Our president has repeatedly assured us that the federal government is doing everything in its power to keep us safe. What limits the government's ability to do this?
President Obama wants people to feel safe because he feels it is part of his job and of course, he wants us to be safe. There are major problems that prohibit him from a 100% guarantee. Although he is the head of the government he can’t control what every department is doing. He can’t even know if everyone is doing their job properly unless the information filters up to him from the department secretaries. When we think about police departments and the National Guard another problem arises because from local to city to state to federal there are many people working to keep us safe. Each person needs to be able to be observant and act responsibly to keep us safe.
That situation points to the main reason the government is limited in its ability to keep citizens safe. There are too many people in too many departments working to solve the same problem in different ways. For example, both the CIA and the FBI were working on trying to keep the country safe before September 11, 2001. But they were not communicating with each other. Some state FBI’s were even working at cross purposes (it sounds like from news reports).
Not everyone even sees the problem the same way and often, even within a department, there are people working against each other. Either they don’t agree on how to solve the problem or they are competing to solve the problem first and try to sabotage the work of others. There is also the problem of politics which can make the goal objective become a political football.
On the news just now the reporter showed how in the intelligence community there are 17 different departments in charge of “intelligence.” The 17th layer put on the top of everybody else was given the directive to make sure the 16 others communicate and share information with each other. Most, if not all, of the 17 also hire outside contractors to help with the work. The lines of communication are going to be complicated and mixed up just from the amount of information being generated by each group; let alone the number of groups and the number of employees. I don’t know if this makes us safer but it seems like it definitely slows down any positive decisions that might keep us safer.
