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Obscure Labor Issues Block Homeland Security Agency (washingtonpost.com)
The biggest disagreement over President Bush's proposal to create a Department of Homeland Security doesn't involve protecting the nation's porous borders, improving spotty bioterror defenses or fixing the intelligence system.Instead the White House and the Senate are engaged in a battle over the rights of management and workers in the new department, a titanic struggle that has transformed the seemingly obscure issue into the biggest obstacle to the most sweeping government reorganization of the past half-century.
Bush mainly wants to kill unions. God forbid people band together to protect themselves against the economic might of employers.
That isn't the main problem, though. The main problem is that Bush's "flexibility" will really just make us less safe. If Bush gets his way, it opens the door to creating a department whose employees serve only at the whim of their superiors, which ultimately means the President. So anytime someone speaks out against a policy - even internally, they can be fired. Every time someone produces a report that does not agree with the company line, they can be fired. Everytime someone testifies before Congress and says things the Administration does not want Congress to hear, they can be fired.
The danger here really cannot be over stated. The only reason we know about the failures of intelligence prior to 9/11 is because FBI agents were protected by civil service rules and whistleblower protections (the article is not clear on this point, but I believe that the Senate has defeated the Bush Administration proposal to exempt the new department from FOIA requests and Whistleblower protections). The people in this department are going to be dealing with the most critical of tasks. It is vitally important that they not be mere patronage slaves, that they be able to act in the best interest of the nation, not the Administration. Without the protection of the civil service rules, the employees of this new department will be vulnerable to politically motivated reprisals. That makes us all vulnerable
