ASHCROFT UNVEILS RESTRUCTURING OF FBI, IMMIGRATION AGENCIES

Politics & Policy

WASHINGTON -- With the war on terrorism stretching its resources, Attorney
General John Ashcroft said the Justice Department will pull back from
routine activities to focus on preventing terrorist attacks.

"We cannot do everything we once did because our lives now depend on us
doing a few things very well," Mr. Ashcroft told department officials
gathered in the ceremonial hall at the agency's headquarters. "The
department will not be all things to all people."

Outlining what he called a "wartime reorganization and mobilization" plan,
Mr. Ashcroft said he intended to cut 10% of the agency's headquarters staff
and reallocate the positions as additional agents, prosecutors and analysts
in the field. He said he wanted to reallocate 10% of the department's
budget, about $2.5 billion, from normal functions to the counterterrorism
campaign.

Mr. Ashcroft focused on the Immigration and Naturalization Service, which
he said would be restructured to "lead the campaign to detain, prosecute
and deport terrorist aliens." Revamping the INS was under way well before
the attack Sept. 11, and in fact has been in the works, in one form or
another, for years.

INS Under Fire

The INS has been under fire for its inability to prevent terrorists from
getting in and staying in the country, but the agency's problems are far
more systemic, according to numerous reviews. The General Accounting
Office, Congress's investigative arm, said recently that despite some
efforts to improve "uncoordinated, overlapping" functions, the agency's
"organizational structure is still in a state of flux." House Judiciary
Committee Chairman F. James Sensenbrenner Jr. (R., Wis.) was less oblique,
calling the INS "the most dysfunctional federal agency around."

Mr. Ashcroft already has submitted an INS reorganization plan to the White
House's Office of Management and Budget. He said the plan, which he expects
to release publicly soon, would separate the agency's immigration-services
function from its role in protecting the border. Other efforts under way on
Capitol Hill are more radical, including splitting the agency into two.

FBI Reorganization

The Federal Bureau of Investigation, whose major bungles in recent years
have brought criticism from both the left and right, also will be
reorganized, Mr. Ashcroft said. Several reviews, including one headed by
William Webster, a former FBI and Central Intelligence Agency director,
began before Sept. 11, and Mr. Ashcroft said a plan would be issued by the
end of the year.

The attorney general gave few details of how the reorganization would
affect routine operations, but an FBI official said it plans to shift about
half of its 805 agents assigned to local-crime task forces to
counterterrorism work. An additional 250 federal agents and 1,090 local
officers are on the task forces, which target violent crimes, fugitives and
street gangs.

Senate Judiciary Chairman Patrick Leahy (D., Vt.) applauded the effort, but
asked what happened to "the tremendous investment in FBI counterterrorism
resources that the Congress made during the past decade. Just as the
lessons of Pearl Harbor led to the creation of the CIA, a review of what
happened before Sept. 11" could lead to changes, Mr. Leahy said in a letter
to Mr. Ashcroft.

Effect on DEA

The head of the Drug Enforcement Administration, Asa Hutchinson, said "the
dust is still settling" on the plan, but he expected that FBI agents who
work with the DEA on narcotics cases would be moved to counterterrorism,
leaving his agency "to pick up the slack."

Deputy Attorney General Larry Thompson, the department's No. 2 official,
said the department had implemented some of the new powers it received from
antiterrorism legislation approved last month, and said that prosecutors
would put thwarting terrorism above convicting criminals.

"Our overriding priority," he said, is "to prevent further attacks, and to
disrupt terrorist cells before they can do more harm, even if it means
potentially compromising a criminal prosecution." A department official
said that could mean "moving a case early, rather than waiting for a bigger
case to develop."

Mr. Thompson said that sharing of information between law-enforcement and
intelligence agencies -- a focus of the antiterrorism bill -- had begun.
Each day, the FBI provides a summary of information derived from grand-jury
investigations and criminal wiretaps to the CIA and other agencies, he said.

- -- Gary Fields contributed to this article.