Posted on: Saturday, November 23, 2002
Congress rearranges deck chairs, adjourns
The 107th Congress has adjourned after approving the most sweeping reorganization of federal workers since the creation of the Pentagon a half-century ago.
As a footnote destined for obsurity, adjournment means that whoever Hawai'i elects in its special election Nov. 30 to replace the late Rep. Patsy Mink in the House will find that chamber shuttered and dark when he or she gets there.
When the 108th Congress opens Jan. 7, the Hawai'i Second Congressional District will be represented by whoever is elected in our second special election on Jan. 3.
Huge undertaking
The creation of the Department of Homeland Security is a huge undertaking, and it may take years to determine whether it succeeds.
As the impetus is to make the nation safer from terrorists, we must hope that it gels faster than the Department of Defense did in the 1950s and '60s.
The idea stemmed from a commission chaired by former senators Gary Hart and Warren Rudman; the present, less sweeping form was not favored at first by President Bush.
Now a convert, Bush became impatient when Congress appeared ready to delay its creation until next year.
The huge new department will have an annual budget of $37 billion and 169,000 employees. It brings under a domestic security umbrella Immigration and Naturalization from Justice, the Coast Guard from Transportation, Customs from the Treasury, plus smaller independent agencies like the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the Secret Service.
Whether all this produces synergies, efficiencies, rationalization and economies of scale is now a matter of conjecture.
What's clearer is that work rules in the new department may be the narrow edge of a wedge to break one of the last bastions of union power, the federal bureaucracy.
More worrisome are, deep in the bowels of this legislation, exemptions to the Freedom of Information Act and the creation, in fluent doublespeak, of an Information Awareness Office. Warned conservative columnist William Safire: "Every purchase you make with a credit card, every magazine subscription you buy and medical prescription you fill, every Web site you visit and e-mail you send or receive, every academic grade you receive, every bank deposit you make, every trip you book and every event you attend" will find their way into Big Brother's "virtual, centralized grand database." Congress must not lose sight of these developments as they operate obscurely in this mammoth department.
Reneging on glitches
As parting shots from the 107th Congress, Republican leaders began backing out of earlier promises to fix glitches in the homeland security bill next year and, worse, they refused to complete work on unemployment benefits, meaning hundreds of thousands of jobless workers will lose benefits just after Christmas.
In all, this "lame duck" session got a lot done, but it could have been a lot more circumspect — and compassionate.
