Total bureaucratic meltdown

The Washington Post has a massive expose on the inadequacies and failings of the Dept. of Homeland Security; the headline calls the agency "undermined from the start." The article stays strictly within the play-it-safe rules of objectivity, but it seems fairly clear that it's an attempt to knock the Bush administration for petty squabling and bad management of what ought to have been an obvious idea that everyone should have rallied and sacrificed around. Cheney is singled out for his dismissal of the department:

Cheney opposed the concept of a new department as a big-government mistake, several aides recalled. And Steve Abbott, the retired admiral he picked to head the review, did not start work until a few days before Sept. 11.

The article might as well have included a little slashdot style tag -- -- after this sentence. The gall of Cheney! Big government haters! But just a few sentences later, we get this, which the article treats as a conclusion:

The lesson [DHS director Tom Ridge's] staff took away was the need for secrecy: When bureaucracies were informed of potential threats to their empires, they tended to resist. "Everybody realized the agencies were not going to look at mission first, they were going to look at turf first," recalled Bruce M. Lawlor, a National Guard major general working for Ridge.

In other words, the department's major problem was that it was exactly what Cheney said, another grubby bowl of big government stew that no one wanted and couldn't be made to work. More bureaucracy. More managerial levels and ill-defined goals, all hamstrung by the natural tendency of government to muddle and trip through everything. Is anyone really surprised that the DHS is anything more than another bloated government mess?