at this, have a hard time conceiving of a Homeland Defense structure that does not include this part, which obviously it needs defense against some kind of terrorist attack. Why do you come to the conclusion that one should not include this?

Mr. DAALDER. There are many vulnerabilities in our country that terrorists can exploit. If every Government agency that has some responsibility for these vulnerabilities is to be included in the

Chairperson FEINSTEIN. But I am talking about the nuclear one which has a much greater impact on people.

Mr. DAALDER. But there are many Government agencies, from DOD to DOE to the labs, that have responsibility for nuclear, both weaponry and energy sites, with all of the materials that are there. There are many ones that have responsibility for dangerous pathogens which, if released under the right circumstances, will kill more people than nuclear. There are many, many, many agencies involved in homeland security, and it is wrong to believe that the only way you can get them to work together is by putting them in a single building with a new seal on it.

Coordination is the name of the game-a single national strategy that sets out the clear priorities, one of which will clearly be the safety, and security, and protection of nuclear energy waste sites, and particularly if we are ever going to start moving this stuff around the country, the protection of the transportation routes and the transportation systems that are going to move this stuff, that is going to be a top priority for the country.

It is not clear to me that you have to have a department that takes control of it. I have been a strong supporter from the very beginning of having a Tom Ridge-like organization inside the White House, somebody who sits there, as Governor Gilmore rightly said, who can coordinate the Cabinet people, can use the power of the presidency to get things done. I am distressed, in some sense, that 9 months after September 11th, we still do not have a national strategy. We still do not have clear priorities about where it is that we need to focus our resources, our abilities to deal with threats and vulnerabilities, but now we have this massive reorganization plan completely unrelated to our prioritization, which we have not had, and that is

Chairperson FEINSTEIN. Let me stop you here and ask each one of you because I think Mr. Daalder has raised a good point. We are supposed to have a strategy. Is this putting the cart before the horse; in other words, are we repositioning departments before we have a strategy? That has not yet been forthcoming, and you are right, it is a substantial period of time.

Could each of you respond to that. Should we have the strategy prior to making these organizational changes.

Mr. Light?

Mr. LIGHT. Well, that is the ideal case. Twenty-five years after creating the Department of Energy to coordinate and deal with the moral equivalent of war for energy independence, we still do not have an energy strategy. We are looking for one. The Vice President spent a good deal of last year apparently looking for one. We would, ideally, have that. That does not mean you cannot get benefits from reorganization, but there is an implied sort of undertow in this statute and in this conversation that if you build it, the

strategy will come. I am not saying that is the cart before the horse. That is more a notion that we have got to get some coordination and that our agencies are not working very well, particularly INS, and that we need to do something about our organizational capacity even before we have the strategy in place.

Chairperson FEINSTEIN. Thank you.

Mr. Daalder and then Mr. Eland.

Mr. DAALDER. Clearly, in the ideal situation, you have a clear strategy with clear priorities and you organize accordingly. That is what we did when we put our study out at the Brookings Institution. We do have a strategy. We have a vulnerability assessment, and we have organizational consequences that flow from that.

I would note that is not how this administration has gone about it. This proposal, which Mr. Ridge told the National Journal just a month ago he would veto or recommend the President to veto, has come very suddenly, very hastily, I believe in response to particular political developments that have very little to do with the organizational questions. Therefore, it is incumbent on all of us, including, in particular, you here on Capitol Hill, to take a very close look at this, whether it really makes sense and at least demand from Mr. Ridge to see the strategy that underlies it. He says there is a strategy. That is what he told the House 10 days ago, but we have not seen it. The President has not seen it. He has not delivered it to the President.

I think, before you can make final judgment about whether this agency or that agency ought to go into a new department, you have to have some sense whether the administration is barking up the right tree or the wrong tree when it comes to its strategy.

Chairperson FEINSTEIN. Thank you.

Mr. Eland?

Mr. ELAND. Well, certainly, in the ideal case you want a national strategy first, and I think we should make this the ideal case. We have been attacked by terrorists and taken mass casualties. If there was ever a time for the government to do the right thing, this is it. Whether we will do the right thing remains in doubt.

I think, as Mr. Daalder just said, they are trying to solve a different problem than the main problem-the coordination within intelligence agencies and between them. I think the government reorganization is designed to divert attention from the real problem that we need to solve first of all, We need to wait until the Intelligence Committees has finished their work before we start proposing grandiose schemes like this.

That said, maybe we do eventually need to consolidate some of the agencies in homeland security. But I think we need to figure out what the main problem is. Naturally, we know that we are being attacked by terrorists, but what was the specific problem that allowed them to surprise us so much? That is what we need to find out. Then we need to develop a national strategy, and I think we need to take it much slower than we are taking it. We may need to eventually address the problem that the Bush administration is addressing consolidation of the homeland defense sector-but we need to work on the intelligence side first I think.

So the answer to your question is, yes, we do need to know what we are doing before we do it and why we are doing it.

Chairperson FEINSTEIN. See, I am very concerned because we are really creating two additional intelligence-type functions, and the FBI now, in this new department, we have got 12-plus departments that deal with intelligence matters. They are all under the director of so-called DCI, who cannot run the CIA, run all of the intelligence community and be in the Middle East negotiating a peace agreement, it seems to me.

So I think we have got a very fragmented kind of system, with respect to intelligence, and my concern is that we are making it more fragmented, rather than less fragmented, because the bits and pieces a day are in the tens of thousands that have to be looked at. Therefore, if you just add two other agencies-FBI and now Homeland Defense-what is achieved? It seems to me it is just simply a signal that there has not been the communication, and everybody is going to try to get around it by not improving the communication and integration of computer systems, but by doing their own thing. I am not sure the Nation is necessarily benefited by that.

So I think you have raised some very, very good points. I think it is so easy to let a proposal slip by because of the prestige of the President and the fact that we all want to be together, without really taking the kind of look at it that we need to look and letting time settle some of these things down a bit.

Do any of you have any

before we adjourn?

other comments you would like to make

Mr. LIGHT. I think that the point about legislative time is right on target. I mean, I worked up here, and there is a sense that when a proposal like this comes forward, it just carries a locomotive velocity, and then it gets tied to a date. People start to say it has got to be passed by September 11th because that is the way to honor the victims of that terrible day.

It is hard to resist that pressure, but I think that that is the job of the U.S. Congress, and I often say that that is the particular job of the U.S. Senate. You are responsible in this chamber for confirming all of these people. And it has always been the Senateand I hate to say this-that has been the place where the buck on reorganization stops. It tends to come over from the House or down Pennsylvania Avenue, and it comes over to you all, and it is a tough one here because of the national visibility attached to it, but once you create one of these things, there is a certain immortality attached to it.

So I applaud you for this hearing and for asking the right questions, I think.

Chairperson FEINSTEIN. I have not had a chance to see your remarks, but do you go into the specifics on the waivers in your remarks?

Mr. LIGHT. Yes.

Chairperson FEINSTEIN. I will pull it and take a look at it. Thank

Mr. DAALDER. Let me make two points. One is I think there is widespread agreement, even on Capitol Hill, there certainly is in the outside community, and there is inside the administration, that on the border and transportation side, something needs to be done.

It is what Hart-Rudman came out with, it is what everybody has agreed on, and it might be the element you can move quicker on, than on the whole thing.

One way to resolve the political tension that I think Paul has rightly put before you is say, we are going to move on 90 percent of what you asked, Mr. President, which has to be the border and transportation side. It makes sense. We are going to do it. We are going to make it a Cabinet department, but all of this other stuff, we are going to spend some time thinking about it. On the information side, we are going to wait to see what the Intelligence Committees come up. Some of us still believe we need a national commission to look at this in some great detail before we start making new decisions and pouring new concrete about how to resolve those issues.

The second point is I am concerned, and deeply concerned, about the fact that the White House is right now spending all of its time trying to get you to pass this piece of legislation and none of its time on what is Tom Ridge's day job, which is leading, coordinating, and mobilizing this Government to make sure that this country remains secure.

I think that if Tom Ridge is going to lead the transition effort on convincing Capitol Hill, on convincing the outside world that the proposal that the President put forward on June 6 is the right way to go, somebody else, a senior official at a high level needs to be in charge of the Office of Homeland Security because the terrorists are not going to wait until we have figured out how we are going to rearrange the boxes on an organizational chart. In fact, they may well exploit the opportunity, as we are busily figuring out where to build our new buildings and who should and should not be in it, in order to look at that vulnerability, and we should not lose sight of that. If we are, indeed, in a war, that war is still ongoing. It is not going to wait until we figure out our final decisions and reorganization.

Mr. ELAND. I would echo some of Ivo's comments. I think we cannot get too diverted from the main tasks. I do think the intelligence task is probably the most urgent-to figure out what happened there so we can correct any problems. The other stuff can probably wait, although I think we need to be very vigilant. There is currently a lot of effort in Washington. Whenever the President proposes something like this, all of the attention focuses on moving organizational boxes: but that does not necessarily mean that we are going to have better security or better security quickly.

I do applaud the Congress for looking at this. The urge to be together is certainly high after a tragic event like this, but if we are, I think we may be in great peril.

Some people have to ask questions, for example, is this the right thing to do. We cannot be afraid to ask those questions just because we have had a horrendous event occur. Our country is based on discussion and determining what we should do both the executive branch and the Congress together debating the issues.

So I think we need to definitely take more time to look at some of these issues. We need to solve the things like intelligence that really matter in the short term, but slow it down a bit on the government reorganization.

Chairperson FEINSTEIN. Right. Well, let me thank you very much. I, for one, am becoming increasingly convinced that we should have at least one alternative proposal, which is smaller, which is more discrete, which is more concentrated, which is doable quickly, which does not have personnel implications that can create the climate that we all know can be created in a bureaucracy that makes the mission more difficult. So I am going to try to work in that direction and would appreciate any advice that you might be able to provide, the three of you, as we approach this.

I think the point is that, to a great extent, parts of INS should go in this, certainly, the enforcement parts, most probably the visa parts. We ought to look certainly at part of the State Department Consular Affairs with respect to visas. If you want to protect the homeland, let us keep hijackers out, if we can. Ergo, perhaps adding that.

Certainly, whether it is National Guard or Coast Guard, there needs to be one element there, and I think you are right about the transportation agencies, certainly Customs. I am still undecided on the nuclear aspects of it because I think protection of reactors, protections of waste, all of those things become vital, maybe even some parts with respect to biological and chemical weapons. I think there has to be some role for this.

So that it is probable that a more discrete, in terms of size, agency might make sense, and I am going to try to see what I can do to work on that and appreciate any input that you could provide. In the meantime, thank you so much for being here, and the hearing is adjourned.

[Whereupon, at 12:04 p.m., the subcommittee was adjourned.] [Submissions for the record follow.]