Former Gov. Tom Kean, Rep. Lee Hamilton slam Congress’ intransigence. 9/11 panel chairs slam 'dysfunction'

Congressional ‘dysfunction’ on counterterrorism and national security makes the United States less safe, the heads of the former 9/11 Commission charge in a new report.

Former New Jersey Gov. Tom Kean, a Republican, and former Indiana Rep. Lee Hamilton, a Democrat, slam Congress’ bureaucracy and intransigence in a new report out Tuesday, marking 10 years since their first one. The 9/11 Commission chairmen and their former panel members found the U.S. as a whole has made progress since then — but Congress has not.


“Congress’ treatment of the issue of terrorism before 9/11 was episodic and inadequate; its overall attention was low,” Kean and Hamilton write. “We predicted that of all our recommendations, strengthening congressional oversight may be among the most difficult. Unfortunately, we were right.”

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Their update was released in association with the Bipartisan Policy Center in Washington and the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania, in Philadelphia. An advance copy was made available to POLITICO before its public release.

One of their favorite examples is the labyrinthine chain of oversight for the Department of Homeland Security, the sprawling Frankenstein agency created in response to the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on New York and Washington. In 2004, when Kean and Hamilton released their first report, DHS reported to no fewer than 88 committees or subcommittees in both chambers.

“Incredibly,” they write, “Congress over the past 10 years has increased this plethora of oversight bodies to 92.”

That’s no way to run a railroad, Kean and Hamilton argue. Congress has never “enacted a final, comprehensive DHS authorization bill setting policy and spending priorities,” they write, plus the spaghetti junction of oversight committees “places an extraordinary administrative burden on DHS.”

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“While Congress often complains about ‘waste, fraud and abuse,’ it seems to be complicit in squandering DHS resources here,” Kean and Hamilton write.

They acknowledged in separate interviews with POLITICO that they appreciate the difficulty of improving the way Congress works, especially given what Hamilton called the increase in political polarization since his and Kean’s first report.

“You can’t get perfection here,” Hamilton said — but Congress has shown it can do better overseeing large departments. He gave the example of the House and Senate Armed Services Committees, which along with the defense panels of each chamber’s Appropriations Committee, represent a much simpler structure to oversee the Defense Department than DHS has.

Lawmakers should make some kind of start now, Kean said, if they want have a roadmap in hand for how to set up the committee structure when the new Congress is seated early next year. One goal could be to try to cut the number of committees with DHS oversight by about half, he said, because the current structure is wasting so much energy.

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“I have testified about 20 times before Congress in the past four or five years,” Kean said. “It takes time to prepare testimony, it takes all morning to give it, and if you figure the secretary and his top deputies have to appear before these 90 or so committees, you can understand how much time it takes, and you can understand how it distracts them. We talked to a lot of [Obama administration officials] and every single one of them said we’d be able to keep this country safer if Congress gave us the same kind of oversight as almost every other department.”

While they’re reforming their own committee structure, members of Congress also need to revisit the post-Sept. 11 authorization for the use of military force, Kean and Hamilton said. It was passed “under very specific circumstances,” Kean said, “but not intended to be passed forever.” Members should revisit the authorization to exercise more control over how and when the U.S. can use its military around the world.

Another caution Kean and Hamilton raise in their report is what they call “counterterrorism fatigue” among the American people. Many are complacent, or in danger of becoming complacent, because there hasn’t been a major attack on the scale of Sept. 11, Hamilton said, and political leaders respond to that lack of interest by keeping quiet themselves about the potential dangers from terrorism.

That’s risky, Kean and Hamilton warn. Tens of thousands of foreign fighters in Syria and Iraq, the prospect of cyberattacks and Al Qaeda’s international affiliates all pose serious risks to the U.S.

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“You put all those things together and you have a lot of trends that are dangerous,” Hamilton said. “We have to be alert to that danger.”

If there’s good news in the new Kean-Hamilton assessment, it’s their sense the U.S. has made some solid improvements in its overall readiness. The creation of the director of national intelligence, they agree, has proven as effective as they hoped at establishing a central point of authority for intelligence, and Kean in particular praised the current DNI, James Clapper.

Plus U.S. intelligence and law enforcement agencies have improved their overall ability to detect and defeat terrorists, they write. One of the major failures before Sept. 11 was the intelligence community’s inability to “connect the dots” about what it knew about the different aspects of the terrorist plot, but the agencies do a much better job now, Kean said.

But not such a good job that there aren’t still “stovepipes” inside the intelligence and military worlds.

“The trouble is, they keep things secret from each other,” Kean said. “This isn’t something where we can say, ‘OK, because it’s three-quarters right. It’s got to be 100 percent right.’”

Complicating the job for the post-Sept. 11 intelligence world, Hamilton acknowledged, are the disclosures of Edward Snowden about National Security Agency surveillance. The apprehension shown by some voters and members of Congress isn’t misplaced, he said.

“The challenge is getting a balance between security and liberty,” Hamilton said. “I don’t think we’ve got that balance right.”

The decade since Sept. 11 has seen the biggest expansion of government power “in my lifetime,” Hamilton said. “The government has the power to intrude massively into your privacy and your civil liberties.”

The government needs the ability to connect the dots and gather information on the scale of “mega-data,” he said, but also must do a better job explaining itself and restoring the confidence of a skeptical public.

“We should not abolish that power,” Hamilton said. “But we do need to review it, sustain that review, constrain it and conduct ongoing, constant oversight.”