Beyond 9/11: U.S. Security Needs in the 21st Century

Q: Okay, speaking of balance, what’s the right balance of power between the federal government and states? The book explores this, and we can grasp — for instance — that there are clear benefits to distributing election oversight among states, counties, and even towns. But it might be harder for those smaller administrative entities to accumulate the cybersecurity knowledge they need to protect elections.
A: It’s a mess. When it comes to immigration, it’s clear the federal government has the leading role. But there are places where the roles themselves are not clear, including management of pandemics and cybersecurity. So, nobody’s solved the issue of homeland security in a federal structure. For instance, the Constitution allocates responsibility for election administration to the states, and the states then decentralize further. Yet it’s very clear that a breakdown in one or two particular counties in swing states could disrupt the entire system. If a determined adversary were trying to accomplish this goal, with relatively modest and focused effort they could call into question the legitimacy of the entire system. And that makes it a homeland security issue. We haven’t sorted that out yet.

We wrote this book imagining how to improve the homeland security enterprise. The analogy is Berlin in 1990: You could look at the city and see some blighted areas and some beautiful areas that showed what the city might be 30 years later, the gleaming capital that Berlin is today. The book is providing a roadmap for getting from Berlin in 1990 to Berlin in 2020. But we can also see from earlier history that without proper oversight, there are real dangers of politicization.

Congressional oversight is cluttered and capricious — fragmented among different committees. I think there’s a consensus that oversight should be streamlined. Of course, every congressional committee would like to streamline oversight in its own hands. Still, there are plenty of people on Capitol Hill who care about homeland security being executed properly, so there should be an opportunity to create better oversight.

Q: What have you learned about security issues from the Covid-19 pandemic?
A: I think everything we predicted about homeland security was borne out in the context of the pandemic. If the right relationships are not built between the federal government, the states, civil society, and the private sector, you will reap a very poor harvest.

A slightly different revelation from Covid-19 is that homeland security has distributional consequences. We’re used to thinking of homeland security as what economists call a pure public good [enjoyed equally by all], but some people suffer more from the measures that are needed to secure all of society. In the pandemic, the self-employed and the hospitality sector, among others, have borne the brunt of social distancing measures. That’s something the whole homeland security apparatus has not wrestled with yet: Society as a whole can be better off, but some are doing so much better than others, that we’re inadverdently recapitulating the inequality in society. That’s a good lesson for other disasters.

Peter Dizikes is the social sciences, business, and humanities writer at the MIT News Office. The article is reprinted with permission of MIT News.