Private: Policy Making By Organizational Chart: The Coast Guard and the Environment

In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, numerous investigations found that FEMA's botched response could be blamed, at least in part, on the decision to transfer that agency into the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), "where natural disaster programs are often sidelined by counter-terrorism programs." 

ACS' latest Issue Brief, Running Aground: The Hidden Environmental and Regulatory Implications of Homeland Security, by Stanford Law professor Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar, discusses a similar phenomenon, arguing that the transfer of the Coast Guard into DHS has similarly undermined environmental protections.  In addition to its national security role, the Coast Guard has a broad environmental mandate, which includes "safeguard[ing] living marine resources, prevent[ing]
over-fishing, stop[ping] toxic spills degrading the environment," as well as coordinating with the EPA to carry out environmental programs on oceangoing vessels.  According to Cuéllar, these mandates have fallen by the wayside:

Overcoming resistance to the idea of including the Coast Guard from Congress and reluctance from the President’s own Homeland Security Advisor, the Administration placed the entire bureau in DHS. The Administration did not separate out the agency’s regulatory policy or enforcement functions from its interdiction capabilities. Neither did it create within the new DHS a special office to ensure attention to environmental and safety functions within the Coast Guard or its sister bureaus, as it did to oversee narcotics enforcement and privacy issues. At the same time, new budgets only partially offset the burdens of the Coast Guard’s growing security-related burdens, and in some cases, policymakers explicitly pursued cuts in budgets for regulatory enforcement that would have been more politically costly in normal circumstances. Regulatory performance has begun to shift in response.

This undermining of environmental enforcement, says Cuéllar, occured because
of DHS' singleminded priorities--priorities which led DHS to cut non-homeland security missions within the Department by 75%:

For high-level officials in the new Department, the task of overseeing the Coast Guard would proceed against the backdrop of the White House’s narrow approach to defining homeland security. The present Administration construed homeland security primarily in terms of counter-terrorism, thereby making it more difficult to protect legacy mandates merely by using homeland security rhetoric to describe longstanding missions.

Cuéllar explains that "the story of the Coast Guard is part of a larger picture, where domestic regulatory policy is increasingly affected by budgetary, statutory, and bureaucratic developments involving homeland security." However widespread the new focus on a "narrowly defined" view of security may be, however, the Issue Brief concludes that this focus is ultimately misguided.  "Indeed, the nation’s experience with Hurricane Katrina offers a cautionary note to anyone determined to exclude natural disasters, serious health emergencies, and infrastructure failures from the scope of discussions about national security."

To read the entire Issue Brief, follow this link.