay made at a hearing of the House Select Committee on Homeland Security. To contact him, Click Here.
The above column has been distributed by PoliticsOL.com.
