Mr. Chertoff's Challenge

The Washington Post, Thursday, July 14, 2005; Page A24

WITHOUT THE fine print, it isn't possible to draw any definitive conclusions from the major restructuring of the Department of Homeland Security announced yesterday by the department's secretary, Michael Chertoff. Both in a speech he gave describing the changes and in his subsequent comments, he frankly identified some of his department's most intractable problems, ranging from the urgent need for better information-sharing across the department, to the poor quality of current terrorist watch lists and other screening systems, to the porous southern border. Whether he has a strategy that can solve these issues, some of which predate the department itself, will become clearer as he announces more specific policy changes over the coming weeks.
Nevertheless, the philosophy that lies behind the restructuring is the right one. In a meeting at The Post, Mr. Chertoff repeated several times that the goal of the reform is to keep the department focused on the most serious threats: both those targets that are of most interest to terrorists and those attacks, particularly involving nuclear or biological weapons, that could do the most damage. He spoke, for example, of using computerized risk analysis to determine spending priorities, a principle that would improve on the current, often haphazard decision-making process. At the moment, spending is easily hijacked by Congress: This week the Senate voted in favor of a more risk-based formula for distributing first responder money, but -- thanks to pressure from smaller, less populated and less clearly targeted states -- shied away from taking the principle as far as it should go.