USA: Department of Homeland Security commences operations
Big and cumbersome it may be but the Department of Homeland Security is a step up for domestic intelligence and investigation in the USA political hierarchy.
The USA's biggest re-organisation of its domestic federal law enforcement agencies has developed with considerable alacrity. The Department of Homeland Security, which officially came into being on 24 January 2002, is an amalgamation of several of the country's largest - and some smaller - agencies.
Tom Ridge is the first secretary of Homeland Security as the new cabinet-level department comprising 22 federal agencies and 170,000 employees> Ridge, a former governor of Pennsylvania is a former Vietnam warrior, was sworn in at a White House ceremony just two days after the Senate unanimously approved his appointment. He becomes the 15th member of the Bush Cabinet. He has been Director of the White House's Office of Homeland Security since October 2001, having resigned as Pennsylvania's governor to take up that appointment at the President's invitation after the 11 September 2001 attacks.
Bush sought to create a new federal agency that was designed to keep Americans safer from terrorist attack. The U.S. Congress passed legislation in November to create the department with a first-year budget of approximately USD37,450 million, which comes largely from the existing federal agencies that will comprise the department. Creation of the department is the largest reorganization of government since 1947, when the current national security apparatus was created at the outset of the Cold War.
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