Bush Begins Push For Security Plan

President Bush on Friday lobbied key members of Congress on his proposal to create a Cabinet agency to oversee domestic security and said he expected turf battles over the plan.

"We've got a lot of work to do to get this department implemented. There's going to be a lot of turf protection in the Congress. But I'm convinced that, by working together, that we can do what's right for America," said Mr. Bush, the morning after outlining his proposal on national television.

To help wage the battle for his plan, Mr. Bush said he was authorizing current homeland security chief, Tom Ridge, to testify before Congress – something the White House has blocked up until now, CBS News Correspondent Mark Knoller reports.

Ridge has avoided formal congressional testimony by insisting that precedent shields presidential advisers from the microscope of congressional inquiry. Mr. Bush said he was making an exception to that rule, but only for testimony about creating the new Cabinet department.

Mr. Bush convened a strategy session Friday in the White House Cabinet Room to survey the opinions of lawmakers. They had already drafted legislation doing essentially what the president has proposed: gathering all the domestic security functions, currently spread among more than 100 federal entities, into a single Cabinet agency.

It's not going to be easy for Congress to get such a complicated piece of legislation finished before they adjourn for the year in October, reports CBS News Correspondent Bob Fuss. Especially since lawmakers are so far behind on finishing the budget and partisan fighting keeps the Senate moving at a snail's pace. But with elections in November, the political pressure to act will be very strong.

Because 88 congressional committees and subcommittees have a piece of the domestic-security puzzle, power struggles are inevitable.

"We're not kidding ourselves," Sen. Joseph Lieberman, co-sponsor of domestic security legislation, said after the White House meeting. "There's going to be some opposition and it probably will be bureaucratic turf protection. There will be a lot of arguments about why we ought not to do this."

White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said Mr. Bush saw strong signs of support from lawmakers in the Cabinet Room meeting. As part of a building public relations campaign, Ridge and White House chief of staff Andrew Card are being deployed to the Sunday morning TV interview shows. Also, Mr. Bush will travel to a Missouri water treatment facility Tuesday to highlight how a new Cabinet agency might better protect the nation's water supplies.

The government restructuring, the most extensive since Harry Truman created the Defense Department and National Security Council nearly 60 years ago, requires legislation to be passed by the House and Senate. Mr. Bush asked Americans to weigh in with their elected representatives, a plea he was repeating in a trip to Iowa on Friday.

Mr. Bush rejected suggestions that the overhaul does not get at the root of intelligence lapses between the CIA and the FBI; both the agencies are left virtually untouched by the proposal.

"The FBI and CIA are changing. They understand that there has been gaps in intelligence-sharing," the president said.

He said FBI Director Robert Mueller had taken heed of the testimony from whistle-blower Coleen Rowley, an FBI lawyer critical of the agency who Mr. Bush called the "FBI woman" from Minneapolis.

Mr. Bush said he takes domestic security reforms personally.

"Harry Truman said the buck stops here. I understand that," he said. "But if that's the case I want to make sure that accountability to me is clear."

Not coincidentally, Mr. Bush unveiled his plan on the same day that the Senate Judiciary Committee began public, televised hearings into the apparent intelligence failures that preceded the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

"We need to know when warnings were missed or signs unheeded — not to point the finger of blame, but to make sure we correct any problems, and prevent them from happening again," he told the nation Thursday night.

He said nothing he has seen suggests anyone could have prevented the horrors of last September. "Yet we now know that thousands of trained killers are plotting to attack us, and this terrible knowledge requires us to act differently," Mr. Bush said.

Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, D-S.D., was receptive to the proposal, which he called overdue, but immediately talked of "necessary changes."

Democrats had been pushing for months to create just such a Cabinet department, something Mr. Bush resisted before now so he could retain Ridge as an informal adviser and shield him from having to testify before Congress.

The White House said its reorganization will not cost more money; it will shuffle current operations within the government without expanding the bureaucracy.

The new Department of Homeland Security would inherit 169,000 employees and $37.4 billion in budgets from the agencies it would absorb, including the Secret Service, the Coast Guard, the embattled Immigration and Naturalization Service and the Customs Service.