Executive Order 13228, signed by President George W. Bush on October 8, 2001, created the Office of Homeland Security and the Homeland Security Council inside the White House to coordinate the federal government’s response to terrorism after the September 11 attacks. The order named Pennsylvania Governor Tom Ridge as the first Assistant to the President for Homeland Security and gave the new office a coordinating role over dozens of federal agencies with domestic security responsibilities. It was an emergency measure. Fourteen months later, Congress replaced the arrangement with the statutory Department of Homeland Security, but the order set the template for everything that followed.
Why the Order Was Issued
Before September 11, more than forty federal agencies held pieces of the domestic security mission, often with overlapping mandates. The FBI ran domestic counterterrorism investigations. FEMA handled disaster response. Border work was split among the Customs Service, the Immigration and Naturalization Service, and the Coast Guard. No official below the President had authority to pull these efforts into a single strategy.
The attacks exposed the cost of that fragmentation. Intelligence that might have disrupted the plot sat in separate agencies with no reliable process for sharing it. Executive Order 13228, issued less than a month later, was Bush’s first structural answer to that problem.
What the Office of Homeland Security Was Set Up to Do
Section 1 of the order placed the Office of Homeland Security inside the Executive Office of the President and put it under an Assistant to the President for Homeland Security. Ridge took office the same day the order was signed.
The Office’s job was to develop and coordinate a national strategy for protecting the country against terrorist threats. In practice, the director served three roles at once: principal adviser to the President on domestic security, central coordinator for the executive branch’s counterterrorism work, and the President’s main point of contact for managing the federal response during an active threat.
The Office also had a budget hand. It reviewed homeland security spending proposals across the executive branch and sent recommendations to the Office of Management and Budget on funding levels. That gave a White House staff office real leverage over departments that might otherwise have shrugged off coordination requests.
Intelligence Sharing Mandate
Section 3 addressed the intelligence failures directly. It directed every executive department and agency to make available to the Office “all information relating to terrorist threats and activities within the United States,” to the extent permitted by law. Before the order, no standing requirement compelled agencies to send threat information to a single coordinating body.
The Office was also charged with pushing that information back out. Intelligence and law enforcement information relevant to homeland security was to be shared among federal agencies and, where appropriate, with state and local governments and private entities. The design recognized that local officials were often the first to see suspicious activity but rarely had access to the federal intelligence that would help them read it correctly.
On the collection side, the Office coordinated and prioritized foreign intelligence requirements tied to domestic terrorism and passed those priorities to the Director of Central Intelligence and other collection agencies. It was also tasked with making sure collection agencies had the technology and resources to gather information on potential terrorist activity inside the United States.
Critical Infrastructure Protection
The order made the Office responsible for coordinating protection of the country’s critical infrastructure and named specific sectors: energy production, transmission, and distribution; telecommunications; facilities that produce, use, store, or dispose of nuclear material; public and private information systems; and transportation systems.
The Office was directed to work with federal agencies and the private sector on vulnerability assessments and protective measures. That work fed into the first National Strategy for Homeland Security in July 2002.
The Homeland Security Council
Alongside the Office, Executive Order 13228 created the Homeland Security Council as the President’s senior policy forum for domestic security, paralleling the role of the National Security Council on foreign policy and defense.
Section 5 set the Council’s mandatory membership:
- The President and Vice President
- The Secretary of the Treasury
- The Secretary of Defense
- The Attorney General
- The Secretary of Health and Human Services
- The Secretary of Transportation
- The Director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency
- The Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation
- The Director of Central Intelligence
- The Assistant to the President for Homeland Security
The Council met at the President’s direction. Its purpose was to integrate domestic, foreign, and military security policy so that homeland security decisions were not made in isolation from broader national security planning.
Why the Office Had Limited Power
The Office had a built-in weakness: it existed only by executive order, not by statute. The director carried the title of Assistant to the President, which brought influence inside the West Wing but no independent legal authority over the agencies he was trying to coordinate. The Office could recommend, convene, and press. It could not order.
That limitation quickly became political. Members of Congress argued that placing the function in a White House staff office insulated Ridge from congressional oversight, since presidential advisers are not generally required to testify. Several committees sought Ridge’s testimony on homeland security spending and priorities, and the White House resisted. Critics argued that a job this consequential needed statutory authority, Senate-confirmed leadership, and direct accountability to Congress. That argument won, and it drove the push for a permanent department.
Replacement by the Department of Homeland Security
The Homeland Security Act of 2002, signed on November 25, 2002, replaced the White House office with the Department of Homeland Security, a permanent cabinet-level department. The legislation folded components from 22 existing federal agencies into the new department, which opened on March 1, 2003. It was the largest federal reorganization since the creation of the Department of Defense in 1947. Agencies moved in included the Coast Guard, the Secret Service, Customs, Immigration and Naturalization, the Transportation Security Administration, and FEMA. A Senate-confirmed Secretary of Homeland Security took over the senior domestic security role from the Assistant to the President, closing the accountability gap.
The Homeland Security Council survived the transition. Title IX, Section 901 of the Homeland Security Act codified the Council into statute, keeping it as a White House policy body even after the operational work moved to the department. On January 23, 2003, President Bush issued Executive Order 13284, which amended EO 13228 to add the Secretary of Homeland Security to the Council’s membership. With that amendment, the emergency structure the original order set up in October 2001 had been folded into the permanent institutional framework that governs domestic security today.