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Release Date: December 4, 2008
Union, New Jersey
Kean University
Secretary Chertoff: Not just in New Jersey but in Union County.
Secretary Chertoff: And actually raised not more than a mile and a half from here. Well, I’m delighted to be here to speak at Kean University. I want to thank the president, President Farahi, and the chair, Eugene Enlow. Of course, my good friend John Brown, who’s now the funniest member of the New Jersey Legislature but a real leader and a lawyer, a very smart lawyer and a very dedicated public servant, and I’m delighted to join him here.
It’s a particularly appropriate place for a Secretary of Homeland Security to speak because Governor Kean obviously was a chair of the 9/11 Commission and much of what that Commission generated in terms of recommendations has found its way into the DNA of the Department of Homeland Security and many of the policies and practices that we pursue.
I also have to make note of the fact that it’s Thanksgiving season going into Christmas. That means a lot for all of us, of course, from a family standpoint. For me, it has special meaning. It is the end of hurricane season and that means I don’t have to worry about hurricanes anymore, but I do certainly -- have had the occasion to look back over the last four years and actually further back over the last eight years, during which most of which I was in government, first as the head of the Criminal Division of the Department of Justice and then after a couple years as a judge, federal judge, back as the Secretary of Homeland Security.
Let me make two observations at the outset as I talk about my tenure. First, since I am at a university and there are a lot of students here, let me encourage you to consider homeland security not just as a department but more generally as a possible career choice for the future. If you’re interested in public service and you have an interest in getting into any one of a number of fields of endeavor, whether it’s intelligence analysis, law enforcement work, emergency response work, business processes, there’s a space for you in the field of homeland security. It’s also an area in which perhaps, regrettably as we continue to grow, will be very important for all of us not only here in New Jersey but nationally and internationally because the threats that we deal with are not going to go away. They’re going to become more and more challenging.
The second thing I’d like to say as a preliminary matter is when I look back over the last four years and particularly the term of office of this president, the current president, who came in really just a matter of months before September 11th, it has been an opportunity to look at certainly my domain and a lot of what has been accomplished under this president’s leadership and something that people have remarked upon and I always touch on when I say this, we have not been attacked successfully over the last seven and a half years.
I don’t think people in the wake of 9/11 would have believed that that would be possible and I don’t think that is an accident. It’s certainly not emblematic of the lack of intent on the part of the terrorists and extremists because, even last week, we saw the effect of an attack in Mumbai by a group who adhere to the extremist ideology that also gave us September 11th, and in fact there’s been attack after attack all over the world and there have been efforts to attack here, whether it was the shoe bomber in December of 2001, whether it was the plot to blow up bridges or blow up apartment buildings using gas, natural gas, whether it’s some of the plots that are currently the subject of ongoing criminal cases.
It’s not a question of lack of intent. It’s because under the leadership of this president and at all levels of government, we have taken very, very energetic steps to protect this country and that means that steps were taken overseas to take care of the enemy and kill and capture a lot of the leaders of al-Qaeda. It’s transforming our intelligence community with new tools and eliminating the stovepipes between the various intelligence agencies which, as the 9/11 Commission indicated, really hampered us in identifying and contending with 9/11.
It’s the Patriot Act. It’s my own department, what we’ve done to make it much harder for people to come through the ports of entry using false identification, like some of the 9/11 hijackers did when they boarded airplanes using phony drivers’ licenses. All of these elements form the strategy that this president has led in a determined way to carry out what he regards as a most important mission which is protecting the United States and I think there’s dispute and controversy about individual measures, but I think if you stand back and you look at the result and the result is not having to go to more funerals of Americans who were killed in this country through terrorist attacks, I think that speaks volumes for a president who has made tackling big issues and getting the job done on stuff that’s very important to the American people his number one mission, and I think we owe him a debt of gratitude.
Secretary Chertoff: Since I am celebrating the end of hurricane season and a year that was particularly strenuous in terms of all kinds of disasters, whether it was forest fires in California, an exceptional flooding season in the Midwest, lots of tornadoes also in the Midwest and, of course, Hurricanes Gustav and Ike in the Gulf, I do think it’s appropriate to talk a little bit about how we manage hurricane season incidents and the lessons I’ve learned over the last four years and what I think it means for the structure of the department and what it means for what the department’s workload is operationally in meeting the response to emergencies all across the government.
Now, when we had Hurricane Gustav hit the Gulf Coast, of course, it was a considerable concern about the fact that it was headed for New Orleans and we had certainly not completed the job of rebuilding, although some measures had been put into place to strengthen the levees and some of the other physical infrastructure which might have been imperiled.
But we had, first and foremost, to make sure that we were able to evacuate the people of the communities that might be affected, so that there would not be a repeat of what happened four years previously when we were not prepared for the kind of evacuation planning and capabilities that you needed in 2005 with Hurricane Katrina.
Over the last three years, working with state and local governments, Governor Jindal and Mayor Nagin, we looked at very, very robust and detailed set of plans with matching capabilities that enabled us to be able to do a remarkable evacuation of the coast of Louisiana over this summer and because of that evacuation, I don’t think there was any significant loss of life. Maybe one or two people lost their lives through misadventure. We did not have anybody in the path of the hurricane that did not voluntarily make a choice to remain and I think that’s a great tribute to the joint work done at a number of levels, but it also reflects a couple things about my department.
First, that FEMA has very, very significantly been reconstructed from what it was in 2005 when I inherited it as the second Secretary of Homeland Security. For the first time in its history, FEMA had a strong planning process, but it also had something else. It had the ability to draw upon the components and the strength of the Department of Homeland Security, whether it was the Coast Guard, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Customs and Border Protection, or even the Transportation Security Administration.
What many people don’t realize is that in order to perform the functions that FEMA had to perform as the federal representative of emergency management, it needed to draw on capabilities and communications equipment and training that was residing in other parts of the Department of Homeland Security that simply are not part of the ordinary workforce of FEMA. That meant that we needed to have Customs and Border Protection, law enforcement personnel, to provide security for the transit of life-sustaining goods and commodities distribution.
TSA actually took screening officers from airports, 366 of them, and we assigned them to points of distribution in Houston and other parts of Harris County, Texas, so they could distribute food and water to people who needed it when they were thrown out of their homes by Hurricane Ike. Again, FEMA does not have the personnel to do that. It was by bringing in other elements of the department that we were able to get that job done.
The Coast Guard, as it did in Katrina, as it has done in every subsequent disaster, performed heroically as a life-saving and a search and rescue component, and we were able to use the unmanned aerial vehicles and other aerial assets in order to get a better view of what was going on and make sure we’d be effective in how we responded.
The big picture here was that FEMA was substantially and dramatically supported by having all the elements of the department integrated with it under the leadership of a single Secretary and a single leadership team.
So what am my three take-aways, my three lessons from this past season of natural disasters? First, when it comes to any disaster or incident or emergency, whether it is manmade in its inception or natural, the key to success is planning and preparation, training and exercising. That has to be done across the board. It can’t be done in stovepipes. It has to be done in a unified and joint way.
Second, what’s critical is unity of effort and unity of effort means managing the incident in a coordinated way and that again requires cooperation, communication and coordination, something that is best accomplished by people who work together and are integrated together on a daily basis.
And finally, my conclusion is that the department, far from what some critics say, having stifled FEMA, has actually been an enabler that has permitted FEMA to do things that it could never do as a stand-alone agency, where, after all, it’s largely the people who would be out inspecting homes and dealing with claims. It doesn’t -- FEMA doesn’t have its own air fleet, it doesn’t have its own helicopter fleet, it doesn’t have its own capability to conduct law enforcement operations or protect things. In order to get that done right, the most efficient and effective way was to have a bond with the entire Department of Homeland Security.
There’s some debate back and forth on the issue of whether FEMA ought to be taken out and made an independent agency once again and people who advocate this, I understand everybody has a different view, have the vision in their mind that risk management, dealing with natural disasters, is somehow very different than preventing things or having law enforcement, and we ought to keep these things separate.
Again, since we’re at Kean University, so I’m reminded of the 9/11 Commission, don’t forget that the 9/11 Commission identifies one of the problems in 9/11 as the radical disconnect between the fire department and the police department and the city of New York because it didn’t have an integrated system for dealing with all the elements of the spectrum of emergency, prevention, protection and response. That disconnection cost lives and created delays in 9/11 and that’s one of the reasons we wound up with the Department of Homeland Security.
Additionally, the ability to have tools at hand that may not be called upon 90 percent of the time but that are available to support an emergency manager when he or she needs it, that gives a leverage to an emergency manager that he would not have if you kept consequence management separate from law enforcement and prevention and protection, and finally, I have to say when you look at the challenges we face, the last thing we need to do is to go back to the days of stovepiping and everybody protects their own turf.
Every time you look at the issue of how do we make the country safe, you realize that you have to deal comprehensively with how do you prevent things, how do you reduce vulnerabilities, and how do you mitigate the damage with effective response, and you can only do that kind of integrated analysis and planning if you bring all these elements under a single rubric where they can work together, plan, train and exercise together.
Additionally, I have to say many of the people who advocate most strenuously for taking FEMA out do so because they think of FEMA mainly through the prism of the day-in/day-out disasters that we all deal with, but as Mumbai dramatically illustrated just in the last couple of weeks, we are far from being in a place that we can dismiss the possibility of another terrorist attack and without getting into classified issues, just by looking at what is reported in the public press about the response in Mumbai to the terrorist attacks, there was concern expressed about the fact that the fire department and the police and the military did not coordinate and work together and that that caused problems.
So we certainly don’t want to go back to a system that has proven not to be as capable as what we currently have in terms of dealing with all kinds of emergencies, but I’d like to make an even broader point because I find that when we deal with the issue of emergencies, there’s a real tendency to focus only on the last thing that happened or the thing which customarily happens, the high probability, relatively routine type of disaster we deal with, but if there’s any lesson the last eight years taught us, it is that the thing that is most difficult to address but the most urgent to consider, it’s the low probability but very high consequence event, and we’ve had that happen three times during this administration.
We’ve had 9/11. We’ve had Katrina where the real issue was the failure of the levee system. The hurricane itself was not remarkable compared to other hurricanes, but the failure of the levee system was what precipitated the catastrophe. And, of course, the financial crisis. Each of these, the financial folks describe as a “fat tail event,” meaning on the bell curve that measures probability, it’s a low probability at one end of the spectrum, but an exceptionally high consequence and when that happens, that becomes the greatest challenge and that is where the federal government does -- presents a unique value proposition that can’t just be handled by state and local government. State and local government does a very good job with a lot of regular events that occur day-in and day-out, but the truly high-consequence events is where the federal government has a special role to play.
That’s why an integrated emergency incident management of the kind that we have developed at the department is so critical. Look at the kinds of low-probability but high-consequence events we do have to worry about. We have to be concerned about, of course, high-consequence natural disasters, a truly significant earthquake like the one that occurred in the early 19th century along the Mississippi River, along a geological formation called the New Madrid Fault. You probably never heard of the New Madrid Fault. If you have heard of it, you probably would have thought it was pronounced New Madrid Fault. It is a fault like the San Andreas Fault that runs down the center of the country, that if in fact it were to precipitate a major earthquake, it could cause flooding and disaster on a scale that would make Katrina look like it was a thunder shower on a sunny day and because of what has been built up over the last 200 years in that area, the need to have an integrated response would tax all of the elements of national government.
The good news is we are working with states and local governments now on a series of comprehensive plans and exercises which we will continue to progress on in the next few years, but this is an example of a low-probability but high-consequence event that requires a coordinated incident management philosophy across the entire spectrum from prevention to response.
Imagine a pandemic flu. Again, it hasn’t -- it has not occurred, but one, that if it did occur, it would involve not only the medical capabilities but concerns about how to manage the border, concerns about how to keep our critical infrastructure operating if people were afraid to go to work, for example, concerns about security, if police forces were to become decimated because of incapacitating illness.
Again, we have built an integrated plan to get this job done, but it requires going across the whole spectrum of prevention, protection, and response, and not just within DHS. It involves Health and Human Services, the Department of Justice, the military, and state and local public health and security offices. All of these kinds of high-consequence/low-probability events make it clear that where we have to go in the domain of civilian emergency management is the way the military went after four years in the Defense Department that was not fully connected and then they finally integrated and created a true joint Defense Department covering the entire military spectrum in 1986, and it’s where we have to go in the foreign affairs arena, where we integrate our foreign affairs activity between diplomacy, assistance and aid to people who need it, and military force, and have the ability to reconstruct as well as to win wars. That movement towards integrated, joint and interoperable activity overseas and in our national security domain must be mirrored in what we do here in emergency management and protecting the country.
The department, through its formation, has made a good start on that in terms of our own capabilities and components, but increasingly, we have seen what we are working on, this integrated planning and operational activity across all of the civilian departments of government, whether it’s protecting against cyber attacks, protecting against massive catastrophic health threats or whether it be a terrorist attack or natural disaster, and I’m hopeful and I’m going to urge the new administration to continue this process of integrating the planning, integrating DHS’s role designated by the president as the coordinator across the civilian domain, not displacing the expertise of individual agencies but making sure that the agencies are synchronized and coordinated in their response at the federal level in the same way that we’re increasingly working to do that overseas through our national security apparatus.
This is going to unquestionably run into obstacles and I’ll tell you very quickly what they are before I conclude.
The first is a natural inertia in all bureaucracies to protect your turf. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve dealt with people in the department who, in one way or another, say to us back off, this isn’t your business, this is our domain, we’re the experts, we’ve always done it this way, leave us alone. The problem is, while every agency is an expert in its own domain, it is often not in a position to understand the interdependencies between what it does and what other departments do.
So, for example, if we have an outbreak of agricultural livestock disease, the first reaction many people have is, oh, that’s the Department of Agriculture issue. Why does the Department of Homeland Security care if it’s not a terrorist attack? Well, when you think about it, your response is going to require not only agricultural and veterinary activities, it’s going to require potentially a change in the way we deal with movement of livestock across the border. That’s a Customs and Border Protection issue. There are going to be questions about the impact on our military bases, and what does that mean in terms of food and their ability to deal with their troops and personnel? So DoD is going to have to be involved in this. There may be requirements for screening and scanning that affect the air travel and other transportation elements and so you’ve got to get the Department of Transportation into the mix and what we do is, at DHS, we don’t tell anybody what to do, but we bring everybody together so that we have an operational forum in which all of the actors with relevant equity and relevant interest in the outcome of the emergency and also everybody who has some tool to bring to solving the problem, everybody’s brought together and we can work in a coordinated way to put together our plan of action and to execute it and that concept, I think, has to be ultimately what overcomes bureaucratic inertia.
Finally, I’d be remiss if I didn’t talk about another big obstacle to this kind of integrated activity which is the very fragmented congressional oversight system.
Congress is still using a committee system that was built before 9/11 and every committee jurisdiction has a proprietary interest in its own department that it supervises and so whenever there is a pull to having synchronized or coordinated activity, there is some concern on the part of some committees that they’re losing a little bit of their turf or a little bit of their authority over the agencies they have traditionally supervised.
But again, in much the same way as the national security apparatus was pulled together by Congress, I think Congress has to complete the job they’re doing on the homeland security side by empowering the homeland security committees that have been set up which have the responsibility to parallel what we do in the congressional domain, and I think if we get that done, we’re going to go a long way in making this process of jointness and unity of effort be a reality.
So as we look forward to the challenges of the future, I would say a lot has been done in building the basic foundation and architecture of homeland security strategy, but more needs to be done. This is not a process that anybody could have reasonably thought would be done within a matter of five years.
If Congress and the next administration, as I’m confident they will, builds upon the progress that’s been made, and it won’t necessarily be everything we’ve done and that’s fine, that’s why we have change, but if they build on the basic fundamentals, I think we can continue to build a unity of effort and the jointness across the entire spectrum of dealing with emergencies which is what the American people expect.
Every time you have a Mumbai, whether it’s in India or it’s a 9/11 here, it gives us a moment to look at what we’re doing and say are we putting the protection of the country first above our individual turf consciousness or agency agendas, and we always make sure that when we make decisions about how we proceed that we are putting the protection of the country first, because at the end of the day what’s at stake is not the budget of our individual agencies or the customer when the customer went into a business at our individual agencies. What’s at stake are our families and our communities in which all of us have an interest in securing.
Thank you very much.
Secretary Chertoff: I have left some time for questions, and I think there are people with the microphone. So if you’d stand up, wait for a microphone, identify yourself, I’ll be happy to answer the questions. Wait for the microphone and you’ve got to tell me who you are.
Question: Mr. Secretary, Brad Booth from Westfield. Welcome back to Kean and I hope Westfield is in your future.
I admire and envy your career as a prosecutor, as a federal judge, and I especially admire your action in resigning from a lifetime judge, as a federal appeals judge, the aspiration of most lawyers, to take on this almost thankless can of worms that you did, and I think you’ve done very well. I think we all owe you a debt of gratitude for that.
Question: On the radio yesterday, I heard a snippet of a report by somebody, I think it was outside the agency, referring to what they thought was a great probability that some time in the next five years, we would have another crisis inflicted upon us, probably in the biological area rather than by a physical act, such as a bomb or something like that. I didn’t gather who put the report out or what the background thinking of it was, but I wondered if you would comment on just the extent you’re able to do so.
Secretary Chertoff: Well, first of all, it’s great to see you again, a fellow former Westfielder.
This refers to something called the “Weapon of Mass Destruction and Terrorist Commission” which was set up by Congress, I guess about a year ago, and it issued its report, I think, yesterday. It was chaired by two former senators, Bob Graham and Jim Talent, and what they did say is that they thought in the next five years, there was a reasonable likelihood of a biological attack somewhere in the world or a nuclear attack with a greater likelihood of it being biological.
I’m not sure I agree with the time frame, but I do agree that the chances of a biological attack are greater than a nuclear attack, and one of the reasons I say that is because we’ve had one already. We had the anthrax attacks in 2001, and, you know, the FBI has indicated they’ve identified the perpetrators as a single individual, but certainly it showed the capability of carrying out an attack in a small way.
This is not meant to frighten, it’s meant to underscore the importance of continuing to do what we have and doing it. Let me tell you a little bit about what we have done. Five years ago, cargo that came into the country through containers, like at the Port of Elizabeth not far from here, was not scanned for radiation at all. Now, virtually 100 percent of it does go through radiation scanners. Five years ago, only a small percentage of these containers were inspected overseas. Now, we do inspection of many containers overseas, not as many as relates to the whole, but of those we’ve identified as high-risk, many of those we do overseas.
Five years ago, no one paid attention to general aviation as a way of bringing in nuclear weapons into the country. Now, we have begun the process of issuing rules and regulations that will require screening of international private flights from overseas, so we can see whether there’s a dangerous person coming in with potentially dangerous weapons.
Five years ago, we didn’t have biological sensors in more than two dozen cities in locations around the country, but now we do have them and we’re moving to the next generation. So we’ve done an awful lot in terms of reducing the risk, but it is fair to say that, as know-how goes on, as more people and with scientific background, are out there doing research in this area, the capabilities of someone putting together particularly some kind of a biological weapon, by weaponizing something that occurs in nature, that increases, and so we have an obligation to continue to build on what we’ve done.
These are long-term investments and the reason we talk about this is not to, as some people say, fear-monger but because in order to dedicate the money we’re going to need to reduce the vulnerability over a period of years, we’re going to have to make those investments now. If we make the common mistake of saying let’s only deal with next week’s problem and let’s put off next year’s problem, the next decade’s problem, we’re going to find ourselves once again with what I described as that fat tail high-consequence event and the day they say, oh, by the way, there’s a biological weapon and it’s on the way, that’s going to be way too late to begin doing the investments.
So what this is about, I think, is an acknowledgment that we’ve done quite a bit but a reminder that this is not an invitation to stop the work. It is, rather, an invitation to continue to build and invest so that, if and when something occurs or someone develops a weapon in five or 10 years, we’re in a position to deal with it as opposed to playing catch-up which is, unfortunately, historically, the way things have often happened when there are disasters.
Back there.
Question: Yes. My name is David Matthau. I’m from New Jersey, 101.5 News. What do you think, sir, are our greatest vulnerabilities? We’ve heard a lot over the last couple of years about chemical plants, about nuclear power plants in New Jersey. What, in your mind, are the biggest vulnerabilities, and how do we protect those critical points?
Secretary Chertoff: Well, we have, of course, got regulations in place on chemical plants, particularly those in areas where there’s a large population, and we have sent out some performance requirements in terms of security that they’re going to have to implement. Likewise, -- excuse me. Likewise, we’ve improved our security with respect to the movement of hazardous chemicals along rail lines, reducing the amount of time they are held without -- in a static environment, and also making sure that somebody always has the responsibility for security of those things.
In terms of what our greatest vulnerabilities are, a high-consequence vulnerability is the potentially dirty bomb with potentially devastating biological effort which we’re spending a lot of time addressing in terms of reducing risk. For example, we are working with medical centers and hospitals around the country to change the way they deal with radioactive material that is used for medical purposes by reconfiguring their machines so that it becomes very difficult to actually steal the material and make a dirty bomb.
As I’ve described, we’re doing a lot in the biological area. We’re stockpiling antidotes and treatment for the most concerning types of biological weapons, anthrax and things of that sort, and we’re working to increase our ability to distribute those rapidly by beginning to work on a program where we would actually preposition medical kits with first responders and other groups that might need to get them very quickly in order to respond to an emergency.
At the other end of the spectrum, there is the much higher-probability but lower-consequence attack and that’s the kind of attack where someone goes into a shopping center or a hotel and detonates a hand grenade and shoots people, and I say it’s higher probability because we’ve lived through this. Virginia Tech was an example of that.
Unfortunately, we’ve had, even before the most recent wave of terrorism, people who are disturbed or politically motivated, who have committed acts of terror either on an individual basis or in a small group.
The way to deal with this is to, first of all, continue to educate our police what to look for in terms of the signs of someone who may be planning something, to continue to prepare and train them for a coordinated and quick response using police, fire and emergency responders working together, and this is an area where the federal government can be an enabler but the federal government is not going to be on the front lines. It’s going to be your local responders and I know a lot of work has been done here in New Jersey. You’ve got an outstanding state police, outstanding fire fighters here in New Jersey, and both in my prior lives and also in this job, I’ve seen what a great job they do, but getting this out there to more and more communities is a critical way of addressing this, I would say more consequence vulnerability, but much more probable vulnerability.
Yes?
Question: Thank you. Good morning, Mr. Secretary. Gary White from Mountainside. We used to live across the street from each other.
Secretary Chertoff:Yes.
Question: It’s nice to see your wife. I’m in the shipping industry. We import bananas into the port. My offices are right on the pier where the ships dock. I see firsthand the daunting task that CPP and DHS has. I work very closely with Coast Guard, Immigration, Customs, across the board.
One thing that my 35-year career in this company is I used to see for at least 25 years a great presence of customs officers on the ships talking with the captains, talking with the crew, mingling, and in that -- in doing that, they created their own intelligence and, you know, same ships come back week after week or every couple weeks. It disappeared. I see the emphasis strictly on radiation now. Every container, like you mentioned, goes out the gate gets -- gets -- goes through portals and -- but I think you should really go back to the old days of going on the ships and making your presence known because I think it’s a deterrent across the board.
I see nobody in 10 years and I just wanted to -- I’ve always wanted to get that out, but I -- thank you very much.
Secretary Chertoff: I’ll certainly pass your advice along. I would say there’s been a major change over the last several years as we moved toward much more intelligence-based system called Automated Targeting. We now collect a huge amount of information which we analyze in determining what ships to go on and the other thing which you may not see is we do a lot of that interaction overseas in foreign ports.
Ten years ago, we didn’t have the container security issue. We mainly interacted with ships when they arrived here. Much of the interaction you’re not seeing, you’re not seeing because it’s occurring at the point of embarkation where the ship is being loaded and that’s where we actually have customs officials overseas going on the ships, talking to the captains, and then they’re sending us back information which we use to determine who to target.
So I would actually think that it’s not so much we’re doing less of it, it’s that we’re doing it further out, at an earlier stage in the process, and I think that gives us better warning and more time to evaluate them rather than just waiting till the last moment.
Question: Secretary Chertoff, my name is Neil Broder, and I’m a professor of International Business Law here in New Jersey.
First of all, welcome back to New Jersey.
Secretary Chertoff: Thank you.
Question: Secondly, I’ve followed your career, I’ve been an attorney both in New Jersey and New York, from your U.S. Attorney days to the 3rd Circuit, so I’m glad you’re now here as the Secretary of Homeland Security.
But here’s the question. Three things have happened in the last week or so and those are that we have had the Secretary appointee, Governor Napolitano who’s going to succeed you. We’ve had what that first speaker indicated was the Weapons of Mass Destruction Commission suggesting that over the next five years, we should be prepared for some attack, biological or nuclear, and lastly, we’re in a terrible financial crisis.
How, using your stovepipe analysis that you’re talking about which is wonderful, how are we going to attribute funds and contributions to make sure that Homeland Security coordinates everything it has and the financial resources to do that?
Secretary Chertoff: Well, that’s a great question. We’ve been, of course, very well supported over the last five years in terms of our budget, and the budget that Congress gave us for 2009, which will carry over the next administration, also further increased the budget.
The challenge for the next Secretary, who I’ve known for a long time and is a good friend and I think she’s going to do a great job, her challenge as you go further out into out years, is to continue to make sure that we are properly investing in these issues, particularly when the pay-off may not be evident immediately because what we’re doing is we’re trying to prevent something from happening and if we’re successful, you’re not going to necessarily have a big press conference and a big hullabaloo. It’s going to be a quiet victory.
I do think that there are a couple things that will support her in her efforts to continue to keep us strong. One is I think there’s a keen awareness on the part of everybody and that includes the new administration and I know many of the people who have come in and have been designated, that the world remains a dangerous place. I think that the lesson of Mumbai underscores that, and everybody seems to understand, the president-elect has said this, we have to do many things at the same time. We don’t have the luxury of only doing one thing at the same time. So I think they’re coming in with the right frame of mind to continue these investments.
The last thing I would say is the business community, I think, has a role to play in continuing to push for this but not just from a federal government give me money standpoint but from a private investment standpoint. You know, one of the questions I get sometimes is, well, you know, we’re in a tough economic environment and companies are going to be focused on investing where there’s a direct bottom line upside. It’s going to increase their sales. It’s going to increase your market share and you’re going to want to cut your costs and here’s where I think that’s a short-sighted view because if you are in business and you become either a victim of a terrorist attack or the victim of some other kind of catastrophe and you are not reasonably prepared for that, first of all, everything you’ve invested is placed at risk, your employees, your assets and your future business.
Second, and this has been the experience we had both in the first attack on the World Trade Center and the second attack on the World Trade Center, everybody who depends on you and who winds up losing their own businesses because you haven’t done the reasonable thing, I hate to put it this way, they’re going to sue you. So, you know, not to invest in security on the ground that what you’re trying to do is increase your short-term sales volume to deal with your short-term business problems is a little bit like saying I’m not going to keep the roof of my house repaired because I moved here, you know, we paint the bathroom or I need to get a bedspread. It’s a short-sighted way of evaluating where your risks are.
Here’s what I think is a great take-away from the financial crisis. A lot of people in the financial community took the view all that matters is what do I do this quarter and this year, what are my financial results going to be, and there was not a lot of thought about what’s going to happen, do I have some cash, for example, stashed for a down turn, so that if credit winds up becoming scarce, I can continue my operations?
Now, I know people who did put that cash aside and who are now -- they may be struggling but they’re actually weathering this business environment pretty well. In fact, some of them will actually do well because they’ll have that cash available to make new acquisitions. But there are a lot of people who were short-sighted and didn’t do that and now everything they put together and invested in in the last 10 years is now at risk.
So my argument is if there’s a real lesson of the financial crisis is don’t be a short-term decision-maker, be a long-term decision-maker. Recognize that the good times do not keep rolling forever and the smart long-term investor and businessman hedges against the bad times as well as tries to take advantage of the good times.
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This page was last reviewed/modified on December 4, 2008.
