Homeland Security preps for presidential transition

0 Comments | Oakland Tribune, Apr 21, 2008 | by Scott Lindlaw

OAKLAND -- From a 12th-floor desk at the regional Federal Emergency Management Agency office in downtown Oakland, Nancy Ward can survey a swath of her FEMA territory where millions of people, from downtown Oakland to San Francisco and beyond, live and work atop earthquake faults.

Soon, Ward's portfolio, including several Western states, will expand to include the nation's complete complement of catastrophe zones, from Southeastern hurricanes to Southwestern wildfires to Midwestern tornadoes and floods.

Ward is part of a cadre of senior career officials who have been tapped to temporarily take the reins of disaster- and security- related government posts on Inauguration Day. She will become interim FEMA administrator Jan. 20, alongside dozens of others who will run key agencies until the next president picks top leaders and the Senate confirms them.

"We can't call a time-out for six months, because the world isn't going to call a time-out," Department of Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said in a recent interview in San Francisco with The Associated Press.

Presidential transition planning has been going on since George Washington was getting ready to hand off to John Adams, and it's now routine for military and intelligence planners. The president's top appointees usually leave with him, and the government runs itself until the new occupant of the White House settles in.

There are rare but notable exceptions: Clinton White House anti- terrorism chief Richard A. Clarke and CIA Director George Tenet were kept on board by the Bush White House and helped lead the government's response on Sept. 11, 2001.

"In every transition, departments and agencies are decapitated. All the political appointees disappear," said Bill Galston, a senior fellow in governance studies at the Brookings Institution.

But the DHS planning effort "sounds more thorough and deeper than the norm," said Galston, who worked in the Clinton White House as a domestic policy adviser.

"There's no question about the fact that in certain sectors of the government, 9/11 was a game-changer, and now that the game has changed, they'd be irresponsible not to think about incident planning and how government should respond," he said.

The Sept. 11 attacks indeed led DHS to make special efforts as it looks ahead to the twilight-zone period between the inauguration and the confirmations, Chertoff said. The 1993 World Trade Center bombing occurred the month after President Bill Clinton took office.

Chertoff was one of just a handful of Justice Department appointees who had been confirmed Sept. 11; FBI Director Robert Mueller was not even nominated by President Bush until July 2001 and did not take the oath of office until a week before the attacks.

"We faced 9/11 with many of the positions not populated. That's not a responsible way to deal with the threats we have now," Chertoff said.

"We want to get career people in these positions fully up to speed, we want to reduce a lot of what we've done to written doctrine, we want to get as much of our planning finished as we can this year," he said.

It is an unfamiliar exercise for an agency that was born after the terrorist attacks: DHS has never undergone a transition from one administration to another, though most of its component agencies, such as the Secret Service, have.

DHS also oversees the Transportation Security Administration, Customs and Border Protection, Immigration and Customs Enforcement and several other agencies. The department is working to line up career officials for about 50 key roles, Chertoff said.

It began transition planning last year, asking state and local governments as well as the private sector for its "best practices" in transition situations. Next month, it is convening a three-day conference where about 200 senior career officials, including some of the interim leaders, will conduct an exercise in response to a hypothetical, national-level incident, DHS spokeswoman Amy Kudwa said.

There has been no official communication on this with the three senators vying to be the next president -- Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and John McCain. But Obama is a member of the Senate Homeland Security Committee, and DHS has briefed the panel on its transition activities, Kudwa said.

Ward is now juggling her responsibilities as the head of FEMA Region 9, which includes California, Nevada, Arizona, Hawaii and Guam, with the demands of transition planning. Before a recent interview in her office, she spent 90 minutes on a transition- planning conference call with Washington officials.

"It's a bit overwhelming, I have to admit," said Ward, 53, who has spent her entire career in government, including nearly 27 years working for the state of California, most of it in disaster planning.

But, she said, "it's in your blood, and when you're asked, it's hard to say no."

Despite her experience, or perhaps because of it, Ward confesses that she is squeamish about riding the trains beneath the San Francisco Bay between Oakland and San Francisco.