Sending the Bureaucracy to War

I. Introduction The war against terrorism is transforming our bureaucracy, and it is transforming it badly. Since September 11, the government has mobilized not just its national security apparatus, but almost all of the myriad units of the federal civil administrative state to battle against a small and elusive foe. 1 Officials like state department of motor vehicles ("DMV") employees and federal banking regulators have no obvious expertise in counterterrorism. Nevertheless, in DMVs, the Treasury Department, and many other unlikely venues, all of the usual indicators of bureaucratic action - rulemakings, adjudications, licensing, and civil enforcement actions - have been put to the new and uneasy service of national security. In this Article, we argue that the vast majority of these civil bureaucratic initiatives in the war against terrorism suffer from predictable, persistent, and probably intractable problems. Everyone agrees that we should fight terrorism. The question is how we should do it - and who we should use for the job. While the debate over the war on terrorism thus far has focused on questions of civil liberties and executive authority, other fundamental questions have been overlooked. For example, do our civil administrative agencies make effective, efficient foot soldiers in this war? Or, in transforming our bureaucracy to become a fighting unit, are we undermining its ability to serve the vital, if more prosaic, purposes for which it was intended? A sober reevaluation of the costs and benefits of the approach the government has taken since September 11 ...