Last week, on his way to the Mexican-American border, Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) told USA Today’s Kathy Kiely that border security was the absolute key to the immigration issue. He said, “I would look at it as if you have a patient who is bleeding to death . . . Close the wound first. Secure the border. And then you can begin to look at what other options are.”

Resident Scholar Norman J. Ornstein

The Speaker’s comments and analogy led me to a parallel analogy: Congress is like Washington, D.C.’s emergency response team. The patient--the border--started to bleed uncontrollably many years ago. A lot of people called 911 (starting on Sept. 11, 2001), but the House ambulance is just now arriving at the door (with legislative EMTs about as clueless as D.C.’s finest).

Here we have Exhibit A in the damage done by a Congress that years ago abandoned a deliberative process and serious oversight. When President Bush belatedly embraced the idea of a Department of Homeland Security in 2002 and picked the behemoth model for maximum political impact, Congress accepted it without question, fighting only over the level of political control of its 170,000 employees.

As I have noted before, any student of organizations and reorganizations--public or private--knew that throwing together 20 or more disparate agencies, bureaus, offices, and other entities would lead to disorganization and chaos for years as career civil servants struggled to figure out their new career paths; as agencies were shuffled and moved physically; and as new leaders simultaneously tried to manage the change and department, and also create a new mission and carry it out at a time of maximum danger to the homeland.

And everyone should have known that it would be a Herculean task to change 20 bureaucratic cultures built around pre-existing missions to create a new culture focused on the new mission of protecting the homeland--with the added danger of losing focus on the old, still-important missions along the way.

At the time the administration’s plan for a department emerged, there was an obvious alternative: create a Department of Border Security first, joining together the Border Patrol, Customs Service, Immigration and Naturalization Service, and Coast Guard.

This reorganization would have served several powerful needs, forcing the four component parts to look beyond their pre-existing missions (the Customs Service, for example, was created in large part to generate revenue) and handle the new and urgent mission of focusing on border threats. In addition, this approach could have brought attention to two components with long-standing problems and dysfunctional cultures--the Border Patrol and the INS--and helped repair those cultures, perhaps by proximity to two other agencies with sterling reputations. And this approach could have ensured that the outcome of the reorganization would be to strengthen the border while preserving important additional functions such as the Coast Guard’s role in marine safety.

Once that merger had been completed--and given the time and effort needed to make it work--other entities, such as the Federal Emergency Management Agency or the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, could be considered for addition to the department, phasing them in to reduce the turmoil along the way.

Instead, the “Big Gulp” approach was taken, without a peep from Congress. Moreover, after the DHS was created, Congress did little oversight, either during its early period of chaos and revolving doors for top management or afterward. It even took years to create parallel oversight committees.

So--no surprise--a preoccupied DHS left the dysfunctional Border Patrol to its own devices and sat by idly while the old disputes among the Border Patrol, INS, and Customs festered. The failure to make the border agencies work, much less work together, contributed to the corrosive, anti-immigrant atmosphere in border areas in the Southwest and elsewhere in the country by failing to get any meaningful handle on border security.

Of course, Congress’ failure here was even more striking and inexcusable when it came to FEMA--a once-proud agency left in tatters within the DHS, a shift that mightily contributed to the disastrous response to Hurricane Katrina (and, we now learn, to a dysfunctional post-Katrina effort that led to outrageous misuse of taxpayer dollars to buy things that were not needed, or unused and allowed to rot). Given this history, I have little confidence that Congress’ newfound zeal to reorganize FEMA, either spinning it out of the DHS or reforming it within, has been thought through carefully or would be carried out well, much less subject to real, sustained, and searching oversight.

Norman J. Ornstein is a resident scholar at AEI.