HSPD 12: Brilliant Lunacy

Aggressive deadlines won't be met, but they do force some action

By Derek Slater

August 01, 2006 — CSO — Surely in security, at least, we have a realization that the government and military have a lot going for them.

After all, security as a profession has gleaned a lot of intellectual capital, and in fact much of its manpower, from those sources. Plus, the government has processes and standards that in some cases make complex tasks quite straightforward. There's a company in our backyard, Security Engineered Machinery, that makes a variety of gigantic shredders—the kind you can use to obliterate hardbound copies of War and Peace, metal computers, small cars probably—and an engineer there once told me that while corporate customers often have no idea what they need to buy, government employees can dictate their requirements on the first phone call (power usage, shredding volume, mean time between maintenance, the whole nine yards)

Our cover story this month is a deep dive into the public sector: Sarah D. Scalet's illuminating dissection of Homeland Security Presidential Directive 12. In a nutshell, that's the edict establishing an employee credential that works in all federal facilities across all agencies. I'll leave the details to Scalet. What's striking about HSPD 12 is its approach to governing. Some people think it's lunacy. I think it's brilliant. Actually, maybe it's both

HSPD 12 is a short statement that has three elements:

One, it lays out a very good and ambitious idea. The efficiencies generated by a common identification standard are obvious

Two, it establishes who is in charge of working out the particulars for implementing that good idea.

Three—and this is the interesting part—it sets forth ridiculous deadlines

It's easy to criticize the deadlines. Some of the poor folks charged with implementing HSPD 12 are in fact quite critical. After all, they have been given a colossal task—it's estimated that this directive will result in the issuance of more than 5 million new identification cards and the total swap-out of every card-reading device in the federal government—and no funding with which to do it

But in fact, isn't this how the private sector often operates? Big ideas and tight deadlines create chaos, but it's a chaos marked by kinetic energy. The chaos of genesis. For all the hand-wringing about purchasing schedules and product lists and requirements that need clarification, something is happening.

You can't criticize the government for bureaucracy and then keep criticizing when they move quickly on a daunting challenge.

I suppose Uncle Sam could have sent the concept into years of committee meetings and refused to