A quarter century after the deadliest terrorist attack on American soil, two veterans of the Department of Homeland Security say the federal response to terrorism has outgrown the structure built to deliver it. In a joint interview with NBC News on Thursday, former DHS Secretaries Michael Chertoff and Jeh Johnson called for the creation of a new public safety agency — an institutional separation from the national security and immigration machinery that has defined the department since Sept. 11, 2001.
The two men represented different eras and different parties. Chertoff led the department from 2005 to 2009 under President George W. Bush. Johnson led it from 2013 to 2017 under President Barack Obama. Their shared conclusion, delivered around the 25th anniversary of the attacks, was that the department the United States built after 9/11 is no longer properly shaped for the public safety threats that now confront the country.
Why Michael Chertoff and Jeh Johnson Want a New Public Safety Agency
The proposal is less a sudden break with precedent than a response to two decades of accumulated mission creep. DHS was created in 2002 by merging 22 federal agencies into a single department with one overriding purpose: preventing another catastrophic attack. Over time, the same department absorbed border security, immigration enforcement, cybersecurity, emergency management, and the Secret Service. The result, in the former secretaries’ view, is an agency that has become too broad to manage effectively and too tangled to explain to the public.
Their argument is that a dedicated public safety agency would separate the all-hazards work of protecting communities — natural disaster response, emergency preparedness, and resilience — from the threat-focused work of stopping terrorists and securing the border. The former is about helping Americans when something goes wrong. The latter is about finding adversaries before they act.
What exactly did the former secretaries propose?
Chertoff and Johnson did not offer a formal organizational chart or a legislative blueprint during the interview. They offered a concept: a dedicated public safety agency whose mission would be to prepare for and respond to the range of hazards that affect American communities, while leaving the national security functions of DHS in a separate structure. In their framing, the new agency would give emergency management and public safety the same institutional weight that counterterrorism and border security have had for the past 25 years.
Why make this case on the 25th anniversary of 9/11?
Anniversaries force institutions to ask whether they still serve their original purpose. The DHS created after the September 11 attacks was designed to meet the threats that existed in late 2001. A quarter century later, the threat environment has expanded: the foreign terrorist network that drove the department’s creation is not gone, but it now shares the field with pandemics, extreme weather, cyberattacks on critical infrastructure, and the long-term challenge of community resilience. Chertoff and Johnson used the anniversary to argue that the federal government has not fully adjusted.
The Department That 9/11 Built
To understand the proposal, it helps to recall what DHS was meant to be. President George W. Bush signed the Homeland Security Act in November 2002, and the department began operations on March 1, 2003. It was the largest federal government reorganization in more than half a century. The idea was simple in theory: gather the federal capabilities that could prevent or respond to the next attack under one secretary, with one line of command and one budget.
In practice, DHS was never a single culture. The Coast Guard and the Secret Service brought decades of institutional tradition. The Federal Emergency Management Agency brought an emergency management culture focused on disasters. Customs and border protection agencies brought law enforcement mandates. The Transportation Security Administration was built from scratch after the attacks. Later, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency added a new digital-age mission. The department was less an organization than a treaty among subagencies.
That breadth has been a source of constant tension. A DHS secretary must simultaneously be a counterterrorism official, a border security director, an immigration policy administrator, a cybersecurity coordinator, and a national emergency manager. These roles do not always reinforce one another. In the former secretaries’ telling, the public safety part of the mission has become harder to see, harder to fund, and harder to operate because it shares a leadership structure with law enforcement and intelligence work.
What does DHS actually do today?
The current Department of Homeland Security spans several distinct functional areas, each with its own operational culture:
- Border security and immigration enforcement through Customs and Border Protection, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services
- Transportation security through the Transportation Security Administration
- Protection of senior officials and financial infrastructure through the Secret Service
- Cybersecurity and infrastructure protection through the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency
- Disaster preparedness and response through the Federal Emergency Management Agency
- Maritime safety and security through the U.S. Coast Guard
Those missions are not interchangeable. A federal agent who investigates a smuggling network operates by different rules, with different authorities, from an emergency manager who coordinates disaster relief after a flood. Placing them in the same department may create efficiency on paper, but it also creates competition for attention, political capital, and money.
What a New Public Safety Agency Would Change
The core of the case made by Chertoff and Johnson is that public safety is not a subset of homeland security. Public safety is about hazards that can strike any community at any time — a hurricane, a cyberattack on a hospital, a chemical spill, a pandemic, a mass shooting. Those events do not require a military-style counterterrorism posture. They require coordination with state and local officials, trust from the public, and a mandate to help before, during, and after an emergency.
A new public safety agency could be built around FEMA but would be broader than FEMA alone. It could include preparedness grants that currently flow through DHS, emergency communications programs, disaster mitigation efforts, and the federal functions that support local police, fire, and emergency medical services. It might also absorb pieces of DHS’s infrastructure-protection and cybersecurity work, since those are now central to keeping communities safe in an age of interconnected systems.
The former secretaries did not specify which of those functions would move. But their central point was clear: the nation needs an agency whose default mission is safety, not surveillance. The distinction matters. A national security agency is often judged by how well it stops bad things from happening. A public safety agency is judged by how quickly and how effectively it helps people recover when bad things happen anyway.
How is this different from keeping FEMA inside DHS?
FEMA has existed inside DHS since the department was created, but it competes with law enforcement-heavy components for resources and attention. A dedicated public safety agency would make emergency preparedness the executive identity of the organization, rather than one of many programs. In effect, it would allow the federal government to do for disasters and community safety what FEMA was originally created to do, without the cultural drag of being parked next to border enforcement and immigration agencies.
Would local police and fire departments be affected?
Not directly. Public safety in the United States is primarily local, and a federal public safety agency would not replace local police, fire, or emergency medical services. Instead, it would fund them, train with them, coordinate with them, and respond alongside them during major disasters. The value would be in creating a more focused federal partner for state and local officials who currently have to navigate multiple DHS grant programs, advisory systems, and response offices to get help.
The Hard Part: Politics, Budgets, and Turf
If a new public safety agency were created, it would not happen quickly or cleanly. Every federal reorganization is also a transfer of power. Congressional committees with jurisdiction over DHS components would have to decide which functions move and which stay. Federal employee unions, contractor networks, and state and local governments that have built relationships with DHS would push back against disruption. And the departments that would lose functions — including DHS itself — would not necessarily cooperate with their own dismemberment.
There is also a real question of cost. Creating a new cabinet-level agency or a major independent agency requires new administrative structures, new congressional oversight relationships, and an expensive transition of personnel, information technology, facilities, and legal authority. It is not enough to make a public announcement; Congress must pass legislation, appropriate funds, and impose a deadline. The former secretaries did not put a price tag on the idea, and they did not pretend that the path would be easy.
The political climate matters too. DHS has become one of the most visible instruments of federal immigration policy, and any proposal that touches the department is immediately read through that lens. By making a joint statement, Chertoff and Johnson tried to lift the conversation above partisan politics. Their argument is structural, not personal: the machine built after 9/11 does not fit the problems of the next 25 years, and no amount of internal adjustment will fix that.
What would need to happen next?
The next step would be study, then legislation. A congressional hearing or an independent commission would need to map every relevant federal program, identify which functions belong in a public safety agency, and determine what remains in DHS. That is the sort of detailed work that has blocked past reorganization efforts, but it is also the only way to make the concept real. Without a transition plan, the proposal remains a powerful idea without an execution path.
The factors that made DHS hard to create in 2002 are still present: multiple agencies, multiple cultures, multiple congressional masters. But the former secretaries’ joint appearance matters beyond policy detail. It signals that the intellectual case for a public safety agency can be made by Republicans and Democrats who have actually run the department.
What a Public Safety Agency Would Mean for the Next 25 Years
Looking forward, the next quarter century will likely be defined by threats that do not fit neatly under the label of homeland security. Climate change will produce more extreme weather. Cyberattacks will compound the effects of natural disasters. Public health emergencies will strain local systems already carrying heavy responsibilities. In that world, the United States needs a federal agency whose primary job is keeping people safe, not simply defending the homeland from an identified enemy.
Chertoff and Johnson have reopened a conversation that many in Washington considered settled. They are not arguing that DHS should be abolished. They are arguing that the model shaped by the immediate panic and urgency of Sept. 11, 2001, is not the model for the next generation. For two former secretaries to say that, on the anniversary of the attacks that created the department, is a significant moment in the long debate over how America organizes its safety.
The question now is whether Congress, the executive branch, and the broader national security establishment are willing to ask the same question honestly. The anniversary has passed, but the structural questions have not. The men who once led DHS have made their answer clear: the future of American safety requires a dedicated public safety agency, and the time to begin building it is now.
