| 13 April 2006 Master of Policy The Master of Policy is a man of small stature with merry eyes. They twinkle behind his gold-rimmed glasses. He is bald, though his forehead would be prominent in any case. Perhaps to make up for the deficiency in follicles to the north, his eyebrows have grown to astonishing length, wizard length, curling up behind the wire frames of his glasses like vines up an ancient building. We had the meeting scheduled for weeks, and it had changed several times, due to the exigencies of the times. He was appointed to his position as the Assistant Secretary for Policy for the Department and confirmed by the Senate just after New Years Day last year. The real New Year is in October, when the Federal money machine recalibrates itself. On the First of the month the floodgates open and we begin to spend the fresh cycle of appropriations. It makes us all a little disoriented, like members of an Eastern Orthodox church, who live on an older, different calendar. The Master is a legal bureaucrat of extraordinary pedigree. He began his career clerking for a Supreme Court Justice, and other senior federal jurists. He enjoyed tinkering with institutions, and has served on dozens of boards and blue ribbon panels. At Ronald Reagan's Education Department, he drafted arguments for and against its abolition. He finished his career advising the Director of the National Security Agency on what was legal in the shadow world. When he was done with that, he returned to his more lucrative career in the private sector with a prestigious K Street law concern. One of the founding partners had been the second Secretary of Defense, and the first one to live all the way through his term. Public service runs in the blood, though. When they needed help on the President's Commission on Weapons of Mass Destruction, the Policy Master volunteered. The panel had a grander title, but it became known as the Commission on WMD, and the recommendations that he drafted were enshrined as the metrics for the success of the new Director of National Intelligence. It is an open question as to whether the reorganization is accomplishing its purpose. Certainly there are hundreds of talented people who have been hired to do so, and that means thousands are dining out regularly on the matter. We love to talk about reorganization here, and the other poster child for organizational disaster is the Department of Homeland Security, which jammed together more than 20 independent organizations and 180,000 government employees. As one might expect, there were a few minor problems. One of them was that at least four of the component Directors had larger and grander offices than the new Secretary, and staffs and egos to match. Skilled observers, dining out elsewhere, have noted that the resources should be brought together, even if they are wholly insufficient to accomplish the amount of work that needs to be done. They needed a man of the caliber of the Policy Master. One likened Stewart to the man who would swim out from his beachfront estate to clamber aboard the Titanic. It is a fair analogy. One of the most pressing issues at the DHS is the lunch crisis. In order to keep the new organization plugged into the dynamics of the Capital, Governor Ridge grabbed the only prime real estate available at the time, a former girl's school off Nebraska Avenue occupied by the Navy during World War Two. As befits the stark simplicity of a working military installation, a single fast food outlet served the campus. The most senior officials in the struggle to protect the Homeland are thus fed exclusively on Subway Sandwiches that come in two lengths: Too long, and too short. When the Policy master sat down to lunch he explained that he had not been able to get away from the campus for two weeks, ten consecutive small sandwiches with small chips and medium drink. With a choice of tournedos of beef, seared tuna or a tantalizing breast of chicken, he had a medical appointment looming and could eat nothing. It was not exactly the myth of Tantulus transposed to the Potomac, but it will suffice for the moment. The Policy master was thus free to speak about that problems that he saw coming. His first major crisis, after determining which broom closet would serve as his office, was the Dubai Port World fiasco. The policy implications were enormous, and the analysis of risk had to be carried out under a cloud formed by Talk Radio Provocateurs entirely extraneous argument about sovereignty and xenophobia. Technology and policy collide in the Policy Master's world, and he is widely regarded as the most savvy lawyer in town in that world. He said he did not worry overmuch about nuclear weapons being brought to the country in shipping containers. You cannot worry about everything simultaneously because there are not sufficient resources to do so. He does think that a “dirty bomb” may be far more likely. He is concerned about the Border crisis, since it is one, but would like to install a comprehensive surveillance network so that we can begin to count the “gottaways,” and define the dimension of the problem. He said dismissively that we could always reduce the chance of crossing the border at any given point to zero- but that like pressing on a balloon, the problem would simply move elsewhere. He also said that we already know where at least nine million of the illegals are working. In order to get a job, they are required to provide a social security number and some sort of identification. Of course, one or both is fake, but the employer is not. When a number and a name do not agree, the Social Security Administration is required to issue a letter to the worker and his company each year, requesting that the discrepancy be addressed. They send nine million letters a year, which is effectively a directory of where almost all the falsely documented are living and working. The government could sweep down and arrest millions, if they were charged to do so. Unfortunately, the information cannot be shared with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, due to privacy laws. Of course it is ridiculous, and the law may be changed. The Policy Master is phlegmatic about the consequences, since he notes that the nature of technology will simply cause the problem to change. There will be more artful instances of identity theft, or the rise of a market to “share” social security numbers associated with real identities. He smiled as he contemplated the endless policy issues. He took a sip of ice water and then said this. “So long as the value proposition for illegal entry exists, we are going to have a problem, and that is what we have to address first. So long as we have people in China who are willing to pay up to $75 thousand dollars to come here, or a Mexican knows he can make five times the salary he can at home, we are going to have a problem.” I nodded and gestured to the waiter for coffee. The Policy Master is a remarkable man, well suited to his challenging position. He rose to leave and get to his medical appointment. He patted me on the shoulder as he left in a kindly manner. I decided to stay, since there were no technical issues there at the restaurant, and the only policy decision involved what to do about dessert. Copyright 2006 Vic Socotra |