Thursday, February 08, 2007
The Cafferty File: Fixing Homeland Security?


On "The Situation Room" today, we asked viewers the following question, and here are some of our favorite responses that we didn't get to read on air:

How would you fix the Department of Homeland Security?

What was needed when Homeland Security was created was not a government monster, but an information processing agency. We had all the necessary agencies and they worked fairly well. So the only real fix is to abolish the organization and create an information sharing agency.
Roxie, Dilworth, Minnesota

Close it down, get rid of it! It has proven itself to be the most incompetent of any governmental bureaucracy; it certainly doesn't help anyone... no matter how many fairy tales they try to tell about it
McKenzie, Silt, Colorado

The first thing I would do is fire Chertoff; he has been worthless since the beginning. However, I believe that he is doing exactly as he is being told. I would then have Homeland Security take care of security. FEMA needs to be separate.
Sally, Brighton, Michigan

Other than dissolving the department and starting all over, probably the best next thing would be to decentralize the powers of the DHS. Right now, too few people are in control of too much, leading to what you have already noted: wasted resources, poor decisions with little accountability, and much delayed responses due in part to too much red tape. As it is, the DHS is just too big and clumsy to work effectively.
Otis

The only way to "fix" Homeland Security is to get rid of it. It seems to me that banding together all the individual entities under Homeland Security was pointless. Every time they make a government agency bigger it gets more inefficient.
Marilynn, Tubac, Arizona
Posted By Jack Cafferty, CNN Commentator: 2/08/2007 07:44:00 PM ET | Permalink
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