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In response to the terrorist attacks on the United states on September 11, 2001, the last department (in the series thus far) was created - the Department of Homeland Security.
This podcast uses government documents to illuminate the workings of the American government, and offer context around the effects of government agencies in your everyday life.
Welcome to Civil Discourse. This podcast will use government documents to illuminate the workings of the American Government and offer contexts around the effects of government agencies in your everyday life. Now your hosts, Nia Rodgers, Public Affairs Librarian and Dr. John Aughenbaugh, Political Science Professor.
N. Rodgers: Hey, Aughie.
J. Aughenbaugh: Good morning, Nia. How are you?
N. Rodgers: I'm excellent. How are you?
J. Aughenbaugh: I am very good and I'm also very excited, listeners, because as we draw to the end of our series on federal government cabinet level departments. Today's episode it is about a department that Nia and I know very well, that is the Department of Homeland Security, which is the most recently created federal government cabinet department.
N. Rodgers: The thing about DHS, DHS is dear to my heart in part because I was an adult when it was created. I have a greater understanding of it probably than I do any of the others. I know folks would like to believe I'm 9,000 years old and that education was part of my adult experience, but in fact it was not. But I do want to note, by the way, this is the penultimate department episode because we have one more on the ones that didn't make it.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah.
N. Rodgers: I like to think of them, the all departments.
J. Aughenbaugh: Well, in the public administration policy scholar and me just loves going through in examining some of the ideas for our departments.
N. Rodgers: Because we've had some cool stuff. But I also wanted to say something about DHS from the outset. Even though it is dear to my heart, in part because I studied, Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness. But also one of the things that we've noted throughout this series is that departments are created in their time and of their need. You get a whole lot of cars and all of a sudden you need a Department of Transportation. You get a whole bunch of people living in tenement buildings and you need a Department of Housing, so you have all these things. DHS came along at a modern time of messiness, and it reflects that deeply. The department itself is inordinately messy. What's in DHS? Well, I have a kitchen sink and I have a screwdriver, and I have a beaver and I have a hat, and I have lamp. It's like that, it's this crazy when Aughie gets to the list where he names them all, you should sit down and get a glass of water because it's going to take a minute to get through them. It covers a billion things.
J. Aughenbaugh: Well, you might actually need something stronger.
N. Rodgers: You might want an adult beverage because it's a lot.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah.
N. Rodgers: But we should say it first, we should start out by saying Homeland Security is created in the wake of the September 11th attacks on the United States by the terrorist group Al-Qaeda, or Al-Qaeda, however you pronounce it. It's pronounced several ways. When they termed planes into bombs and flew them into the World Trade Center in New York, the Pentagon in Washington, and who knows where they were going with the one that ended up in the field in Pennsylvania but that one crashed because folks on that plane fought back because they had heard about the other crashes and they didn't want to be part of killing a bunch of other people. They tried to fight back and take that plane back. I think a very heroic thing to do. Makes me proud of those people even though I don't know those people. But anyway, in response to approximately 5,000 American citizens dying, that's when President Bush 43, not 41, 43 comes up with Homeland Security. But it wasn't just I shall create a department, it's not quite like that.
J. Aughenbaugh: No, in fact, for many scholars, it is the first data point. When you discuss the Department of Homeland Security what many Americans don't recall is that initially the Bush 43 administration created an office within the Executive Office of the President, and it was initially staffed by Pennsylvania Governor, Tom Ridge.
N. Rodgers: That was pretty quick, wasn't it? After the attacks?
J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah, within 10 days.
N. Rodgers: That is passed.
J. Aughenbaugh: The President announced it. The Bush 43 administration was somewhat ambivalent about asking Congress to create a brand new cabinet level department. Recall listeners, Congress has the authority, not the president. Again, this is an example of checks and balances, Congress the legislative branch decides if there are going to be new executive branch departments or agencies.
N. Rodgers: As a Republican, I can imagine him not wanting to expand the government, because one of the hallmarks of the Republican Party is small government.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: Local government, they think government should be as small and as local as possible. I should say traditional Republicans. I don't know where the Republican Party is now.
J. Aughenbaugh: It should also be noted here. The Bush 43 administrations ambivalence about creating a cabinet level department also reflected the rather significant influence that Vice President Dick Cheney had, because Dick Cheney and a number of his staffers were of the opinion that there were certain executive branch functions that should be largely beyond the control of the United States Congress. But if you create a cabinet level department, United States Congress does have historical, if you will, institutional authority to provide oversight. They do it a lot with budgets into the budget process. Dick Cheney and his cadre of assistance, their initial advice to the President was do what many modern presidents have done in responding to an emergency, which is, you create a special assistant or a czar position. Whether or not future presidents want to use that office, okay, fine. If not, okay, fine. But if you create it and as a cabinet level department not only did that run against mainstream Republican doctrine.
N. Rodgers: It would be oversight from the Congress. It would not be able to do things that the President wanted it to do [OVERLAPPING].
J. Aughenbaugh: Would become very quickly bureaucratized. In one of the lessons that the Bush 43 administration took from the September 11th attacks, was that the federal government had to be more nimble, faster to respond, and you don't get that as we've discussed throughout this series. You don't necessarily get quick government response when you create a federal government department. Typically you don't.
N. Rodgers: In fact, in some ways that's a good thing because what you get is bureaucracy, which then people understand what the process is. They can follow the process and they can achieve whatever it is they need to achieve. If you don't have HUD, then you don't have housing vouchers and people can't apply for them and people can't get the assistance, so once you have that, then you have the structure that people know what to do in order to get help from the government or what have you. What's interesting to me about that, and I'm going to go over to the dark side and Aughie is going to pull me back. But my cynical self says, yes, because the previous CEO of Halliburton would want as little oversight of what that department may or may not do.
J. Aughenbaugh: Well, it was more than just Cheney.
N. Rodgers: I'm sorry Dick Cheney was a board directors CEO, something with Halliburton which is a defense contractor.
J. Aughenbaugh: He was a defense officer. But it was more than just that Nia. I didn't know how far you want it to go into the weeds on this. But within the Bush 43 administration, Dick Cheney, and a bunch of well-known legal scholars including John Yoo Y-O-O were proponents of what is known as the Unitary Executive Theory. If you think about how the federal government is structured, there are two dominant principles. Checks and balances, but separation of powers. The Unitary Executive Theory basically goes ahead and says, Congress has certain powers, the executive has certain powers, and the judiciary has certain powers, and those powers are largely given to each of those branches. The Unitary Executive Theory is not a huge fan of checks and balances.
N. Rodgers: Is this thing Nixon, if the President does it then it's legal?
J. Aughenbaugh: Well, it's more than just that. It's that each branch has certain authority or powers that cannot be checked or should not be checked by the other branches. Their conception of separation of powers is, it is separate powers. The other conception of separation of powers is that it's separate but shared powers. That's where you get the checks and balances.
N. Rodgers: I think that that's the one most people think democracy is.
J. Aughenbaugh: Well, at least the American form of democracy.
N. Rodgers: Version of democracy.
J. Aughenbaugh: They were big proponents of the Unitary Executive Theory, and so their thought was, if we put it in the Executive Office of the President, which as we've discussed previously on this podcast. When FDR really pushed for the expansion of the Executive Office of the President, he did so in part because he didn't want to share power with members of Congress. Because he thought that his vision of responding to the Great Depression would only get watered down and corrupted by members of Congress who would be looking to benefit their states at the expense of a national response to the Great Depression.
N. Rodgers: They may not have been wrong about that. But if you just wait around for Congress to abdicate power, they will eventually give you the power to do whatever you want to do. President just didn't want to wait for that.
J. Aughenbaugh: Well, we know that now.
N. Rodgers: She said slightly bitterly.
J. Aughenbaugh: But the other interesting thing about this was that it wasn't not only the Bush 43 administration that was somewhat skeptical of creating a new cabinet level department. There were members of Congress who opposed the creation of this department because in part, it happens so fast, so there was very little study time. Nia.
N. Rodgers: What department do we need? I don't know. I'll figure it out as we go. That's the, learn to fail and then keep going. I can't remember what that's called. But anyway, that whole idea that you will just fall forward into making it work.
J. Aughenbaugh: The department was created in two months.
N. Rodgers: That's right.
J. Aughenbaugh: It was created in November.
N. Rodgers: That's right.
J. Aughenbaugh: Of 2002, and Ridge was confirmed by the Senate to be the first Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security in January of 2003. No not three month.
N. Rodgers: It's a year.
J. Aughenbaugh: It was a year.
N. Rodgers: It was a year. But within a year from the time that the attacks happened and we have this internal office to a department is really fast. That's a quick, getting everybody in line, and part of that is that at that time people felt that not being in line was being disloyal. There was some pressure.
J. Aughenbaugh: Many Americans thought that the country was vulnerable. That sense of vulnerability really drove a lot of the actions.
N. Rodgers: Fear.
J. Aughenbaugh: But listeners of this series that we've done, Nia should take note of how quickly this transpired. Because some of these capital level of departments that we have discussed.
N. Rodgers: Take years.
J. Aughenbaugh: Were decades, decades in the making.
N. Rodgers: Get peeled off from other departments.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: Like this is a whole new cut from cloth thing. There were people who I remember and listeners who are too young to remember but who have read the book 1984. There were people who were like, this is a big brother department. We don't want this. We don't want homeland. First of all, the name is terrifying. The Department of Homeland Security, that sounds like doublespeak and it was really scary. But the other side of that was people were scared to get on planes. People were scared to go to large buildings. But there was all stuff. I know that they held the Super Bowl the January after 9/11. But it freaked everybody out to go to a place with 50,000 people in it. Because there's this whole thing in the back of your brain of, wow, we'd make a really good target right now. Fortunately, we have not been hit with anything nearly as large. We've had individual things, but not anything nearly as large, but Aughie how many departments are in DHS? She said laying a trap for him that he would have to read all 10,000 of them.
J. Aughenbaugh: Well, there's not 10,000, but there are 22, and nearly all of them were existing agencies within the federal government. I'm going to try to quickly go through these. We have the Transportation Security Administration, TSA.
N. Rodgers: They check you at the airport.
J. Aughenbaugh: Which many Americans did not know, was an already existing agency, but got expanded dramatically.
N. Rodgers: Now they make you take off your shoes and they make you go through an X-ray.
J. Aughenbaugh: Coast Guard, FEMA, Federal Emergency Management Agency, Secret Service, which got transferred from Treasury to Homeland Security.
N. Rodgers: Do they still do counterfeiting?
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes, they do.
N. Rodgers: Okay.
J. Aughenbaugh: Because again, one of the findings of the 9/11 commission report was the importance of money to terrorist organizations. Customs and Border Protection, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which still in my humble opinion.
N. Rodgers: ICE baby.
J. Aughenbaugh: It still has the best acronym because I just like to say it ICE.
N. Rodgers: Because you're a weirdo.
J. Aughenbaugh: I am a weirdo and I love government acronyms. Citizen and Immigration Services, Critical Infrastructure Assurance Office of the Department of Commerce, the National Communication System, which used to be part of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the National Infrastructure of Simulation and Analysis Center, the Energy Assurance Office of the Department of Energy, which by the way, those are the folks that tried to have a handle on our energy grid.
N. Rodgers: On hardening the grid, and people in North Carolina can tell you that needs to be worked on. Because when we're recording this in recent memory, there has been a gunfire at a substation which took down, I don't know, 20 or 30 thousand customers in North Carolina for almost a week, so scary.
J. Aughenbaugh: Again, that was identified.
N. Rodgers: Energy is a big deal for homeland security. The grid, if you can take down the grid, ask New York what happens when there's a blackout for 24 hours, which happened in the '80s, I think.
J. Aughenbaugh: It happened a couple of times in the '70s and '80s in New York. You have the Federal Computer Incident Response Center of the General Services Administration, the GSA, basically the federal government's landlord operation.
N. Rodgers: But this was taken from the GSA.
J. Aughenbaugh: That's right.
N. Rodgers: And that's what he's saying is energy assurance office was taken from the Department of Energy and put into GHS.
J. Aughenbaugh: You have the Federal Protective Service, you have the Office of Domestic Preparedness, you have the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center, which by the way the FBI fought really hard not to give that one up.
N. Rodgers: I'm sure.
J. Aughenbaugh: I came across easily a half a dozen articles about how the FBI did not want to give that up. The Integrated Hazard Information System of NOAA, which Nia and I both spoken rather positively about the National Weather Service, as most of us know. The National Domestic Preparedness Office of the FBI, by the way, the FBI lost some significant units and were not happy about it.
N. Rodgers: If Hoover had been alive, that would not have happened. I don't care what president, vice president tried to do that, no, that would not have happened.
J. Aughenbaugh: We also had the Domestic Emergency Support Team of the Department of Justice, the Metropolitan Medical Response System of the Department of Health and Human Services. By the way, that's HHS is a crisis management team, if there is a public health breakout that could have been caused by outside individuals.
N. Rodgers: The Ebola scare that we had not too long ago.
J. Aughenbaugh: The National Disaster Medical System also of HHS, the Office of Emergency Preparedness in the Strategic National Stockpile of the Department of Health and Human Services.
N. Rodgers: The Strategic National Stockpile you have heard of because that is where you get the response to COVID.
J. Aughenbaugh: Then I actually had to look this one up, this one stumped me, the Plum Island Animal Disease Center of the Department of Agriculture.
N. Rodgers: Which one of the Ebola outbreaks came out of that.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: Came out of that with the monkeys.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah, because there is the fear that terrorists will go ahead and will weaponize animals.
N. Rodgers: Will weaponize animal diseases and there were a big fear that cupboard had been an animal disease that had been weaponized. I personally think COVID was an animal disease that was accidentally weaponized, meaning they didn't intend to weaponize it but I suspect that there is some lab something that will come out eventually. But basically what Aughie said to you was, DHS point one of these and two of those and one of these and four of these and six tablespoons of this to make a department. Come to find out, when you do something like that, the logistical challenges of that are a nightmare because trying to get all those disparate individuals to work together on a problem I cannot imagine that is not considered problematic.
J. Aughenbaugh: Almost immediately, Congress's audit organization, which is the Government Accountability Office, identified DHS as high risk.
N. Rodgers: The entire department of DHS as high risk not just like a little bits and pieces, but like man, this is a mess.
J. Aughenbaugh: In high-risk, when GAO, when the Government Accountability Office gives a department or even an agency within a department, the high-risk label, it means the following, they, "vulnerable to waste, fraud, abuse, or mismanagement, or in need of transformation." The agency existed for less than a year and GAO already concluded.
N. Rodgers: It was like, no, this isn't working.
J. Aughenbaugh: We got some problems here.
N. Rodgers: You've listened to what was slapped together and how many different departments that some of those came out of and different agencies. You figure out that even though it seems like every agency within departments and every department within the federal government should have the same structure of organization, that is so wildly not the case as to be, it's a managing example of how you can make something work when people that are all doing very different types of hierarchical jobs.
J. Aughenbaugh: They don't have the same organization, they don't have the same purpose. Nia, if you look at the 22 different department agencies that I just went ahead and mentioned, you had some that were focused on transportation, you had some focused on energy, you had some focused on our borders, you had some focused on immigration, you had some focused on gun variety law enforcement, you had some that were focused on medical, protecting the president, protecting or responding to medical crises. Because when you're responding to a medical crisis, you don't care about arresting people, you're trying to figure out, how do we protect and save human beings?
N. Rodgers: You take the folks who are dealing with an outbreak of something and the folks who are trying to remove illegal visitors to this nation trying to work the same problem and you just have a mess. Because they health people say, no, we need people to talk to us and tell us who they know, who's sick, that kind of thing, and you get the other people like, yeah, let them talk to you so I can find those people and boo them out of the country. It terrible. The DHS, I'm not trying to be ugly, but it's a mess and it's amazing that it works as well as it does.
J. Aughenbaugh: In as recently as last year, GAO still had the entire Department of Homeland Security on its high-risk list. It specified the following areas for concern, cybersecurity, internal management of information, finance, and acquisition, and then the protection of US technology. What I thought was really interesting was GAO did not even mention immigration, even though by nearly all accounts, it's a mess.
N. Rodgers: It's a huge area of concern.
J. Aughenbaugh: It's a huge area of concern.
N. Rodgers: Do you know what? They got tired after a while. It's like, you know what, just fix the whole damn thing. I'm sure they couldn't get away with just writing in one sentence which is, fix it all, XOXO, GAO, but they probably would have wanted to if they could have gotten away with that. Now, we've been talking about criticisms, and one of the criticisms is the messiness of the thing.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah.
N. Rodgers: But I would like to take just a quick moment and give kudos, because while there have been small terrorist attacks, like the Boston Marathon bomber, you get things like that. They've been individuals which are much harder to track than groups. DHS has done a pretty good job really. Please don't hear me say that no lives are important, all lives are important, but they've kept the numbers down really low, relatively speaking, especially when you look at terrorist attacks in other nations where sometimes those are in the dozens or hundreds, we're seeing a lot less of that in the United States than we could be seeing. I think a lot of that has to do with the hard work that's done by people in these departments and in other departments, who are constantly vigilant about this thing in a way that we weren't before. One of the things about the commission report was a failure of imagination. What we've seen is that they actively try to imagine and then try to circumvent. They've done a lot better job of recruiting people who speak a lot of different languages and who are willing to be in country and listen on the ground.
J. Aughenbaugh: I don't want listeners of this episode to go ahead and think that we think the Department of Homeland Security has been a failure. There have been problems. We've already chronicled some, we'll probably chronicle a few more when we wrap up the episode, but I want listeners to go ahead and take into account the seemingly impossible work we have charged Homeland Security with accomplishing. This was identified in 2007 in the Bush 43 administration. Even today, these are the three broad mission areas of DHS. Prevent and disrupt terrorist attacks, that's one. Two, protect the American people, infrastructure, and key resources. Three, respond to and recover from incidents that do occur.
N. Rodgers: When you think about that second one, protect the American people, infrastructure, and key resources, we are the fourth, I think, largest nation in the world. We're big, we're in the top 10, anyway, but we also have two very long borders in this country. We're relatively vulnerable and they've done a pretty decent job, I think, at keeping up.
J. Aughenbaugh: We have an aging infrastructure, and though we do have various resources, many of our essential resources come from other countries. If you think about the three broad mission areas, it's before, during, and after, and most departments are not tasked.
N. Rodgers: With before.
J. Aughenbaugh: They certainly aren't tasked with all three. The fact that they have that broad mission, and as Nia pointed out, many of the fears of what would occur post 9/11 attacks have largely not materialized, which is not to say that they won't, but we're 21 years past the 9/11 attacks. We have to give quite a bit of the credit to a department that was put together basically, on the fly. A process that I don t know if we'll ever be able to replicate again.
N. Rodgers: Let's not try. Sorry. Just as a side note for our listeners, we are the fourth largest nation. Russia, Canada, China, United States.
J. Aughenbaugh: In terms of landmass.
N. Rodgers: In terms of landmass, not in terms of population. China tops everybody in terms of population, although their one child policy may change that in the next few generations. But my biggest problem with DHS, and I want to say this with love in my heart, is I don't like the theater that I go through at the airport. I do not believe that I'm being somehow kept incredibly safe by taking off my shoes at the airport. I think it's a reaction to the shoe bomber guy. We have heard it called that before. We've heard it called security theater, and I think that in some ways it is security theater.
J. Aughenbaugh: What you have to go through at airports, it is an example of political symbolism. Let's face it. If somebody was held bet in trying to get weapons onto a plane, human ingenuity, such as as it is, would probably find a way. A lot of what's done by the government is to go ahead and reduce public fear. If the police go ahead and put a police vehicle or cruiser on a string.
N. Rodgers: Everybody will slow down. That is so true. Even if they get up to realize there's nobody in the car, they've slowed down.
J. Aughenbaugh: They've already slowed down.
N. Rodgers: That's true. That's an excellent point. You think that a person at TSA might search your bag you might be less likely to bring things on a plane that will be restrictive or disruptive.
J. Aughenbaugh: It will act as a deterrent for most people.
N. Rodgers: That's a fair point.
J. Aughenbaugh: But on the other hand, some of the techniques that have been used, it has been alleged violated civil liberties of people of color. They use profiles. Profiles are inherently conflictual in regards to the Equal Protection Clause of the United States Constitution.
N. Rodgers: Which is interesting because Israel makes no bonds about the fact that that's what they do when they walk down the line and look at people in the airport. They make no bonds about the fact that they are profiling you. They are looking for physiological things that you can't control, like sweat and other things to see what kind of person you are and whether you're a criminal or not.
J. Aughenbaugh: You just mentioned that particular criticism. As I mentioned earlier in the podcast, DHS in particular, receives a lot of criticism about immigration policies in the United States. I think some of it is fair criticism, but some of it is unfair. The reason why you think it's unfair is that our elected officials have basically tasked DHS with an impossible job because current policy legislation is circa Reagan administration. I'm sorry. I think it needs to be said. If you're going to go ahead and give unelected federal bureaucrats, i.e., Immigration and Customs Enforcement authority to implement immigration laws, then the law should go ahead and reflect current realities. That falls on Congress in multiple presidents who have not responded. That said, some of the stuff that Immigration and Customs Enforcement has been doing has not made the situation any better.
N. Rodgers: Detention centers, Aughie is talking to you.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: Part of that is how people are being treated in detention centers. There are questions about whether people are being forcibly sterilized. There are questions about separating children from parents. There are questions about whether people are sleeping on concrete floors. There's some real human rights questions that are happening at the border. Part of also what that is is you're asking a relatively small group of people to protect a very long border and they don't have the personnel or the facilities.
J. Aughenbaugh: We don't have the personnel, we don't have the facilities and this country still has not come to grips with this reality Nia.
N. Rodgers: Quit telling people America is the greatest in the world and then say, but you can't come here.
J. Aughenbaugh: They want to migrate to the United States.
N. Rodgers: Exactly.
J. Aughenbaugh: Whether or not the conditions in this country are good, great, whatever the case may be, the reality is a whole bunch of other people from other countries want to come here and maybe it's because of the conditions in other countries aren't all that great either, comparatively. No matter, the reality is this, and it doesn't matter who is president and what they say about immigrants, a whole bunch of people want to come to the United States. At some point in time, this country, the citizenry, its elected officials, have to wrap their mind around the fact that we've got a whole bunch of people who want to come here. But if we task a department with enforcing current immigration laws, we need more personnel, we need better detention facilities, better treatment at the facilities because it's a lie to go ahead and say Nia that we're a civilized country with the way we treat people at our detention facilities.
N. Rodgers: Of all kinds, detentions, and prisons. [OVERLAPPING]
J. Aughenbaugh: You can go ahead and accuse me of any number of isms after I said that. But for me, it's unconscionable. In part, we are asking them to do an impossible job. Then we're acting shocked-
N. Rodgers: When they F it up.
J. Aughenbaugh: -when they screw it up. I'm sorry.
N. Rodgers: I'm sorry for my language. Yeah, it's a horrible, I'm not going to give you enough resources, but I want you to do this thing. I don't know. I'm going to make the rules ambiguous about what's actually going to be enforced and what isn't. You go out, you find somebody and then I'm going to let them go or you go out, you find somebody and I'm going to report them even though they've been here for 20 years and working in job. There's all weird things. Also, just as a side note, which has nothing to do with DHS, but I feel like I need to say it anyway. Statistically speaking, we're not having babies in this country. If we want to continue to be a country, we are going to have to change our immigration laws. We're going to have to let more people in, we're going to have to give more people who get here a pathway to citizenship if we want to continue to have a country. This idea that somehow you can hold onto this much land with a lot fewer people, that's not going to happen. Either we allow immigration in this country or the Canadians and the Mexicans will split up the United States and leave us the chunk that we occupy.
J. Aughenbaugh: This goes back to previous discussions, Nia, we've had on this podcast. The United States like most western democracies, have welfare systems; social safety net systems that are predicated on the population particularly the adult population, growing at a certain rate to go ahead and support our neediest populations. That isn't happening.
N. Rodgers: We've got to fix that.
J. Aughenbaugh: A few weeks before this podcast episode was recorded, South Korea is looking at no growth rate in its population in the next 3-5 years. They're offering cash subsidies.
N. Rodgers: To people to have babies.
J. Aughenbaugh: For the citizenry to have kids, right?
N. Rodgers: Right.
J. Aughenbaugh: While we might check a little about that here in the United States. Okay.
N. Rodgers: We're not that far off from it.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah, we're not that far off. Japan is a little worse than we are. But most western democracies in Europe are struggling with the same issue.
N. Rodgers: Yeah, Italy is in real trouble as far as their aging population. Hey, can we talk about disaster response for a minute? I want to talk about Katrina for just a second. I want to start by saying, in fairness to the government, nobody expected the levies to break. If it hadn't been that the levies broke, Katrina would not have been as bad as it was. It would not have been the unmitigated disaster than it became once we've lost the levies. Now, if you still want to talk about local zoning and problems with spending on the levies, I think is yes. That was a local problem. They took money away from levy, spending and put it on other things because that's what local officials do. They kick the can down the road and guess what? The can showed up in 2005 and boom. Now, that being said, it was a bigger mess than they were expecting, but their response was horrible. George Bush will be forever remembered by those of us in the emergency management community with his, "Good job, Brownie," comment to Ron Brown.
J. Aughenbaugh: Michael.
N. Rodgers: Michael Brown, sorry, Michael Brown. He was head of FEMA and it was not pretty, their response was not pretty.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah. In listeners, Nia is referencing the response to Hurricane Katrina that hit the Gulf Coast of the United States in 2005, and over 1,800 people lost their lives during Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath. The Federal government's response really highlighted what were some of the concerns in creating the Department of Homeland Security, because when you create a department out of so many agencies from other departments, you have to integrate the culture, the purpose, the mission. FEMA, it was fairly obvious, was not fully integrated into the Department of Homeland Security because before its transfer to Homeland Security, FEMA was a standalone federal agency, right?
N. Rodgers: Right.
J. Aughenbaugh: Part of the difficulty in response to Hurricane Katrina is that FEMA's authorizing legislation had not been updated. According to FEMA's authorizing legislation, FEMA could not go into the Gulf Coast states until Nia, who requested the Federal government's assistance.
N. Rodgers: The governor of Louisiana.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah, the Governors of Louisiana, Mississippi.
N. Rodgers: Texas, Mississippi.
J. Aughenbaugh: Alabama.
N. Rodgers: I think it started with Landrieu, she was Governor.
J. Aughenbaugh: Really Landrieu was the Governor of Louisiana. None of the governors, but particularly the Governor of Louisiana, asked for FEMA's assistance before the hurricane hit. Michael Brown, who was relatively inexperienced at running a federal agency.
N. Rodgers: He ran horse races very well, equestrian competition. Okay, I'm being sarcastic, sorry. That's what happens when you put in a point to you in charge of something like FEMA.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah. In a more experienced federal government bureaucrat, would have been able to work around the recalcitrance of the governors. But Brown, inexperienced, did things by the book. The book quite clearly says, FEMA can't go in and usurp the authority of state and local officials until state local officials ask for help. This is federalism 101. But a more experienced, either emergency management official or I would dare say government bureaucrat, would have gone ahead and said, okay, I know you're not specifically asking for our help, but why don't we go ahead and relocate some federal government assets to the Gulf Coast just in case? But we won't do anything until you officially ask for our help. Brownie didn't do that. Brownie did not do that. He got called out and I think, correctly for waiting. But it was much more complicated and it points to a larger issue with Homeland Security in responding to disasters.
N. Rodgers: You have a quote here from Susan Collins.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah.
N. Rodgers: That I think is marvelous. May I read it?
J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah. Go ahead. Yeah.
N. Rodgers: "If our government failed so utterly in preparing for and responding to a disaster that had been long predicted and was imminent for days, we must wonder how much more profound the failure would be if a disaster were to take us by complete surprise."
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: Susan Collins, 2007. I think she's dead on right there. We know that we're going to get disasters along the Gulf Coast. We know we're going to get hurricanes. We know that we're going to get hurricanes in Florida. It's a fact of living in the United States, the same as wildfires in California affected the United States and blizzard-like snow conditions affected the United States, in the northern parts of the United States, with a lake effect, where in Buffalo, they get something like 400 inches in a day or horrible snow falls at once. We know we don't even get that.
J. Aughenbaugh: What you're talking about Nia and she knows this all too well because one of her master's degrees is in Homeland Security. This is known as risk management. One of the things that FEMA was noted for before it was transferred to DHS, was that because it was independent and it had a history of being able to identify and manage risk, that's going to get lost in a large bureaucracy like DHS. That's always one of the downsides. That's what got lost. We saw this most recently in 2017 in Puerto Rico. Now, I know we can go ahead and say it was the Trump administration. But the reality is Nia, as you pointed out, with climate change and with the hurricane season getting worse in the Atlantic Ocean, we knew this was going to happen.
N. Rodgers: Well and Puerto Rico is an island approximately four inches above sea level, like it's incredibly vulnerable.
J. Aughenbaugh: Even a modest hurricane it's going to create problems. Puerto Rico, much like mainland United States, has a poor aging infrastructure already before a hurricane hits. We know this.
N. Rodgers: That's not Trump. That's been years and years and years in the making. You can blame Donald Trump for lots of things. You can blame him for the Miss America pageant falling apart, but you can't blame him for Puerto Rico. You can blame him for a tacky response just going in throwing paper towels, but whatever that's him as a person. But his administration was not any less prepared or under prepared than any other administration has been for other disasters we've had.
J. Aughenbaugh: Have been in natural disasters.
N. Rodgers: We weren't super prepared for Sandy, we weren't prepared for Katrina and we should be. FEMA still doesn't have its act together. This is 2005-2017, so 12 years and they're still going, what? A hurricane. I'm like, no, put me in charge of FEMA if it's going to be like this because really I find that very frustrating. Part of what I find frustrating about Puerto Rico is, Puerto Rico is in that horrible place where it's a territory, but it's not a state. It has certain rights, but not other rights and it has certain responsibilities but not other responsibilities. I don't know, if you're going to claim something, take care of it. If you are like, we want Puerto Rico to be ours. Well then take care of it like it's yours. Don't just, all right, Puerto Rico. Don't add it as an afterthought. It's an important place with important people. Let's integrate them anyway. Whole thing there, but I agree with you that we don't blame Trump for that. This is an ongoing FEMA problem that has been true through many presidencies, Democrat and Republican. There's no one party that's responsible for that.
J. Aughenbaugh: I know this sounds like academic geek speak, but if you're going to go ahead and transfer an independent agency who by many accounts was operating quite well and was oftentimes pointed to as an example of the good work that the federal government does. If you're going to transfer it into a large bureaucracy with a varied mission, I think all of us can agree that the Department of Homeland Security's mission is varied.
N. Rodgers: I like how you put that. It has multiple personalities.
J. Aughenbaugh: Something's going to get lost in the translation.
N. Rodgers: FEMA it's not the thing we want to be lost in the translation.
J. Aughenbaugh: One of the agencies that has really suffered has been FEMA.
N. Rodgers: I agree with you.
J. Aughenbaugh: That's been really unfortunate.
N. Rodgers: When I'm president, I'm going to make it its own thing again.
J. Aughenbaugh: Here's just as a personal anecdote before we conclude the episode. I remember when I started my doctoral program in the mid '90s, we studied FEMA as an exemplary department. If we're trying to go ahead and figure out how to go ahead and get better governments, productivity, work service, etc., FEMA was one of the departments that we studied.
N. Rodgers: If you ever wanted to take a class on risk management, but you don't want to pay for it, FEMA has online courses that you can take from them that will actually talk about risk management, disaster management. They've done that for a long time, always right. They used to be exemplary and now they've been lost in a huge departmental shuffle. They weren't thrilled about it either. They didn't really want to be moved to DHS I don't think.
J. Aughenbaugh: No.
N. Rodgers: There were some fighting to start with and they've been proven right. But can I just say that part of why they've been lost is because of blood that DHS started off.
J. Aughenbaugh: Congress threw money at Homeland Security.
N. Rodgers: Departments, here take anything you want. Take everything. They shouldn't have done that. But they were acting out of fear. They were acting out of concern that we were going to and didn't we end up in a rock right after that? All this stuff roiling around at that time of people being afraid to go out and people being afraid to travel and affecting the economy, was affecting people psychologically. It was affecting all these different things and Congress was like, you know what? Here's $100 trillion. Take it. Go get whatever you want, buy all new boats. Do whatever and money just disappears in DHS.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes. That has been one of the criticisms and it would not shock me as we move further into this decade, Nia, that if the political parties in Congress ever start cooperating with one another again.
N. Rodgers: The first thing they'll do is get rid of the DHS?
J. Aughenbaugh: I don't think they'll get rid of it, but I think there will be some significant overhaul or changes. Now I understand listeners, I just went ahead and put a huge conditional statement on that. That is if the political parties ever start cooperating again, but there are critics on both sides of the ideological spectrum. There are critics on both sides who readily acknowledge DHS needs to be reformed. Now I understand there are some members of Congress who've called for its abolition. Most notably AOC, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Most critics don't go that far, Nia.
N. Rodgers: Because we do need what they do. We certainly need FEMA, but we need other things too. We do need immigration control. You can't just have a straight-up open border and you don't even know who's living here or what they are up to or anything that they need.
J. Aughenbaugh: You need customs and border patrol.
N. Rodgers: You need a national medical response as we just discovered in the last couple of years. We're not saying that we don't need those things, but we are saying that they need to be better organized. That there needs to be a better. I feel certain that every secretary who's hired comes in thinking, I shall organize this. Then somebody says, you know there are 22 departments in here? They say, I shall organize part of this.
J. Aughenbaugh: In DHS like any other cabinet department, Nia has important stakeholders. Anytime you start talking about reforming or changing a department, those stakeholders immediately, very reflexively. Their reflexive position is, don't touch my unit. Don't touch my agency. But you're going to have some elected officials show some leadership and say, hey, some of this stuff isn't working. We've had 20-plus years. What do we need now from Homeland Security?
N. Rodgers: They can call me and Aughie because we have ideas.
J. Aughenbaugh: We do have ideas and not for nothing. I would actually be willing to take a leave of absence to go work on that reform effort. Because Nia, you, and I, we have a lot invested personally, and professionally, chunks of our lives have been devoted to the study of Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness.
N. Rodgers: We at the library, VCU are a partner to hold onto all of their documents in perpetuity. We're trying to even make sure that what we have is an ongoing collection of their documents so that we can keep those for future generations to study. Well, thank you, Aughie. I'm looking forward to our next and last, which is proposed and failed so far departments and it'll be fun to hear some of those.
J. Aughenbaugh: Listeners don't stop with this episode. You got to tune in and listen to the proposed departments that were never created because some of them just have great backstories. Anyways, but thanks, Nia.
N. Rodgers: Cool. Thank you, Aughie.
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