"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"
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Chertoff’s sentence is an exercise in bureaucratic triage: concede just enough to sound candid, then move the spotlight to the slivers of the system that didn’t collapse. The phrasing is telling. “Certain elements,” “parts of the department,” “worked very well” - these are not the words of a leader offering a reckoning. They’re the words of a manager narrowing the aperture, carving out defensible islands inside a broader disaster.
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.
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 |
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