Foundations of the Garrison State: far from being a reaction to 9-11, the proposed Department of Homeland Security is based on an elitist blueprint finished and on the President's desk before Black Tuesday. (On the Home Front).

One of the themes trumpeted in the news media as a "lesson" to be learned from 9-11 is that the federal government is too disorganized and inefficient to combat effectively a threat like terrorism. On October 8, 2001, President Bush established by executive order the Office of Homeland Security, with former Pennsylvania governor Tom Ridge as director. More recently, the Bush administration has proposed creating an entirely new cabinet-level department, the Department of Homeland Security, to fill the alleged void in homeland defense capabilities.

The Department of Homeland Security might at first blush seem an appropriate prescription for the battle against domestic terrorism. Undeniably, America does face a serious threat. Moreover, defending the American homeland is certainly an important governmental function. The Founders intended for the federal government to be able to defend the United States of America; the weakness of the Articles of Confederation in providing for the common defense was one of the major factors that led to the 1787 constitutional convention. But the new Department of Homeland Security is unmistakably an Insider-inspired move to consolidate dangerous new powers in the executive branch of the federal government, and to erode the independence of state and local governments.

Dubious Origins

The biggest red flag about the Department of Homeland Security is its origin. Unbeknownst to many Americans, our nation's power elite had carefully planned for an Office of Homeland Security years before September 11th. A few days after the Black Tuesday attacks, the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), the nerve center for America's pro-world-government Establishment, held a meeting in Washington, D.C., to promote the policy recommendations of an obscure task force, the so-called Hart-Rudman Commission. This group, known formally as the United States Commission on National Security/2lst Century, had been working since 1998 on proposals for restructuring the U.S. government to prepare for 21st century challenges. The Commission, originally created at the urging of President Bill Clinton and former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich (both CFR members), was entirely a CFR project. Chaired by former senators and CFR veterans Warren Rudman (R-N.H.) and Gary Hart (D-Colo.), the Commission sported an impressive rost er of CFR Insiders, including CFR president Leslie Gelb, former Indiana Congressman Lee Hamilton, and former Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger.

The Hart-Rudman Commission produced several studies, beginning with New World Coining, which forecasted trends and events over the next quarter century. New World Coining foretells, chillingly, that "Americans will become increasingly vulnerable to hostile attack on our homeland, and our military superiority will not entirely protect us" and that "states, terrorists, and other disaffected groups will acquire weapons of mass destruction and mass disruption, and some will use them. Americans will likely die on American soil, possibly in large numbers."

The Hart-Rudman Commission also issued several other reports recommending changes in the federal government's organization. The most important proposal, recommended in another Commission report entitled Road Map for National Security, was the creation of a "National Homeland Security Agency." According to Road Map, this agency would have "the responsibility for planning, coordinating, and integrating various U.S. government activities involved in homeland security." The Hart-Rudman study recommended placing Customs, Border Control, the Coast Guard, and many other federal agencies under the jurisdiction of the new cabinet-level agency. The agency would also oversee state, local, and federal law enforcement. Its responsibilities would include "setting training and equipment standards, providing resource grants, and information sharing among state emergency management officials, local first responders, the Defense Department, and the FBI" -- all, presumably, to combat the Commission's predicted threat of terrorism.

Shortly after President Bush took office, members of the Hart-Rudman Commission delivered copies of Road Map to the Bush administration. Unsurprisingly, within days after September 11th, President Bush created his Office of Homeland Security, followed in June 2002 by a formal proposal to create an entirely new department. The blueprint for the new department followed the CFR panel's recommendations almost precisely.

Department of Everything

The proposed new Department of Homeland Security, when fully operational, will become the most far-reaching of federal departments, with a vast jurisdiction embracing huge swaths of private activity as well as areas of state and local jurisdiction. According to President Bush's own proposal, issued last June:

The Department of Homeland Security would make Americans safer because our nation would have:

* One department whose primary mission is to protect the American homeland;

* One department to secure our borders, transportation sector, ports, and critical infrastructure;

* One department to synthesize and analyze homeland security intelligence from multiple sources;

* One department to coordinate communications with state and local governments, private industry, and the American people about threats and preparedness;

* One department to coordinate our efforts to protect the American people against bioterrorism and other weapons of mass destruction;

* One department to help train and equip first responders;

* One department to manage federal emergency response activities.

The new department's sweeping jurisdiction will include, according to the Bush proposal, "food and water systems, agriculture, health systems and emergency services, information and telecommunications, banking and finance, energy (electrical, nuclear, gas and oil, dams), transportation (air, road, rail, ports, waterways), the chemical and defense industries, postal and shipping entities, and national monuments and icons" -- in other words, just about everything, from the food we produce and eat and the money we spend to the telephones and email we use to communicate.

The reason for claiming such an all-encompassing authority is that, in the words of the Bush proposal, many functions within the federal government are "currently fragmented" -- that is, separated. But once upon a time, "fragmented" government worked very well; our American constitutional republic was crafted on the basis of the separation of powers, so that, in Madison's words, we could "first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place, oblige it to control itself." The Founders believed that the powers the new Constitution enumerated would enable the new federal government to govern effectively, despite the careful separation of powers and checks and balances that the Founders created.

Yet the Bush administration is dissatisfied with the federal arrangement. Homeland Security chief Tom Ridge, speaking in November 2001, explained that homeland security was "to be a national strategy -- not a federal strategy. The national strategy that the president envisions will involve all levels of government, federal, state and local. It will tap the creative genius and resources of both the public and the private sectors.... Our national strategy will focus all the instruments of national power at our disposal." A July 2002 document produced by the Office of Homeland Security made the picture still clearer, insisting that "the homeland security community will view the federal, state, and local governments as one entity."

Since the Constitution's ratification, the power and scope of the federal government have grown enormously, far exceeding its original constitutional limits. Never in American history -- except, arguably, in wartime -- has the federal government enjoyed more power over state and local governments and individual American citizens than now. The federal government is the largest employer in the United States, and even those of us working in the private sector still toil for months every year just earning the money to pay our federal taxes. Rules and regulations constrain our every activity, stifling private enterprise while spawning a vast professional sector of accountants, lawyers, and consultants who spend their time teaching us how to navigate the shoals of the federal bureaucratic ocean.

What need, then, do we have of yet another federal regulatory behemoth? Our problem is not that the federal government is too diffuse, or too fragmented. It's too large and too powerful, operating well beyond its constitutionally defined limits. Any new Department of Homeland Security will add huge new regulatory burdens and further expand the activities of the federal government into areas where it isn't authorized to act.

Feds and First Responders

According to the Bush proposal, the new department would "coordinate, simplify, and where appropriate consolidate government relations on its issues for America's state and local agencies. It would coordinate federal homeland security programs and information with state and local officials.... It would manage federal grant programs for enhancing the preparedness of firefighters, police, and emergency medical personnel. It would set standards for state and local preparedness activities and equipment to ensure that these funds are spent according to good statewide and regional plans." Quite so: The new department will be in the business of dictating to state and local "first responders" -- fire, police, and other emergency workers -- how better to do their jobs, via the inevitable federal standards and guidelines (read: "bureaucratic red tape").

Yet on September 11th, the federal government did little to help the stricken people of lower Manhattan. Instead, even as Washington's elite huddled at a safe distance, New York City's "first responders" -- without the benefit of any federally imposed mandates or standards -- rushed into the flaming skyscrapers. Without federal supervision, they dragged many of the wounded to safety, and, when the towers fell, many heroic "first responders" gave their lives. The only Americans able to confront the terrorists were the heroic passengers on United Airlines Flight 93, who, without the benefit of military training or modern weaponry, hastily organized a counterattack against the men who had commandeered their plane, bringing it down in a remote Pennsylvania field rather than allowing it to reach its intended target.

September 11th was a story of improvised, frontline heroics by ordinary American citizens, and of panic and confusion on the part of the federal government, which had ignored and even suppressed critical intelligence prior to the attack. There's no basis for believing that the federal government should be entrusted with supervisory authority over all our multilayered defenses against terrorist attack, and every reason to believe that state and local "first responders," free of federal interference, will do a better job every time.

The proposed Department of Homeland Security, then, is a gigantic, Insider-inspired new push to amass power at the federal level, and especially in the executive branch. Its misguided agenda to consolidate power over domestic security will be implemented at the expense of state and local independence, and will help lay the groundwork for a national police force. The Department of Homeland Security will prove in the long run to be the organizational template for massive new inroads on the sovereignty, privacy and freedoms of state and local governments as well as private citizens.