Congress has balked at consolidating committee jurisdictions when it comes to overseeing the $39 billion Department of Homeland Security and its constituent agencies, a key recommendation of the Sept. 11 commission.
The commission found that homeland security officials reported to 88 congressional committees and subcommittees last year. The commission report cited an expert witness who called that "perhaps the single largest obstacle impeding the department's successful development."
Instead, the commissioners recommended the House and Senate each have a single committee to review each year's budget and provide oversight for homeland security activities.
When Congress comes back next week, there will be fewer panels, but not by very much, largely because House and Senate committee and subcommittee chairmen have fought off most attempts to limit their jurisdictions.
The Senate in October added "Homeland Security" to the name of the Governmental Affairs Committee but gave the panel authorization authority over only 38 percent of the department's budget and 8 percent of its 175,000 employees.
The floor debate at that time reflected the tension among lawmakers. Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), chairman of the Governmental Affairs Committee, got so frustrated as agencies within the Homeland Security Department were taken away from her panel that she told her colleagues, "We are just going to end up with jurisdiction over [then-Secretary] Tom Ridge's personal staff. That is about what is going to be left."
Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), then chairman of the Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee and an ally of Collins, described the Senate process as "farce . . . crazy . . . stupid," during the floor debate when he lost a motion to take jurisdiction for the Transportation Security Administration away from his panel and give it to hers.
McCain called it a "joke" that the Coast Guard remained in his committee. "Why don't we just stop, why don't we call it a night and say the heck with this farce?" McCain said at one point. "This is crazy. This is stupid."
Sen. Mitch McConnell (Ky.), the Republican whip who with Sen. Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) negotiated the committee resolution, said during the October debate that the roughly 25 Senate committees and subcommittees that had jurisdiction over the Homeland Security Department had been cut "significantly."
On the House side, the battle has not been settled. Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) is trying to get approval for converting the two-year-old House Select Committee on Homeland Security into a permanent panel with some legislative authority to go with oversight responsibility.
The speaker is running into opposition from his own Republican committee chairmen, much as he did on recently passed legislation to reorganize the nation's intelligence system.
Rep. Don Young (R-Alaska), chairman of the Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure, said in an interview last week on National Public Radio, "I don't see why we need a new committee."
Young said, for example, that it is not possible to separate oversight of highway construction and trains -- for which his panel is responsible -- from important security aspects of such programs.
Hastert plans to bring the issue of the homeland security committee to the Republican conference as part of a package of resolutions on all committees, according to congressional sources.
"We plan on moving something on the first day of the session," Hastert's spokesman, John Feehery, said earlier this week. "The speaker wants to make the homeland committee permanent, but it has got to have some teeth."
Negotiations are underway among House members and senior committee staff members over jurisdictional issues, he said, adding that the issues are complex because so many committees are involved.
Rep. F. James Sensenbrenner Jr. (R-Wis.), chairman of the Judiciary Committee and an opponent of the intelligence bill, has objected to potentially losing jurisdiction over immigration enforcement and other security issues his panel now controls.
The chairman of the Select Committee on Homeland Security, Christopher Cox (R-Calif.), has indicated he does not believe his panel would work if congressional oversight remains spread over several other committees. In a recent interview with NPR, he said that if such authority "remains balkanized, then our oversight of homeland security will be like the blind man and the elephant."
Many of the same issues pending in the House also came up in the Senate.
For example, one of the first decisions made in the Senate, which is now being negotiated in the House, was when Finance Committee senators made it clear they would retain jurisdiction over customs, border and immigration functions because they are matters of trade facilitation and regulation.
"Large chunks of the homeland security jurisdiction -- the Coast Guard and Transportation Security Administration, now part of the Immigration and Naturalization Service -- have been taken back by the other committees," Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman (Conn.), the ranking Democrat on Collins's committee, said during the October debate. "That is the kind of action that encourages those who are cynical about this chamber, and I hope we can try to do better on that."
