IF THE SUBSET, WHAT ABOUT THE SET?:

Ridge Discovers Size of Home Security Task: The nation's secretary of homeland security, Tom Ridge, faces the challenge of merging 22 agencies into one superdepartment. (PHILIP SHENON, 3/03/03, NY Times)

Five weeks after Mr. Ridge, a former Pennsylvania governor, was sworn in as the newest member of the Bush cabinet, he now begins in earnest to confront the gargantuan management challenge of merging 22 federal agencies and their 170,000 employees into a single superdepartment. At the same time, he must defend against the possibility of an imminent attack by terrorists who could enter the United States from across thousands of miles of border, if they are not here already.

With most of the department's crucial jobs still unfilled, with its employees confused and worried about their future and with a budget that many of his political allies feel is insufficient to the agency's vital task, Mr. Ridge could be forgiven for feeling alarm about his predicament.

An affable career politician who is a close friend of the president and was on Mr. Bush's short list of vice-presidential candidates, Mr. Ridge is offering a brave face to the men and women who have come under his leadership.

"I'm confident we can get the job done," he said last week at a ceremony marking the transfer of the Customs Service and the Secret Service from the Treasury Department to his control. "Everybody says this is an extraordinary task, it's a difficult task, it can't be done," he said. "And I say, I believe in my own mind that we're already united." [...]

His proposed $37.7 billion budget for next year is already being described by Congressional Democrats and many private security specialists as grossly inadequate, especially when matched against the $380 billion the White House is requesting for the military and the hundreds of billions the administration is seeking in a new round of tax cuts.

Friends and political allies say they worry that Mr. Ridge has been given a career-crushing assignment, and that he will be left as the administration's fall guy if there is another wave of terrorist attacks that can be attributed to a lack of government preparation.

They say his best hope for success — and political survival — is his relationship with Mr. Bush, a friendship that dates back several years and that gives Mr. Ridge instant access to the president.

This is one of our favorite memes on the Left: that the Homeland Security department is too massive and its tasks too diverse for human beings to manage it. Suppose that you just changed the scope of the problem, adjusting it upwards: the President has taken over a bureaucratic nightmare of 2.5 million employees, spread across 15 separate Cabinet departments, spending a total of over $2 Trillion, and dealing with matters as diverse as arresting criminals in Pakistan and protecting lichen in Alaska. Suppose that you said such a Federal government had simply become too big and had taken on too many jobs to conceivably be administered effectively. What would Democrats, The NY Times, The Nation, etc., say to that? Posted by Orrin Judd at March 3, 2003 9:21 AM