The top two officials under Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge are stepping down amid criticism from some White House officials and elsewhere in the administration. So few people want to work at the department that more than 15 people declined requests to apply for the top post in its intelligence unit -- and many others turned down offers to run several other key offices, government officials said.

Desperately needed repairs to the department's cramped, red-brick headquarters on a Navy facility in Northwest Washington have been stalled by a shortage of money. Some employees at the complex do not have the secure telephone lines required to do their work, the officials said.

As a result, the department has made little progress on some of the main challenges cited when it was created in March by merging 22 federal agencies and their 170,000 employees, according to officials in the Bush administration and Congress, as well as some outside experts. The Bush administration initially resisted establishing the department but eventually agreed.

Efforts to organize the government's 10 or so disparate lists of potential terrorism suspects, secure airline cargo against terrorist plots and advise local police and firefighters on training and equipment have all foundered, the officials said.

"Not a lot is getting done at the top of the department, and nobody's making them focus on it," said a White House official who handles homeland security issues and who asked not to be identified. "Nobody's got the fortitude to say, 'Sit down and shut up.' . . . It's sad."

Two years after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks that spawned it, the department has become the centerpiece of the Bush administration's efforts to guard against another terrorist strike, making its success a factor in President Bush (news - web sites)'s political future, as well. Already, Democrats, including some presidential candidates, are criticizing what they assert is the department's ineffectiveness.

"Many of the initiatives needed to protect our homeland have not been vigorously pursued," House Democrats said in a report released Friday. It said the Homeland Security Department had failed to hire enough border agents or to protect jetliners from shoulder-fired missiles, initiatives the department is pursuing.

Homeland Security officials accept some of the criticisms leveled by members of the administration but dispute others. Missteps are to be expected, they say, while undertaking the biggest government reorganization in 50 years.

"Certainly there will be organizational issues to deal with, since we're not just simultaneously combining 22 different agencies, we're changing them," department spokesman Gordon Johndroe said. "It's a work in progress, but we're pleased with the progress so far."

Some Successes

Even the department's critics acknowledge that it has achieved success in some areas. The Transportation Security Administration's more than 50,000 airport screeners and air marshals are credited with making airline flight safer. An initiative to safeguard the 6 million shipping containers that enter this country each year is off to a good start, officials across the government and industry agree.

Some of Ridge's allies said that despite the distraction of turmoil at the top of the department, its many agencies are moving forward with their missions.

"Each and every day, we rise to a new level of readiness and response, the highest level of protection this nation has ever known," Ridge said in a speech last week. He cited efforts to computerize the tracking of visitors to this country, and the department's work securing airport perimeters.

The White House, meanwhile, denied that criticism from some of its officials suggests a lack of support for the department at the top. "The president's number one priority is the safety and security of the American people, and the success of this department is critical to that priority," White House spokeswoman Ashley Snee said. "The department has the White House's complete and total support."

But Ridge, widely liked and respected for his hard work, is not detail-oriented and has delegated most tasks to his chief of staff, Bruce M. Lawlor, administration officials said.

Lawlor is expected to take a lower-level job at Homeland Security after just eight months on the job, department officials said. Deputy Secretary Gordon R. England is stepping down to return to a previous post, secretary of the Navy.

Johndroe said Ridge, England and Lawlor all declined to be interviewed.

Soon after it was launched, Lawlor quickly cut England out of a number of important decisions, and England is widely seen as inattentive in many settings, their colleagues said.

In February, England told a congressional hearing that Homeland Security officials had abandoned plans to analyze intelligence on terrorism, though that was a key reason for the department's creation. Asked whether he was familiar with a provision in the recently approved Homeland Security law setting intelligence as a core mission, England said he was not. Hours later, a furious Ridge sent letters to Congress correcting England's misstatement.

Lawlor, an Army major general known for decisiveness during crises, alienated many people in the White House and in the department with a brusque and secretive manner, White House and Homeland Security officials said.

While a chief of staff's job includes giving the secretary advice that keeps him out of trouble, Lawlor has at times helped lead Ridge in the wrong direction, their associates said. Lawlor was involved in perhaps the most bitter dispute in the department's short history, officials said.

Deadline Too Ambitious

In May, Ridge signed an agreement with Attorney General John D. Ashcroft that had been vetted by Lawlor's aides. It established the Justice Department -- not Homeland Security -- as the lead agency investigating the financing of terrorism. But the memo's wording suggested that the Secret Service, which is part of the new department, would be required to halt hundreds of probes and forgo its tradition of financial investigations. Ridge apologized to enraged Secret Service officials, and the rift took months to heal, officials said.

Underlying problems at the department began a year before that. For months after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, the White House opposed creation of a homeland security department, but in June 2002, with Congress on the verge of establishing the department anyway, Bush reversed himself.

Top Bush aides were never enthusiastic about the plan, however. To save money, and in keeping with Republican opposition to big government, the White House ordered that the new department's top ranks be extremely lean, people involved in the department's planning said.

Once Congress passed the law establishing the new department last November, Bush set an ambitious four-month deadline to open its doors -- too ambitious, officials said. The planning process -- overseen by then White House personnel chief Clay S. Johnson III, with only limited involvement by then presidential homeland security adviser Ridge -- was done quickly and haphazardly, White House and department officials said. Phone lines and desks for the new offices were not lined up until just days before the launch, they said.

Plans for locating department headquarters fell to a junior White House aide, and only days before a skeleton staff went to work on Jan. 24, Ridge learned that the site selected was in Chantilly, Va., an hour's drive from Capitol Hill. Ridge rejected that choice, and officials scrambled to line up the crowded office space at a Navy facility in Washington.

On opening day, the result was an understaffed, undercapitalized organization.

The understaffing results from several factors, not the least being that many potential recruits for top jobs decline because they consider Homeland Security a government backwater, administration officials said. Another reason is that many fewer federal employees than were publicly reported actually transferred there from the agencies that were combined to form Homeland Security.

One example: the FBI (news - web sites)'s cybersecurity office. The administration said 795 people in that FBI unit were joining Homeland Security. But that office had only 92 people to begin with, and most decided to stay with the more reliably funded, higher-status FBI. In the end, only 22 joined the new department when the FBI cybersecurity office changed hands. Officials acknowledge the discrepancy, saying the larger number reflected confusion about how many employees were intended for transfer.

Competing for Power

As soon as Ridge left the White House to inaugurate the department, several administration officials said, White House officials began distancing themselves from the new creation. They offered little help, for example, in recruiting prospects for its top spots, said Rand Beers, a former White House counterterrorism official who now works on the presidential campaign of Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.).

White House officials have made limited efforts to persuade administration figures to cooperate with Homeland Security, officials said. Some White House staff members, including members of Bush's newly formed Homeland Security Council, have openly criticized what they view as disorganization in the department's top ranks. The 50-person council, a coordinating body akin to the National Security Council, now competes for power with Ridge, officials said.

Asked about this, a White House spokesman said, "this is a huge government reorganization, and everyone's not going to agree all the time.''

Officials said a small number of Defense Department officials dismiss Ridge's operation and at times fail to send representatives to interagency meetings on homeland security.

Paul McHale, assistant secretary of defense for homeland defense, denied that charge, saying the Pentagon (news - web sites) has sent people to almost all such meetings, and is preparing to dispatch 50 military officials to work full time at the department.

Aside from a cadre of top aides working for Lawlor, the staff around Ridge is exceedingly spare. Some people view that as a mistake, saying the department needs something like the policy office within the Office of the Secretary of Defense, a thousands-strong unit that considers the largest strategic issues facing the military.

"It's a very thin operation," said Paul C. Light, a scholar of government at New York University. Compared to the departments of Education and Energy in the first year of their operation, "this one has a much less sophisticated hierarchy. . . . I'm surprised there isn't a political infrastructure at the top of the department."

One ranking department official said that in part because of staffing shortages, "it's impossible for this department to do anything but manage by the in-box. . . . There's not a lot of brainpower asking, 'What's our agenda? What are the threats of the 21st century?' "

Meanwhile, department leaders spend huge amounts of time appearing before Congress. Because dozens of committees and subcommittees have oversight claims on the department through their old ties to the legacy agencies, Congress has sent thousands of requests for Homeland Security officials to appear on the Hill and thousands more letters demanding answers or action.

Despite a budget that exceeds $36 billion, money is scarce and a constant preoccupation for department managers. Federal budget experts drastically underestimated the overtime costs of the tens of thousands of airport screeners, and Congress and the White House have largely refused to increase spending. The result is cascading budget crises that have led officials to make emergency cuts in crucial programs such as port security and air marshals, which Congress has then overruled.

Homeland Security officials say the department's problems often receive more attention than its successes.

"Not only do we do our day jobs of guarding the borders, securing the ports and scanning passengers entering the airports, we also are reorganizing the entire department," Johndroe said. "The department's roles and missions are still being defined."

"We're learning what works," he said.

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