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New cabinet quick action { June 7 2002 } Original Source Link: (May no longer be active)
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-060702bush_wr.storyhttp://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-060702bush_wr.story
Bush Urges Quick Action on Security Plan
Congress: President warns lawmakers against power struggles as they work to bring domestic security functions, now scattered among more than 100 federal entities, under one Cabinet agency.
By SANDRA SOBIERAJ
Associated Press Writer
June 7 2002, 8:39 AM PDT
WASHINGTON -- President Bush today warned Congress against sparking a "turf battle" over his plan to create a Department of Homeland Security, and said he was sending top adviser Tom Ridge to Capitol Hill to promote the terrorist-fighting plan.
"We've got a lot of work to do to get this department implemented. There's going to be a lot of turf protection in the Congress. But I'm convinced that, by working together, that we can do what's right for America," Bush said after a meeting with nearly a dozen Democratic and Republican lawmakers.
The morning after outlining his agency-shuffling plan in a televised address, Bush convened a strategy session in the White House Cabinet Room to survey the opinions of lawmakers. They already had drafted legislation doing essentially what the president has proposed: gathering all the domestic security functions, currently spread among more than 100 federal entities, into a single Cabinet agency.
Because 88 congressional committees and subcommittees have a piece of the domestic-security puzzle, power struggles are inevitable.
"There is nothing wrong with a good turf battle fight and one way to win that argument is calling upon the good services of the affected members of the House and the Senate," Bush said, surveying the room. "That's what this meeting is all about. It's about the beginning of winning the turf battle."
Sen. Joseph Lieberman, co-sponsor of domestic security legislation, agreed with Bush that passage won't be easy.
"We're not kidding ourselves," he said after the White House meeting. "There's going to be some opposition and it probably will be bureaucratic turf protection. There will be a lot of arguments about why we ought not to do this."
Ridge, the president's domestic security adviser, has avoided formal congressional testimony by insisting that precedent shields presidential advisers from the microscope of congressional inquiry. Bush said he was making an exception to that rule, but only for testimony about creating the new Cabinet department.
Afterward, Ridge said Bush directed him to testify before Congress only as an advocate of the new Cabinet department. "The testimony on the Hill will not be as an adviser and there will not be any discussion relevant to the advice and counsel" Ridge shares with the president, he said.
"The president believes very strongly that it's important to preserve the prerogative not only of this administration but of future administrations to have advisers of presidents" not subject to congressional testimony, Ridge said.
The government restructuring, the most extensive since Harry Truman created the Defense Department and National Security Council nearly 60 years ago, requires legislation to be passed by the House and Senate. Bush asked Americans to weigh in with their elected representatives, a plea he was repeating in a trip to Iowa today.
Bush rejected suggestions that the overhaul does not get at the root of intelligence lapses between the CIA and the FBI; both the agencies are left virtually untouched by the proposal.
"The FBI and CIA are changing. They understand that there has been gaps in intelligence-sharing," the president said.
He said FBI Director Robert Mueller had taken heed of the testimony from whistle-blower Coleen Rowley, an FBI lawyer critical of the agency who Bush called the "FBI woman" from Minneapolis.
Bush said he takes domestic security reforms personally.
"Harry Truman said the buck stops here. I understand that," Bush said. "But if that's the case I want to make sure that accountability to me is clear."
Not coincidentally, Bush unveiled his plan on the same day that the Senate Judiciary Committee began public, televised hearings into the apparent intelligence failures that preceded the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
"We need to know when warnings were missed or signs unheeded-- not to point the finger of blame, but to make sure we correct any problems, and prevent them from happening again," Bush told the nation Thursday night.
He said nothing he has seen suggests anyone could have prevented the horrors of last September. "Yet we now know that thousands of trained killers are plotting to attack us, and this terrible knowledge requires us to act differently," Bush said.
Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, D-S.D., was receptive to the proposal, which he called overdue, but immediately talked of "necessary changes."
Democrats had been pushing for months to create just such a Cabinet department, something Bush resisted before now so he could retain Ridge as an informal adviser and shield him from having to testify before Congress.
The White House said its reorganization will not cost more money; it will shuffle current operations within the government without expanding the bureaucracy.
The new Department of Homeland Security would inherit 169,000 employees and $37.4 billion in budgets from the agencies it would absorb, including the Secret Service, the Coast Guard, the embattled Immigration and Naturalization Service and the Customs Service.
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Copyright 2002 Los Angeles Times
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