Kathy Patterson: The mayor and council are killing a key commission created after 9/11

The DC Council created an expert advisory panel in the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. This year the mayor and council have agreed to kill the District’s Homeland Security Commission despite solid successes during its 20-year history.

Between 2020 and 2023 the Office of the DC Auditor published a dozen reports on the District’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic in terms of funding, data collection, policies and practices. Overall ODCA determined that the District managed the pandemic better than most states, with findings like:

• The District and neighboring states had among the earliest and most comprehensive policy responses to COVID-19.
• DC’s nursing homes experienced lower resident case and death rates in the late summer and early fall of 2020 relative to the national average.

These outcomes were not an accident. The District had strong leadership from Drs. LaQuandra Nesbitt and Roger Mitchell at the DC Department of Health and the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner, respectively.      

And there were other factors.

In 2015, the District published A Look at the District’s Preparedness Level in Addressing a Potential Pandemic Incident. The report found that current resources “could be more efficiently used to improve pandemic planning and preparedness” and offered recommendations on funding and fund distribution, cross-agency coordination, crisis communication, and public-private information sharing. A major contributor to the report was Dr. Rebecca Katz, director of Georgetown University’s Center for Global Health Science and Security; she would later serve as a key pandemic adviser to Joseph Biden during his 2020 presidential campaign and tenure in the White House. 

The research and discussions that went into producing the report had their own impact. By the time of publication, the report would conclude that exchanges between the leadership at DC Health and the private-sector DC Emergency Healthcare Coalition had “already begun to improve communication and collaboration.” While the commission’s discussions were occurring, the District developed a Crisis Communications Guide that was used by preparedness partners for major events, including a papal visit. 

The 2015 report was the work of the Commission on Homeland Security — a body of volunteer experts including Dr. Katz that was established in 2006 by post-9/11 DC Council legislation. It was designed to use the extraordinary expertise of residents who are willing and able to identify and assess vulnerabilities and make recommendations to the DC government. In its 20 years the commission has produced four reports, including two on varying aspects of cybersecurity. Its prescient 2013 report called for the creation of a Chief Information Security Officer in the District — a recommendation readily implemented at the Office of the Chief Technology Officer. 

In the Fiscal Year 2027 Budget Support Act, Mayor Muriel Bowser proposed eliminating the Homeland Security Commission. The council is in the process of agreeing, having approved the budget provision in a first vote June 9; final consideration is expected July 7. 

At a May 12 breakfast discussion, at-large Councilmember Christina Henderson asked her colleague, Ward 2 Councilmember Brooke Pinto, for her view of the mayor’s recommendation as chair of the committee with oversight for the DC Homeland Security and Emergency Management Agency (HSEMA). Pinto said she concurred with termination, saying that the commission hadn’t met recently and was essentially “defunct.” Council Chairman Phil Mendelson — himself a co-sponsor of the bill creating the commission — asked former oversight chair Charles Allen his view. Allen echoed that the commission was defunct.

No one around the council table bothered to note that the commission had not met because it did not have a quorum — and that it didn’t have a quorum because the mayor had not nominated members. 

The Mayor’s Office of Talent Acquisition is said to have balked at recruiting for this purpose, preferring to fill memberships on other more politically salient boards and commissions. In response to a budget oversight question from Pinto’s committee, HSEMA said: “The District has access to a broad array of expertise and experience that exceeds the benefit that it is receiving from HSC.” In other words, the District government has no need for the expertise of its own residents. 

The decision by the District’s elected officials to bring an end to the work of the Homeland Security Commission — in the midst of a war, in the wake of flooding here and elsewhere, and immediately after chemical disasters in California and Washington state — brings to mind the conclusion of the national 9/11 Commission:

“We believe the 9/11 attacks revealed four kinds of failures: in imagination, policy, capabilities, and management.” And of these, the commission wrote in its report, the most important failure was one of imagination.

Kathy Patterson, who currently serves as DC auditor, previously represented Ward 3 on the DC Council and authored the legislation creating the Commission on Homeland Security.

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