I read this article with a growing sense of incredulity and dismay. The story of the floundering of the DHS only gets worse with each section. People fighting over stupid crap, a complete and utter lack of support from the White House
From here:
The Department of Homeland Security was only a month old, and already it had an image problem.
It was April 2003, and Susan Neely, a close aide to DHS Secretary Tom Ridge, decided the… conglomeration of 22 federal agencies had to stand for something more than multicolored threat levels. It needed an identity…
So she called in the branders.
Neely hired Landor Associates…to rebrand a behemoth Landor described in a confidential briefing as a “disparate organization with a lack of focus.” They developed a new DHS typeface (Joanna, with modifications) and color scheme (cool gray, red and hints of “punched-up” blue). They debated new uniforms for its armies of agents and focus-group-tested a new seal designed to convey “strength” and “gravitas.” The department even got its own lapel pin, which was given to all 180,000 of its employees — with Ridge’s signature — to celebrate its “brand launch” that June. (edited for length, feel free to compare it to the original)
A new typeface? Yes, I can certainly see why they needed that. I read this article–and I invite you to do so–with a growing sense of incredulity and dismay. It’s in five sections, and the story of the floundering of the DHS only gets worse with each section. People fighting over stupid crap (apparently the FBI got ticked off at someone trying to use “investigation” in their department name) a complete and utter lack of support from the White House (Bush didn’t feel Homeland Security needed a department, an office was enough) and just–gah.
Born out of the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, DHS was initially expected to synthesize intelligence, secure borders, protect infrastructure and prepare for the next catastrophe. For most of those missions, the bipartisan Sept. 11 commission recently gave the Bush administration D’s or F’s. To some extent, the department was set up to fail. It was assigned the awesome responsibility of defending the homeland without the investigative, intelligence and military powers of the FBI, CIA and the Pentagon; it was also repeatedly undermined by the White House that initially opposed its creation. But the department has also struggled to execute even seemingly basic tasks, such as prioritizing America’s most critical infrastructure.
And later in that article: “Everybody realized the agencies were not going to look at mission first, they were going to look at turf first,” recalled Bruce M. Lawlor, a National Guard major general working for Ridge.
What more can I say? This is what happens when common people with common sense don’t pay attention. I could have figured out that the use of the word “investigation” wasn’t a biggie. I could have spent ten minutes playing and settled on an existing typeface that would have served the department quite well. There are people out there who could have done a far better job than I at all of that and more. I mean, look at this!
Some of the decisions were almost random. Falkenrath (a security expert from Harvard who worked for Ridge) thought it would be nice to give the new department a research lab that could bring cutting-edge research to homeland security problems. He called up a friend and asked which of the three Department of Energy labs would work. “He goes, ‘Livermore.’ And I’m like, ‘All right. See you later.’ Click,” Falkenrath told historians from the Naval Postgraduate School. He did not realize that he had just decided to give the new department a thermonuclear weapon simulator, among other highly sensitive assets of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.
But the FBI was not included. THE federal agency in charge of investigating threats to the country, was not included in DHS, the agency created to prevent the coordination failures that helped produce Sept. 11.
On Jan. 24, 2003, Ridge was sworn in as the first secretary of homeland security; Bush hailed him as a “superb leader who has my confidence.” Four days later, Ridge learned from the president’s State of the Union address that a new intelligence center for tracking terrorists — which he had expected to be the hub of DHS’s dot-connecting efforts — would not be controlled by DHS.
And look–someone was thinking. But no one listened.
From his first day at DHS, Ridge pushed to create what he called “mini-me’s,” eight regional directors who would manage the department’s assets in their areas during a crisis. It was Ridge’s one major effort to put his own organizational stamp on DHS, and it was meant to ensure better preparedness for a disaster, the thinking being that “you can’t plan a response in Los Angeles out of Washington, D.C.,” Lawlor said. With hurricanes in mind, Ridge wanted one region to have headquarters in New Orleans.
Like so many DHS initiatives, Ridge’s regions plan went nowhere.
Lawlor wrote the first draft, giving the mini-me’s full control over the department’s various fiefdoms within their regions. “That went over like a lead balloon,” Ridge recalled. The opposition was led by some of Ridge’s own deputies, such as FEMA’s Michael D. Brown, who appealed to the White House.
Well, I guess we know where the White House came down on that question, don’t we?
The Washington Post reviewed one memo to DHS with a lengthy checklist of items the White House wanted regular updates about, including uniforms for border guards, the curriculum for teaching border inspections, the selection of a single firearm for DHS training academies and “batch processing” for new hires.
“White House staff micromanaged the department in the worst of all ways,” Lawlor said. Loy (Coast Guard Adm. James M. Loy signed on as Ridge’s top deputy in the fall of 2003) called the White House’s involvement “very much a heavy process.”
You know, I’m just going to drop this. It’s making me sick. Go read it yourself.