"We've done it in intelligence sharing and certain elements of security. There were parts of the department, in fact, that worked very well in Katrina, like the Coast Guard and TSA"
About this Quote
The context is post-9/11 Homeland Security culture colliding with Hurricane Katrina’s televised failure in 2005, when FEMA’s breakdown became shorthand for government dysfunction. Chertoff, then DHS Secretary, is effectively re-litigating the narrative: yes, the department can perform, just not uniformly, and not always in the way the public expects. By highlighting “intelligence sharing” and “security,” he quietly reasserts DHS’s post-9/11 mission priorities - counterterrorism competencies - even as Katrina exposed the agency’s uneven capacity for basic disaster response.
Name-checking the Coast Guard and TSA is strategic. The Coast Guard earned praise for rescues; TSA, built for standardized screening and compliance, symbolizes process discipline. Both are operationally tight, hierarchical, and measurable - the kind of performance that looks good on a scorecard. The subtext is a defense of the department’s structure: don’t indict the whole machine because one component failed.
What makes the line work is its calibrated insulation. It’s accountability without vulnerability, a rhetorical compartmentalization that mirrors the organizational one Katrina made impossible to ignore.
Quote Details
| Topic | Management |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
| Cite |
Citation Formats
APA Style (7th ed.)
Chertoff, Michael. (2026, January 16). We've done it in intelligence sharing and certain elements of security. There were parts of the department, in fact, that worked very well in Katrina, like the Coast Guard and TSA. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/weve-done-it-in-intelligence-sharing-and-certain-93337/
Chicago Style
Chertoff, Michael. "We've done it in intelligence sharing and certain elements of security. There were parts of the department, in fact, that worked very well in Katrina, like the Coast Guard and TSA." FixQuotes. January 16, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/weve-done-it-in-intelligence-sharing-and-certain-93337/.
MLA Style (9th ed.)
"We've done it in intelligence sharing and certain elements of security. There were parts of the department, in fact, that worked very well in Katrina, like the Coast Guard and TSA." FixQuotes, 16 Jan. 2026, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/weve-done-it-in-intelligence-sharing-and-certain-93337/. Accessed 12 Feb. 2026.
