Agence France Presse November 20, 2002
US lawmakers pass Homeland Security bill
By SHARON BEHN
The US government is gearing up for its largest reorganization in 50 years now that Congress has approved the creation of a new Department of Homeland Security to coordinate defense against terrorism.
The Senate's approval Tuesday of the landmark measure by a 90-9 vote, gives President George W. Bush a hard-fought victory in his global war on terrorism.
"Setting up this new department will take time, but I know we will meet the challenge together," Bush said in a statement.
"I look forward to signing this important legislation," he added. The bill already has passed the House of Representatives. Proposed in the wake of the devastating September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the new Cabinet-level department is seen as the most significant reorganization of US government in the last 50 years.
"The President's plan will allow us to improve our efforts to work together to identify and assess threats to our homeland, match these threats to our vulnerabilities, and act to insure the safety and security of the American people," said Attorney General John Ashcroft after the vote.
"The creation of the Department of Homeland Security begins a new era of cooperation and coordination in the nation's homeland defense," Ashcroft added.
The bill had been held up for months as Republicans and Democrats argued over how the administration planned to roll all or part of 22 federal agencies into the cabinet-level department which will carry a 38-billion-dollar budget.
Approving the the 500-page compromise bill is the first step in what will likely be a complicated and lengthy process to get the 170,000-employee department up and running.
Analysts predict it will take years before the department is fully effective.
"It is an enormously large bureaucracy. I think they're going to spend the rest of the decade de-bugging it," said John Pike, director of GlobalSecurity.org, a nonprofit defense policy think-tank.
Originally crafted by a group of lawmakers led by Democratic Senator Joseph Lieberman shortly after the September 11, 2001, attacks, Bush had opposed a homeland security agency proposal until lawmakers launched a probe into intelligence lapses that allowed al-Qaeda militants to strike with hijacked airliners, killing more that 3,000 people.
The president later took up the cause and made passage of his version of the legislation a key issue in the November 5 midterm congressional elections, and as Senator Don Nickles admitted, "kept our feet to the fire" to get the bill passed.
Senators spent seven weeks wrangling over the bill, with Democrats balking at what they said were a weakening of employee civil service job protections and late "special-interest" additions to the final compromise measure.
Democratic Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle criticized Republicans for holding the effort hostage to partisan politics.
"There are some who would like to rewrite the history of this effort. They want the American people to believe that Democratic opposition is the reason it has taken this long for Congress to pass a Homeland Security bill," Daschle said.
"That is simply not so. Creating a Homeland Security Department was a Democratic idea to begin with."
Although the new department absorbs such key agencies as the Coast Guard, the US Secret Service and parts of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, it will not include the Central Intelligence Agency or the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the two agencies that came under the heaviest fire for September 11 intelligence failures.
"This agency is more concerned with hardening the homeland against attacks than with going after the perpetrators," explained Pike, noting that the FBI is a law enforcement agency while the CIA is responsible for foreign intelligence.
Not every senator was convinced the undertaking was going to fully equip the country against terrorist strikes.
"It does not address the immediate need to protect our infrastructure, especially nuclear power plants. It does not increase our capabilities to detect biological and radiological weapons," criticized Democratic Senator Hillary Clinton, who nevertheless voted for the bill.
© Copyright 2002 Agence France Presse
