At homeland defense: black belt with street smarts

To some extent, such confusion is to be expected given the complexity of pulling together an entirely new bureaucracy, particularly one whose authority reaches far beyond Washington to the private sector and local police and fire departments. Many credit Ridge for making "major progress" in a very short period of time. "He was a sturdy leader at the helm in a very stormy time, but obviously it's got a long way to go," says Frank Cilluffo, director of the Homeland Security Policy Institute at George Washington University in Washington. "The challenge now is to come up with hard-nosed, cold-eyed priorities."

Those priorities range from developing civil defense plans - which involves reaching out to the private sector that controls such critical areas as electric and chemical plants - to ensuring that the nation's 20 biggest cities finally have communications equipment that is compatible between their police and fire departments. Ms. Kayyem insists there's "no good reason" that hasn't been done yet. Kerik must also continue to improve intelligence and information sharing. The challenge is to make the sharing go two ways: up from local law enforcement and down from federal intelligence agencies, particularly since the terrorist threat is amorphous and ever changing.

Indeed, intelligence experts are fond of noting that every hole in security that gets plugged can create new opportunities for the terrorists. So new intelligence is crucial in keeping an eye on the shifting threat. Then there's another inherent problem: DHS has responsibilities for many issues like bioterrorism for which other departments, from Defense to Health and Human Services, have the ultimate authority.

"There's all of this inter-agency coordination, having everyone play off the same sheet of music, that must be done," says Michael Wermuth, director of homeland security at the RAND Corp. "So the responsibilities that this secretary has are going to be far more challenging and complicated than for most cabinet secretaries who only have to focus on one thing."

All of that has to be finessed, at the same time Kerik takes on a congressional oversight morass. Currently, 88 committees have some authority over DHS. Mr. Cilluffo describes this as "preposterous. Having 88 boards of directors is a tough way to run a business." So the question remains open: Can the tough street kid turned top administrator transform what some have termed a department with a "crisis of confidence" into a symbol of effective deterrence and defense?

"To some extent Ridge had the easy job, which is that he was able to break the initial ground on all of this stuff, whether it was setting up the color code or the framework for 22 different agencies working together," says Ron Marks, a national security expert. "[Kerik] has the tougher job, which is governing and trying to set up some form of infrastructure and some form of coherence across bureaucratic boundaries. That's as tough a job as anyone is going to have."

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