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Letters & CommentsChristopher Bellavita
Christopher Bellavita teaches at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California. An instructor with twenty years experience in security planning and operations, he serves as the director of academic programs for the Center for Homeland Defense and Security. He received his PhD from the University of California, Berkeley. He can be reached at christopherbellavita@gmail.com.
Changing Homeland Security: An Opportunity for Competence
ABSTRACT:
Hurricane Katrina shattered belief that the nation’s homeland security system was ready for a major terrorist attack.
Public administrators staff that system. Katrina provides an opportunity to review the central normative premise of public administration:
competence.
This article briefly reviews the changing competence frameworks that have guided public administration since the 1880s.
Over the last one hundred years, administrators have been seen as artisans, scientists, social reformers, and managers.
The ineptness of the public sector’s response to Katrina reminds us – however briefly
– that for the last thirty years, government has been seen as the enemy, the problem to be solved – not the partner in finding solutions.
The result is a demoralized and dysfunctional public workforce.
The American homeland can never be secure until the public workforce recreates the spirit of competent service so glaringly absent
in the wake of Katrina.
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SUGGESTED CITATION:
Bellavita, Christopher. “Changing Homeland Security: An Opportunity for Competence.” Homeland Security Affairs I, no. 2 (Fall 2005)http://www.hsaj.org/?article=1.2.5