Changing Homeland Security: What Should Homeland Security Leaders Be Talking About?
Abstract
Homeland security has spiraled into Stage Five of the Issue Attention Cycle. Stage Five -- the post-problem stage -- means homeland security again operates principally behind the public apron. Stakeholders sedulously sift through the grist of homeland security's congressional, industrial, academic, and bureaucratic complex. The professionals who populate that complex spend their days calibrating the strategies, programs, and institutions disjunctively formed in the earlier stages of the Cycle. Except for an occasional 15 minutes of public attention to dead terrorists, disrupted plots, and grant cuts, homeland security is not an issue high on the public's agenda. It could leap back on top in an instant. But for now most conversations about homeland security take place within a comparatively small community. The issues are largely the same ones talked about for the last 5 years: funding, threats, hazards, borders, interoperability, intelligence, response, transportation, equipment, and recently, pandemics. Unarguable progress has been made in all these domains. We clearly are better prepared for some things than we were in the autumn of 2001. Equally as certain, there are miles to go before most of the nation's jurisdictions get a "Sufficient" rating in future national preparedness assessments. Stage Five in the Issue Attention Cycle means there is little political will to substantially alter the hodgepodge federalism that characterizes U.S. homeland security. The system we have is the one we have to work with, at least until something significant happens: another attack, a catastrophic natural disaster, a national public health emergency, or a new political administration. Until the system is shocked, much homeland security work will be incremental. It will continue to focus on the mundane but institutionally important work of answering "how prepared are we, how prepared do we need to be, and how do we prioritize efforts to close the gap?"
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Jul 01, 2006
- Accession Number
- ADA484151
Entities
People
- Christopher Bellavita
Organizations
- Naval Postgraduate School