Gilmore weighs in on Bush homeland-security agency

0 Comments | Insight on the News, July 15, 2002 | by Douglas Burton, | Jessica Davis, | Hans S. Nichols

Former Virginia governor Jim Gilmore tells news alert! that President George W. Bush is showing "bold and decisive leadership" in proposing a new Cabinet-level department for homeland security, but he cautions that it will be a huge "management challenge."

Gilmore heads a 17-member congressional advisory commission on homeland defense that met on June 17 and 18 in Indianapolis. Congress established the commission in 1999 to advise on how federal resources best could be used to deal with the threat of weapons of mass destruction and assist first responders at the local level. Some panel members represent the intelligence community and the Department of Defense, but most come from groups outside the Washington Beltway: firefighters, emergency medical services and other first responders.

The proposed Cabinet agency goes far beyond what the commission had urged in its first and second annual reports, Gilmore tells news alert!, but he also believes the commission likely can help the administration meet the management challenge. Since its launch in 1999, the blue-ribbon panel has made 79 recommendations, of which 62 have been implemented by the White House and/or Congress.

"The challenge is not that the new agency would be too big," says Gilmore, a former chairman of the Republican National Committee. Rather it is the likely difficulty in managing "the disparate functions" of the various agencies that would comprise the new department as proposed. For example, he notes that the U.S. Coast Guard has missions as widely cast as boating safety, locating missing people at sea and interdiction of illegal drugs. Another problem will be congressional turf battles. Gilmore notes that there are 13 subcommittees of the House Appropriations Committee, each with some authority over homeland-security funding. According to Appropriations Committee staffers, House and Senate leaders are mulling the creation of a 14th subcommittee to handle requests for the proposed Cabinet agency, but this is likely to make 13 other subcommittee chairmen very uncomfortable.

The chief concern of first responders at the Indianapolis meeting was how much of the federal grants for the new Cabinet agency would be siphoned off by state agencies, Gilmore says, since many believe as much as 25 percent of the federally appropriated monies will not get to the local level.

And the former Virginia governor says he shares the concern of many about the potential loss of liberties during a time of national crisis. He thinks surveillance can go too far, and he says so directly. There is a place for facial-recognition technology [see "Big Brother Greets Visionics," Oct. 22, 2001], for example, but not in the overhead-lighting equipment above each seat on an airliner. "That would destroy the anonymity of each citizen," he tells news alert! "We must never surrender America's civil liberties in the hope of getting security because they are very difficult to restore." Gilmore emphasizes that every measure recommended by the commission has to pass "a two-pronged test: whether it both enhances security and preserves liberty."

The governor says that like the rest of us he gets X-rayed and hand-searched at airports almost every time he flies, even when the uniformed personnel recognize him. He says that on the flight legs going to Virginia airports many of his fellow travelers get "a big kick" out of seeing him being searched to be sure he is not a terrorist in disguise.