Beyond the HSC/NSC Merger: Integrating States and Localities into Homeland Security Policymaking

Abstract

The Obama administration has the opportunity to fix a crippling flaw in the homeland security policymaking process. When President Bush established the Homeland Security Council (HSC) to develop policies and integrate U.S. homeland security institutions, White House officials emphasized the importance of including state and local government representation in the council. Their inclusion is vital. Homeland security fundamentally differs from national security in that states and localities play the leading role in many homeland security missions, as opposed to federal agencies. Yet the Bush administration ended up excluding state and local representatives from the HSC and built only weak mechanisms to include their input in Department of Homeland Security policymaking. That exclusion helped produce a string of failures in policy development and institutional integration. Now, regardless of whether President Obama decides to merge the HSC with the National Security Council (NSC), he has the opportunity to make a vital change: the creation of an effective, institutionalized way for states and localities to help shape the policies and programs they implement. Merging the NSC and HSC is not without risk. I argue that if the councils are combined, administration officials will need to pay special attention to the span of control issues raised by the merger and the danger that homeland security will take a back seat to traditional national security priorities. I also argue that integrating homeland security across the federal bureaucracy that is, horizontal integration poses unique challenges that a merged council would need to address. These problems will be relatively easy to solve, however, compared to the challenge of building effective vertical integration between a merged council and state and local governments.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Jan 01, 2009
Accession Number
ADA494431

Entities

People

  • Paul N. Stockton

Organizations

  • Naval Postgraduate School

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Biomedical
  • Energy and Power Technologies

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Counterterrorism
  • Department Of Defense
  • Department Of Homeland Security
  • Department Of State
  • Emergency Response
  • First Responders
  • Governments
  • Homeland Defense
  • Homeland Security
  • Local Governments
  • National Security
  • New York
  • Public Administration
  • Security
  • Terrorism
  • United States
  • United States Government

Fields of Study

  • Political science

Readers

  • Applied Combinatorial Optimization and Logic Circuit Design.
  • Strategic Security Studies