Remarks by Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff at the 2005 Excellence in Gov.

Remarks by Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff at the 2005 Excellence in Government Conference

Secretary Chertoff: Well, thank you, Pat, for that introduction, and thank you for that musical introduction. I don't think I've ever actually gotten on the stage with a song being played. Maybe I'm going to start asking for that. Maybe we'll play the "Rocky" theme or -- I don't want to continue along that vein.

But it's a great pleasure to be here at this breakfast. I'm thrilled at the attendance here, because I think it really demonstrates the commitment of people here to seeing excellence in government. And I know the council has done a tremendous job as a partner for us at the Department of Homeland Security, providing a lot of useful recommendations about how we can be more efficient and achieve results, and I know you'll be working with us on citizen preparedness, which is a very, very big deal for us.

I think one of the lessons brought home by the events of the last two weeks is how we all as citizens need to be prepared to do -- take steps to participate in our own protection, and also if, God forbid, something happens, in a response to an emergency. And it's important that we think about those things in advance and not merely when we are actually in the middle of an event.

I would also like to thank Tim Clark and Government Executive Magazine, as well as the other organizations that are here today and the sponsors. And I appreciate having this opportunity to share with you some of my thoughts about DHS management and our philosophy as we move forward into the next two, three, four years of the early life of this brand new Department.

Obviously, the events in Egypt and in London this past week and on July 7th remind us again that terrorists continue to plot to take our lives and to destroy our way of life. Americans ought to be assured that we are doing everything possible to protect our country and our citizens, but, of course, as I've said, that is a joint responsibility. It's not one that's owned by the Department of Homeland Security, it's one that is shared by this Department with our state and local partners and with the private sector and indeed with each of us who are citizens here.

We remain today, as I speak, at Code Orange for mass transit, which is a reflection of the fact that we've had a couple of attacks. We know that traditionally al Qaeda does, as a tactical matter, and its sympathizers as a tactical matter, do seek to follow up attacks and have coordinated attacks. But I think I should emphasize here that our general state of preparedness has risen, and Code Yellow is now a more robust color than it was perhaps a year or two ago when we used to talk about being at that level of preparedness. And ultimately as we increase our baseline with respect to these codes, we will have a more secure country and we will be able to, in our day-to-day life, be able to contend with the kinds of threats that the events in London and in Egypt remind us continue to plague the civilized world.

So we encourage all Americans to be vigilant, to report suspicious activity to the authorities, to review their own emergency procedures in case something happens, but also to go about their lives enjoying the prosperity and the freedom that we have as Americans, and not allowing the terrorists to defeat us by defeating our spirit. Our spirit ultimately is the measure of our victory, and it is our courage and resilience, characteristics I know we share with the British people and with others in a civilized world, that will ensure the final triumph of decency in our globe.

September 11th did inaugurate a new model for how we manage the issue of homeland security, and Congress responded, under the leadership of President Bush, by bringing together 22 separate organizations which had responsibilities for dealing with the issue of homeland security. But the purpose of this was not merely to assemble 22 organizations in a single tent, it was to create a dynamic new organization that would integrate the strengths of all of its components through joint, coordinated and strategic action.

What are our guiding principles? Well, first of all, we have to be results-oriented. We have to measure our success in terms of the outcomes we produce. We have to be network-focused, recognizing that in the 21st century, success in government is not a function of command and control, but it's a function of our ability to network with our partners in other government agencies and in the private sector. We have to be flexible and nimble with respect to change and adaptability, and we have to be focused on risk in how we manage our priorities.

And let me turn briefly to each of these and discuss them for a moment. First of all, let's talk about outcomes. The fact of the matter is that what matters to Americans in the area of homeland security is not our process but our outcome. Are we making people safer? And we have to begin every day and end every day by asking questions like, Are we keeping bad people and bad things out of the country? Are we doing what we need to do to harden and protect our infrastructure and our transportation? Are we preparing ourselves to respond and recover if there should be an attack?

It doesn't matter whether each of us does his or her individual job if the result of that is not to produce a good outcome. All of us, when we carry out our individual assigned tasks, have to have ownership of the entire process, to see to it at the end of the day, all of these individual assignments fit together in an integrated way to produce a good outcome. And what we call that is being part of a team. And team building and the team approach is a very fundamental element of the philosophy that is driving the Department of Homeland Security.

So that means, for every single person, whether they're on the border as a Border Patrol agent, whether they're a scientist working on emerging technologies, whether they're an ICE agent going out to detect and apprehend absconders, whether they are infrastructure protection analysts looking to apply the lessons of intelligence to how we protect our infrastructure, every one of us has to be focused upon fundamental questions. Is what we are doing advancing the cause of prevention, protection, response and recovery? All of us have to have a common picture of our mission and our goal, and must consider that what we do is not merely limited by our individual assignments, but by the need to make sure that we are always driving to that objective.

Networking. The federal government, as you all well know, does not own the transportation system in this country. We don't own the power grids or the cyber-systems. Most of these are in the hands of the private sector or, perhaps, in the hands of local and state agencies. So therefore, protecting this valuable infrastructure cannot be simply a matter of federal government dictating rules and regulations. Rather, protection has to flow from partnerships, partnerships at all level of government, partnerships with the private sector, private -- partnerships with our international partners overseas, and, of course, work with individual Americans.

Where DHS has a unique role is to provide leadership and to provide coordination; to disseminate best practices to those with whom we are working; to work to find emerging and cutting-edge technologies and technological systems, which will make the work of our partners easier; to develop and share intelligence and information across the board; and to create incentives to our partners to work as a coordinated network. Networking, which is very much the touchstone of organizations of the 21st century is therefore part of the very DNA of what makes this Department of Homeland Security.

What about flexibility? Well, we know the enemy adapts rapidly to change. I mean, they are constantly morphing and responding to our actions overseas and changing their configuration and their way of carrying out their deadly missions. So we have to be able to match that. We have to be flexible with our own change to meet their evolving threat with our own evolving response. We need to be nimble and we need to be flexible as we survey the landscape, as we assess the changing threats, and as we adapt ourselves to meet those threats. Therefore, rigid structures and procedures cannot be the way we define our thinking. Instead, we have to build in our very culture an ability to change, even change urgently, as new threats develop, as new technologies develop, and as new infrastructure develops that we have an obligation to protect.

And finally, most important, how do we set our priorities, because we cannot protect every single person against every single threat at every moment and in every place. We have to, with our finite resources and our finite number of employees, we have to be able to focus ourselves on those priorities which most demand our attention. And that means we have to focus on risk. And what does that mean? It means we look to consequence, it means we look to vulnerability, and it means we look to threat.

We do not want to have a fortress state. We do not want to be a security nation. We want to be a secure nation. And that means part of our assessment of priority and part of our assessment of risk always involves an element of balance. We want to balance the steps that we take to make sure we are optimizing the protection against risk, but with regard to things like our freedom, our privacy and our prosperity, because we will lose this war if we turn ourselves into a fortress. We will lose this war if we devalue those things which we hold dear in order to gain additional measures of protection. What we want to do is find that level of protection which addresses our greatest risks, but which allows us to do so in a way that is consistent with the values that everybody in this country holds very dear.

A lot of this means more effective use of resources, use of resources that complement rather than supplant what state, local and government and the private sector do. It also means targeting to those high-risk areas in a way that leverages our capabilities so that we get the maximum benefit for the public contribution to the effort of protecting ourselves.

And with these philosophical principles in mind, the ones I've spoken about, and particularly with regard to risk management, we've set about starting to make some changes in the Department of Homeland Security, which I think will reflect some of the lessons we've learned over the last couple of years, some of the emerging changes in the way the threat picture looks, and some of the best learning that we've acquired from dealing not only with experts inside government but experts outside government, with the council, and with people at a lot of different think tanks.

To do this, we inaugurated what we've called the Second Stage Review, which was an effort to look comprehensively across the Department at what our missions and outcomes are, what it is that we need to achieve, not from the vantage point of our individual organizational obligations, but standing back and looking at the whole picture, in terms of what our bottom-line results need to be.

And the teams we put together to conduct the Second Stage Review were deliberately drawn from different parts of the Department, the idea being we didn't only want to have people who were traditionally focused on a particular threat of sets or particular set of targets, looking at that set of threats or set of targets. We wanted to bring people with different disciplines together to encourage people to look outside of the traditional sets of thinking and be creative. In a sense, what we said was, if we gave you a clean sheet of paper, with no constraints other than common sense and the law, what would you suggest we do in order to accomplish our mission?

And these teams, which included more than 250 people, did a phenomenal job of coming up with suggestions, some of which I announced in the last couple of weeks, some of which I will be announcing in the weeks and months to come. Many of them are very substantive; some of them are organizational. And I think among the imperatives we indicated would be very significant in setting our agenda in the next six months were the need to increase our focus on preparedness at all levels of government and private life; the obligation that we have to finally gain control of our borders and to do so in a way that is consistent with our traditional value of welcoming visitors and also fostering immigration that strengthens our country; protecting our transportation, which is what binds us together; further promoting information and intelligence sharing; building upon the management of the individual components to finally create a unified management that covers such important considerations as procurement policy that is efficient and has integrity; properly managed finances; and, of course, a fully integrated state-of-the-art information technology system.

In order to implement these various imperatives and others, we had to look at the structure and see, could we align the Department in a way that would further advance these objectives? And it seemed to us we ought to do four things: First of all, that we ought to finally build a unified intelligence function in the Department of Homeland Security with a Chief Intelligence Officer; second, that we ought to build a unified operations structure that can translate our intelligence into action; third, that we needed to have the capability to build policy across the Department and to plan that policy in a specific and integrated fashion, in a way that is more than simply assembling the policies of the individual components; and finally, that we needed to dedicate within one component all of our preparedness functions -- planning, training, exercising and grant-making, so that we could make sure they are operating in a comprehensive and unified manner and so that we could have accountability for the very difficult but very important challenge of making sure that we are prepared and that we are getting our partners prepared for dealing with the threats that are out there in the real world.

So with these structural changes in place and with the cooperation of Congress, which we are working with very closely to see that we can make these changes part of the law, we're looking forward now to setting the table for driving with a very ambitious and important agenda for the Department in the years to come.

This recognizes the very fine work done by our predecessors who stood up this Department basically from scratch, but also recognizing that we always stand to learn and to improve ourselves based upon the experiences that we have in the past.

What I promise you and what I promised the Department is that we will be forthright in what our views are and what our philosophy is; that we will acknowledge when we make mistakes and we will correct them; that when we are doing the right thing we'll stand up for that and we'll explain why we think we are doing the right thing; and that we're going to be blunt about the kind of discipline and the kind of risk focus, which I think the American people are entitled to expect from a Department that has the responsibility, with our partners, for homeland security.

As members of government and as leaders in your respective fields, you are very much a part of the network of which I have spoken. You've accepted the very high calling of public service, and you understand what it is and how important it is to work together to achieve a common objective. We appreciate your partnership and your contribution in the past. We look forward to building on that partnership and those contributions as we move forward in the future.

Ultimately, homeland security is all of our responsibilities, and it is a challenge that we can meet and a challenge that we can effectively address only if we work together. I know by your attendance and your participation here, you are committed to that goal, as are many, many others. I look forward to working with you, with the council, and with all of our other partners in seeing that we make this country safer and more secure while we maintain our freedom and our prosperity. Thank you very much.

Dear Mr. Chertoff,
How can there be any "Homeland Security" without adequate BORDER INTEGRITY?

Inquiring minds want to know . .

Ultimately, homeland security is all of our responsibilities, and it is a challenge that we can meet and a challenge that we can effectively address only if we work together.

Wanted: One Super-Government Language Translator . .

===========================================

" . .the obligation that we have to finally gain control of our borders and to do so in a way that is consistent with our traditional value of welcoming visitors and also fostering immigration that strengthens our country;
protecting our transportation, which is what binds us together; further promoting information and intelligence sharing;
building upon the management of the individual components to finally create a unified management that covers such important considerations as procurement policy that is efficient and has integrity; properly managed finances;
and, of course, a fully integrated state-of-the-art information technology system."

?.....Remarks by Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff at the 2005 Excellence in Government Conference ....?

?....Question:

?....Is Secretary Michael Chertoff....a Russian?

?....What is his racial, religious,....'background'?

Thanks.....

So we encourage all Americans to be vigilant, to report suspicious activity to the authorities

Mr. Secretary, does that apply at the borders as well? Isn't this EXACTLY what the Minuteman are doing?

Note the reliance on "technologies" to resolve the present crises . .

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"So that means, for every single person, whether they're on the border as a Border Patrol agent, whether they're a scientist working on emerging technologies, whether they're an ICE agent going out to detect and apprehend absconders, whether they are infrastructure protection analysts looking to apply the lessons of intelligence to how we protect our infrastructure, every one of us has to be focused upon fundamental questions."

Note the reliance on "technologies" to resolve the present crises . .

That's because "technologies" always cost a lot of money, and no one is ever required to account for how the money was spent.

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