Things did not proceed as smoothly in the Senate, where the Democrats had the majority. This was in part due to the fact that an amended version of the Lieberman-Specter bill, rather than an administration draft, would serve as the foundation for developing a mandate in that chamber.185 In terms of the department set up, the bill continued to hold on to six department directorates (instead of the four envisioned by the Bush proposal). Moreover, it represented an ambitious attempt to merge FBI and CIA analysis and collection capacity in the new department. Therefore, the Lieberman-Specter bill was in stark contrast to the Bush proposal, which left all of the CIA and most of the FBI intact.186
Senator Lieberman eventually agreed to postpone the issue until the new department was established.187 Still, under a revised version of the Lieberman proposal, the new department would have the right to demand “unevaluated data” from the CIA and the FBI.188 In addition, it called for an “independent intelligence directorate,” led by an undersecretary, which would fuse information from a wide variety of agencies.189
From the perspective of the executive branch, the detailed language of the Lieberman proposal was unacceptable. For one thing, it would not allow the administration to carve out solutions that were seen as crucial “carrots” for garnering Republican support for the proposal.190 White House plans focused not on creating something new but instead on the idea of restructuring existing agencies. In addition, officials questioned whether a newly established department would be the right place for handling intelligence information integral to the protection of the country; in other words, White House planners did not want to throw all their eggs into one new intelligence analysis basket. The question about the department’s future intelligence capacities also touched on a larger constitutional issue considered an executive branch prerogative. Because the executive branch has primary authority over foreign policy and intelligence matters, it was seeking to maintain control over any changes that would be made in these areas. The language of the Bush proposal (and the subsequent homeland security legislation that adopted most provisions of the Bush plan) thus left room for broad interpretation and subsequent adjustments.
Most important, the Senate bill gave the executive branch none of the management flexibility it was seeking.191 In response to the Senate version of the bill, therefore, the White House issued its first veto threat.192 When Congress reconvened after summer recess at the beginning of September 2002, Senator Lieberman made another attempt to hold on to his version of the Senate bill.193 As the Senate debate intensified, Lieberman’s proposal underwent additional amendments but remained irreconcilable with the House version. The White House tried to work through its strong Senate ally, Phil Gramm (R-Tex.), who introduced an amendment seeking to replace the civil service provisions and department layout of the Lieberman substitute, followed by other compromise amendments.194 Perhaps unsurprisingly, no one bill could generate sufficient support to pass, and the stalemate continued through the November midterm elections. In the meantime, the White House made the failure to pass a homeland security bill a central theme of the Republican campaign for the midterm elections.195
When Congress reconvened on November 12 for a lame duck session, it was clear that the Republicans would have the majority when the new Senate took office in January. This fact gave the White House immense leverage, and it set about using it. Key legislators from both chambers worked with the White House to craft a minor compromise on the management issues.196 A slightly modified bill was rushed through the House.197 House members then left Washington for the weekend, leaving the legislation to the Senate—“saying effectively,” Tom Daschle would later write, “take it or leave it.”198
Nonetheless, the issue was effectively decided by the election. The White House had won, and a Senate version of the House bill became a sort of fait accompli.199 On November 25, 2002, President Bush signed the bill into law, creating the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).
Executive Initiatives: The New TTIC and TSC
According to the Homeland Security Act of 2002, the newly created DHS would have its own intelligence analysis capacity as part of the Information Analysis and Infrastructure Protection (IAIP) Directorate. Since it did not absorb any existing intelligence or law enforcement agencies and would not have any collection abilities, IAIP would thus become a “customer” of raw intelligence, finished reports from all federal agencies, as well as incidental intelligence collection through its Coast Guard, Customs, and Border Patrol component agencies. As a member of the intelligence community, DHS would, theoretically, still have a say in how intelligence collection and analysis priorities should be set.
It is important to note, however, that the legislation did not specify how the new regime would be implemented. Nor did it provide any instructions on how information would be moved and how it would be used once it was received by DHS. According to the bill, IAIP would be responsible for assessing vulnerabilities of “key resources and critical infrastructures” and developing a national plan for protecting them, issuing warnings on terrorist attacks, and disseminating information to state and local governments, other federal entities, and the private sector.200 Furthermore, IAIP would “access, receive, and analyze law enforcement information, intelligence information, and other information from agencies of the Federal Government …, and private sector entities, and … integrate such information in order to identify and assess the nature and scope of terrorist threats to the homeland.”201
In fact, the legislation was so broad that it essentially set the stage for subsequent executive initiatives to establish new ground rules for information sharing and a new center in which all terrorism-related threat information would be integrated (which would, as it turned out, emerge outside DHS). As a symbol of the growing effort to coordinate intelligence, the director of central intelligence, attorney general, and secretary of homeland security signed a Memorandum of Understanding on Information Sharing in March 2003. The new framework required intelligence, federal law enforcement, and homeland security agencies to share terrorist-related information “on an unprecedented scale.”202 Most important, the memorandum specified the institutional arrangement needed to facilitate the routinization of information-sharing processes; the new information-sharing mechanism would be implemented in the Terrorist Threat Integration Center (TTIC) President Bush announced in his 2003 State of the Union address.
Just one month after Congress had passed the 2002 Homeland Security Act, creating DHS and its IAIP, President Bush “instructed the leaders of the FBI, the CIA, the Department of Homeland Security, and the Department of Defense, to develop a Terrorist Threat Integration Center”—known as TTIC—“to merge and analyze all threat information in a single location”203—which many had assumed was precisely the IAIP’s job. It soon became clear that TTIC would not become part of DHS and that the new center would perform many of the same functions that had been assigned to DHS’s information analysis division.
TTIC was first discussed during a meeting in Andrew Card’s office in December 2002. Bush’s chief of staff had convened senior-level officials representing the FBI, CIA, DHS, and Departments of State and Defense to brief them about the plan to create an all-source intelligence fusion center. President Bush wanted to use his State of the Union address as a venue for announcing that the FBI, CIA, and DHS would join forces to close the seams between foreign- and domestic-source terrorist threat-analysis