Abstract
Historically, no president has an entirely free hand in controlling his/her bureaucracies. The creation of security agencies is ‘a means of increasing presidential control’ (p. 122). It is not surprising that the presidents of the United States always advance their policy agendas by reorganizing security agencies, in order to meet the demands of their policy making or gain policy advantages. Based on archival resources and interviews, Governing Security by Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar, the Stanley Morrison Professor of Law at Stanford Law School and the Director of Stanford’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, seeks to address a series of questions about the reorganization of American security agencies in the separation of powers context: how the concept of security (including scope of national security and immediacy of external threats) has changed over time; how the presidents and their administrations reorganized the United States’ security agencies in the different contexts; how the stakeholders (e.g. presidents, interest groups, lawmakers, politicians, and legislators) chose the competing visions of national security and secured control over the functions of security agencies through bureaucratic changes and legal interpretation; and how to understand the consequences of the evolution of security agencies
Governing Security stresses the Roosevelt-era Federal Security Agency (FSA) and the Bush-era Department of Homeland Security (DHS). The former has been ignored in American history to a large extent. By nature, both security agencies were ‘a vehicle for asserting greater political control over bureaucratic functions’ (p. 98), which blurred the lines between ‘national, economic, and social security at the level of organizational structure and bureaucratic mandate’ (p. 103). In the meantime, they were both driven by ‘prescriptive concerns about the organizational merits of consolidating various units’ (p. 138).
Cuéllar succeeds in revealing the tensions between legislators and presidential power on the control of bureaucracy over time and in analyzing the competing interests in different contexts. In the meantime, he highlights how all the stakeholders competed to reorganize the new branches to enhance their control of American security agencies.
This book features 10 chapters and a concluding section. In Chapters 1–6, Cuéllar explores the dynamics of the Roosevelt-era FSA, which has been neglected by the academic to a large extent. The establishment of the FSA was the President’s most immediate priority through which ‘to fund sensitive presidential projects’ (p. 122). Due to the subtle relationship between the President and Congress, the President who competed for power with Congress made all the efforts to avoid the ‘legal constraints imposed by congressional enactments as well as substantive statutory mandates’ and facilitated defense-related research, while the Congress protected this new agency from the President’s direct control (p. 52). Moreover, the Roosevelt administration successively persuaded the legislators ‘who were eager to support national security functions but skeptical about domestic welfare and regulatory programs’ (p. 113). As a result, with millions of dollars invested by the Roosevelt administration, the FSA engaged in defense-related import as well as the controversial research of biological and chemical weapons. In addition, Congress recognized the offspring of the FSA, that is, ‘a small number of committees’ (p. 121). In the words of Cuéllar, the FSA did ‘create a new layer of executive branch officials above the bureaus’ (p. 39) and affected the distribution of power and interests.
In the following pages (Chapters 7–10), Cuéllar turns to the DHS, which is the largest government reorganization since the Defense Department was created in 1947, established in a manner consistent with the Bush administration’s domestic policy goals. The DHS has successively integrated 22 agencies in the United States and mobilized numerous resources ‘from agency legacy mandates’ to the security-related missions and priorities (p. 162). However, ‘resources devoted to one area may affect the level of resources available in the other realm’ (p. 195). The concluding section reexamines the parallels and divergences between the FSA and DHS.
Should a wide range of security responsibilities be concentrated in a single security agency? It depends. As Cuéllar suggests, some lessons should be learned from the cases of FSA and DHS.
First, it is noteworthy that ‘the prescriptive benefits of reorganization’ were ‘highly uncertain’ (p. 157). For example, reorganization would probably present uncertain career paths for bureaucrats in the foreseeable future. When a security agency was deployed within the DHS, the former bureaucrats were ‘less likely to be promoted into senior management’ (p. 167).
Second, reorganization of security agencies did not guarantee the effectiveness of security governance. For instance, it was hard to tell whether security-related benefits can offset the transition costs in the long run. In other words, the administration requires more than reorganizing security agencies. It will still require wide partnership among the government, the private sector, and the public sector. According to Rebecca Gambler, the Director of Homeland Security and Justice Issues, Government Accountability Office: DHS has not yet established specific department-wide strategic priorities for use of its resources abroad. Further, while DHS conducted a one-time exercise to assess the department’s international footprint, it has not established a routine process to continually assess the alignment between strategic goals and resource decisions. DHS does not – also does not have comparable cost data for its programs abroad and does not have a standardized framework to capture these data to help inform resource decision-making. (Congressional Quarterly Transcriptions, 2015)
If there are any omissions in this well-researched book, it might be that Cuéllar shows little concerns about American security agencies’ active engagement with the private security contractors. Actually, the United States has been relying heavily on private security contractors. For example, the DHS has ‘more contractors working for it than full-time employees’ (Meserve, 2015). If Cuéllar could stress the dynamics of private security contractors within American security agencies, his arguments would be more inclusive.
Overall, Governing Security not only enhances our understanding of the evolution of the FSA and DHS, it enriches the previous literature of American bureaucratic development, organizational theory, public law, and political development, particularly offering a convincing account of how the creation of the FSA and DHS affected the performance of the security agencies. The book is certain to be of interest to scholars and general readers alike who seek to understand the evolution of security agencies in the United States.