WASHINGTON — After the rush in Congress to create a Homeland Security Department, it could be years before the gigantic new Cabinet agency is fully operational.
The General Accounting Office, the investigative arm of Congress, estimates it could take five to 10 years before the new department can "provide meaningful and sustainable results."
Rep. Nancy Pelosi, the House Democratic whip, said Wednesday the huge agency is "a creature that would have been obsolete in the 1950s. . . . We should whittle it down to something more efficient.
"If our goal is to protect the American people as soon as possible, an unwieldy department of this size and scope is not the way to go," said Pelosi, D-Calif.
Many experts and lawmakers say it's risky to embark on massive, long-term bureaucratic change at such an uncertain time.
"We're going to be spending all of our time thinking about reorganization. It's bound to make us less safe," said Ivo Daalder, a member of former President Clinton's National Security Council staff who is now at the Brookings Institution think tank.
The last government consolidation of this magnitude occurred in 1947, when President Truman took the first steps toward creating what became the Defense Department. Congress cemented those steps in 1949, then did some more tinkering in 1953 and 1958. Another reorganization occurred in 1986.
Likewise, the Homeland Security bill's probable passage this fall would mark only the infancy of the new Cabinet agency. While the bill sets an effective date of Jan. 1, 2003, the department would exist mainly on paper at that point.
The legislation will be the first item of business when the Senate returns from recess Sept. 3. It is expected to win approval despite opposition from some senior lawmakers, including Senate Appropriations Committee Chairman Robert Byrd, D-W.Va. The Senate and House will then have to reach compromise on a final version.
The White House has created a transition office to oversee the change, headed by Homeland Security chief Tom Ridge. Planning is under way to get the new department's leaders in place before it comes into existence and to figure out some temporary space requirements.
Ridge is also charged with coordinating the federal government's efforts to prevent terrorism in the United States. Spokesman Gordon Johndroe said the office can handle both tasks without diminishing either.
A central task of the new agency is to analyze intelligence and act on it to protect against and prevent terrorist attacks on U.S. soil. If the Senate version of the agency is created, it would set up a powerful new unit that needs a great deal of expertise to pore over huge amounts of data in dozens of languages.
"Getting that up and running is going to take years," Daalder said.
Then there's the question of whether — and if so, where — a new department headquarters should be built to house the more than 7,000 affected employees now scattered across the Washington area. The House-passed version of the legislation requires construction of a new headquarters building — another move measured in years, not months — preferably on government-owned land to save money.
Initial transition cost estimates of $3 billion over the next five years don't take into account a new headquarters. White House officials say it may not be necessary to locate all the workers in a single place, which would also save some taxpayer dollars.
These decisions bring up a host of other seemingly mundane issues that could affect the ability of the agency to do its job, such as the stresses involved in forcing workers to change locations and adapt to new power structures.
"These sorts of huge moves are every bureaucrat's nightmare," Norman Ornstein, a government scholar at the American Enterprise Institute said. "Overnight their daily lives, career paths and comfort levels will be turned upside down."
Another potential snag involves questions over how to combine differing retirement and benefits plans for the thousands of workers now in more than 22 agencies.
Overcoming resistance to change and getting the new agency on the right course will take "strong and visionary leadership," the GAO concludes in an analysis of the road ahead. Such leadership "will be vital to creating a unified, focused organization as opposed to a group of separate units under one roof."