Consider Bush security proposal a rough draft

If making homeland security a Cabinet-level priority will improve America's preparedness against terrorism attacks, then President Bush's proposal for sweeping reorganization of the federal bureaucracy is a good start.

The biggest endorsement for Bush's proposal is the fact that it comes from Bush, whose constituency is heavily laden with those who wish to make government smaller, not larger. Bush had opposed such a move until now. In much the same way, the credibility of America's opening to China in 1972 was much enhanced by the fact that it was made by the hard-core anti-communist Richard Nixon.

It now remains to Congress to make sure that Bush's plan is carefully thought out and workable, and not a slapdash affair. One of the few early critics of the proposal points out that some of the functions brought under the new umbrella appear to have little to do with terrorism, including oil spills, currency fraud and mad-cow disease. Done right, one would hope that the affected agencies would lose much of their organizational overhead, resulting in substantial streamlining.

The reorganization also does little to address what appears to be the biggest lapse in internal security, the inability of the CIA and the FBI to communicate efficiently and to assess the meaning of the reams of information they already receive. One wonders what will now make these two agencies willing and able to communicate with this new one.

We must also hope that a new department wouldn't add to the clear and present threat to civil liberties emanating from Bush's Justice Department.

The authors of an analysis on homeland security by the respected Brookings Institution say Bush's proposal would "improve how the government is organized to prevent terrorism," but that isn't enough. "The plan doesn't adequately protect our most vulnerable sites or do enough to keep those who would harm us from our shores."

One hopes the strategic plan under preparation in Homeland Security Director Tom Ridge's office will address those shortcomings. But there are suggestions that the plan, which was due in July, won't appear until fall.

"The bad news," say the Brookings authors, "is that Bush, by highlighting his reorganization plan so prominently, could make us focus too much on government charts in the coming months and not enough on protecting the country."

Among the security measures yet to be addressed, the authors say, are ways to safeguard the air intakes of major facilities from biological agents, higher standards for toxic chemical factories, and improvements to Coast Guard and Customs abilities to monitor containers entering the country. A major difficulty is that most of these activities are privately owned and operated.

Bush's plan is, of course, a major improvement over his preference to leave Ridge in charge of a largely powerless office within the White House, a concept that has proved unworkable. But Congress must ensure that the reorganization is an enhancement to our safety and to preservation of our political freedoms — and not a political fig leaf.