The creation of the Homeland Security Department amounted to the largest overhaul of the federal government in more than 50 years. This monumental task was aimed at consolidating much of the government's domestic anti-terrorism and protective services to ensure better coordination, development and deployment.

Congress passed the Homeland Security Act creating the department in November 2002. The move came some five months after President Bush urged the government to undertake "dramatic reform" to meet the terrorist threat in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks in New York, Virginia and Pennsylvania.

According to the president's National Homeland Security Strategy published in July 2002, the new department's main objectives are to guard the nation's borders, prevent domestic terrorist attacks, create a national defense strategy, and reduce damage from natural disasters and terrorist acts.

The new department employs some 180,000 federal workers from 22 existing federal agencies to perform a variety of security-related duties -- from agricultural research to port safeguarding to disaster assistance. The administration has one year to complete the mammoth task of melding together the various federal agencies into a single department.

President Bush officially inaugurated the department on Jan. 24 with former Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Ridge at its helm. Ridge had previously served as Mr. Bush's domestic security adviser, having opened the White House's first-ever Homeland Security Office on Sept. 21, 2001.

The new department will consist of four sub-agencies: border and transportation security, emergency preparedness, technology and intelligence. The Coast Guard and Secret Service, two agencies transferred in from the Transportation and Treasury Departments, respectively, will now operate within the Homeland Security Department, but will function independent of its subdivisions. The Department now includes a fifth agency, management, which oversees budget, human resources, and other personnel issues.

The department also effectively consolidates the Transportation Security Administration, formerly part of the Transportation Department; parts of the Customs Service, formerly of the Treasury Department; the Immigration and Naturalization Service and parts of the FBI, formerly of the Justice Department; and the Federal Emergency Management Agency, among others.

The department will not include the FBI or the CIA -- two intelligence agencies that drew harsh criticism from Congress and others in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks. However, it will collect and analyze information gathered by the FBI, CIA, and other U.S. intelligence agencies related to domestic security.

A number of the component agencies will be transferred into the new department on March 1. The act says the department should be fully consolidated by Sept. 30.

According to the Homeland Security Act, the new department's responsibilities include:

Border & Transportation Security
The Border and Transportation Security directorate brings together the government's border security and transportation agencies, comprising some 156,169 employees with an estimated budget of $18 billion.

The division's top priority is to manage and guard the nation's borders and transportation systems, including those inside U.S. territories overseas. The BTS consolidates several of the largest federal agencies, such as the INS and its Border Patrol force; the law enforcement units of the Customs Service; and the Transportation Security Administration. These agencies officially transferred to the Homeland Security Department on March 1, 2003.

The Justice Department's Office of Domestic Preparedness, which coordinates with local and state emergency response agencies in crisis situations, also joins the Border and Transportation Security division.

The Coast Guard, formerly of the Department of Transportation, will act independently within the Homeland Security Department, reporting directly to the secretary. The Coast Guard will coordinate and work closely with the Border and Transportation Security directorate, since their missions to guard ports, transportation infrastructure and U.S. borders overlap.

By June, the U.S. Agriculture Department's Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service -- which regulates and protects the nation's food supply and agricultural imports -- is scheduled to move over to the department in an effort to better coordinate a national defense policy.

Similarly, the department is expected to absorb the Federal Protective Service of the General Services Administration, which manages security for federal government buildings, a task coinciding with the department's overarching mission to safeguard the nation and its infrastructure.

The Homeland Security Act effectively disbands the INS as it existed under the Justice Department, separating its immigration, naturalization, and visa services into one agency separate from another that houses its border security and law enforcement units. Under the act, the Homeland Security secretary has the authority to grant or deny visas for U.S. immigration.

Emergency Preparedness & Response
The Emergency Preparedness and Response division oversees domestic disaster preparedness training and provides federal support for recovery from terrorist acts and natural disasters.

The directorate is responsible for ensuring a high standard of readiness among the nation's emergency response teams and for formulating a federal emergency response plan for natural disasters, attacks and hazards.

The division integrates the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the FBI's National Domestic Preparedness Office and the Energy Department's Nuclear Incident Response team, among others.

Currently, numerous groups have developed disparate federal response plans; the EPR seeks to streamline the myriad plans into one "all-hazards" plan for the country.

This division also coordinates with state, local, and public safety organizations to develop a comprehensive national crisis management system to respond to terrorist attacks and natural catastrophes. In case of a national emergency, the EPR has authority to command federal response teams as they work with teams on the local and state levels.

According to Mr. Bush's 2004 budget, the EPR division has roughly $6 billion with which to work. Approximately 5,300 employees are expected serve under the EPR.

Chemical, Biological, Radiological, & Nuclear Countermeasures (Science and Technology)
This division, officially known as the Science and Technology directorate, will head national efforts to prepare for and respond to terrorist threats involving weapons of mass destruction and develop plans to guard the U.S. against such catastrophic attacks.

The group is charged with establishing a national emergency strategy and guidelines for state and local governments as well as chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear attack response teams. The guidelines aim to synchronize the myriad emergency strategies currently in place into a single response procedure.

In addition, the division is responsible for developing diagnostics, vaccines, antibodies, antidotes and other countermeasures designed to mitigate the nation’s vulnerabilities to WMD attacks.

The division incorporates the government's scientific research organizations, including the Department of Energy's Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and the Plum Island Animal Disease Center of the USDA, in order to consolidate federal science and technology research agencies and better coordinate their work related to domestic security.

The Plum Island Animal Disease Center, located off of Long Island, New York, works to protect the U.S. food market from highly infectious foreign animal diseases, such as foot-and-mouth disease, and is the only place in the U.S. where such diseases are studied. The Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, which started as a nuclear weapons design facility in 1952 at the University of California, develops advanced defense technologies and conducts research in energy, environment, biosciences, and basic sciences as related to international and national security.

A third research institution, the National Bioweapons Defense Analysis Center, will be created specifically for the Homeland Security Department, set up with some $420 million previously earmarked for the U.S. Defense Department.

This branch employs some 598 agents with the requested budget of $803 million.

Information Analysis & Infrastructure Protection
This division is responsible for collecting and analyzing information and intelligence data relevant to domestic security obtained from multiple organizations, such as the CIA, FBI, National Security Agency, Defense Intelligence Agency, and the Justice Department's Drug Enforcement Agency, among others.

The directorate has two main units: Threat Analysis and Warning and Critical Infrastructure Protection.

The division centralizes all information relevant to domestic security in an attempt to resolve some of the errors made in intelligence-gathering and analysis before the Sept. 11 terror attacks.

The agencies reshuffled into the Homeland Security Department will seek to collectively assess information, identify threats, communicate appropriate response actions and coordinate with other federal, state, and local officials.

The Threat Analysis and Warning unit is charged with compiling information from disparate intelligence resources to identify and assess current and potential threats against the U.S., evaluate the nation's vulnerability against those threats, and to issue appropriate warnings and recommend preventative, or protective, actions.

The Critical Infrastructure Protection will also evaluate domestic security information, specifically items dealing with the nation's internal systems.

The unit will oversee protection of the nation’s food markets, water systems, health and sanitation systems, emergency services, energy (electrical, nuclear, gas and oil, pipelines, dams), transportation (air, road, rail, ports, waterways), information and telecommunications, and banking and finance infrastructure. It will also guard U.S. energy, transportation, chemical, defense industries, postal and shipping systems, and national monuments and icons.

Officials in this unit are expected to develop a policy to protect these high-risk targets and mitigate damage and potentially catastrophic consequences.

With a requested budget of $829 million, this sub-division brings together some 976 employees from the Commerce Department's Critical Infrastructure Assurance Office, the General Services Administration's Federal Computer Incident Response Center, the Defense Department's National Communications System, the FBI’s National Infrastructure Protection Center, and the Energy Department's National Infrastructure Simulation and Analysis Center and Energy and Security Assurance Program.

The CIAO, FCIRC, and NIPC focus on security for computer, Internet, and information technologies; the NISAC (operated by Sandia National Laboratories and Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico) oversees the development of technology to protect energy infrastructures; and the NCS provides analysis for communications during crises situations.

Other Provisions For Domestic Security:
The Secret Service, like the Coast Guard, stands apart from the four main directorates and reports directly to the secretary. The Bush administration's 2004 budget earmarked around $1.3 billion for the Secret Service, which has some 6,111 agents.

The Bush administration requested roughly $6.8 billion for the Coast Guard, the largest unit of the Homeland Security Department with 43,639 members.

The secretary must also appoint a senior counter-narcotics officer to coordinate narcotics interdiction efforts with other federal agencies, and to track and sever links between terrorism and illegal drug trafficking, which the Bush administration believes funds terrorist organizations.

The department is also responsible for the Homeland Security Advisory System, which issues warnings based on terrorist threats, activities and potential attacks.

What Critics Say:
The Homeland Security Act explicitly forbids creating the controversial, and heavily criticized, Citizen Corps program called Operation TIPS (Terrorism Information and Information System), which critics said would have enabled the department to act as a domestic intelligence agency.

While the American Civil Liberties Union praised Congress for rejecting the TIPS provision and the proposed national identification card system, the civil rights group warned the legislation contained several serious setbacks to civil liberties protections, such as the right to privacy and obstructing the public’s access to information.

Laura W. Murphy, director of the ACLU's Washington office, criticized the bill for permitting the department to withhold "critical infrastructure" information from public scrutiny. The bill exempts infrastructure information deemed particularly sensitive to national security from the Freedom of Information Act and, Murphy notes, “goes so far as to impose criminal penalties for government officials who disclose this information.”

"As a result, officials who blow the whistle on threats to public health (uranium stockpiling or tainted blood) or private sector incompetence (poor maintenance of railroad tracks or computer networks) could become criminals," the ACLU said in a press statement released on Nov. 13, 2002.

The Center for Democracy and Technology, a free-speech and technology advocacy group based in Washington, D.C., says the legislation greatly "undermin[es] privacy online" through the Cyber-Security Enhancement Act (CSEA). This provision enables government officials to obtain citizens' electronic information (like e-mail, voice mail messages, phone records, and Internet transactions) from telecommunication companies in case of "an immediate threat to a national-security interest." Telecommunication companies traditionally have refused to turn over client information unless government authorities have court-approved warrants.

Computer hackers found guilty of engineering cyber-attacks could receive a maximum life sentence, the CSEA provision says.

According to the legislation, the Homeland Security Department is not directly involved in the Defense Department's Total Awareness Information office headed by John Poindexter, the former national security adviser under President Reagan who was indicted and later pardoned for his role in the Iran-Contra deals. Nevertheless, the act grants the department access to intelligence obtained by the TIA office, which critics, such as New York Times columnist William Safire, deride as characteristic of "Big Brotherism." Congress also moved to limit the TIA, removing much of the budget for the new agency in its appropriations bill.

The act has also sparked protests over its indemnification provision that restricts citizens from filing class-action lawsuits against government contractors, such as vaccine-manufacturer Eli Lily and Co.

The provision is intended to offer incentives to companies involved in creating vaccines to fight potential terrorist weapons like anthrax and smallpox, and to protect them from the high costs of liability.

Additional Features Of Homeland Security Act:
The legislation won accolades from civil liberties groups like the ACLU for establishing a civil rights watchdog for the whole department and a privacy ombudsman to oversee the department's intelligence division.

A large part of the Homeland Security Act includes provisions designed to improve the training, management and work environment for federal employees. The act requires each federal agency to designate a chief human capital officer who will help develop better employee incentives and human resources policies, such as training programs and more competitive hiring, promotion and compensation policies. The management directorate is responsible for such matters.

While the act devotes such attention to improving government management of agencies, such as the CIA and FBI, critics charge the legislation strips certain employees of union-protection.

In fact, the act states that all agencies transferred to the Homeland Security Department will be covered by the federal civil service labor-management relations law, unless the employees or agency is primarily involved in intelligence, counterintelligence, or investigative work directly related to terrorism investigation, as a large number of department employees are.

Other Provisions:
--The Treasury Department's Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms is transferred to the Justice Department.

--The legislation tightens restrictions on possession of explosive materials and toughens penalties for illegal possession of explosives.

-- The act outlines several new provisions related to the Transportation Security Administration. It says the TSA can now train pilots on how to carry and use firearms to defend aircraft, crew and passengers if necessary against terrorists or criminals. The act also says that only U.S. citizens and nationals will be employed as airport screeners -- excluding those who immigrated to the U.S.

-- Compiled by Liz Harper for the Online NewsHour