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The Department of Transportation
(DOT) was established by an act of Congress, signed into law by
President Lyndon B. Johnson on October 15, 1966. Its first
secretary, Alan S. Boyd, took office on January 16, 1967. The
department's first official day of operation was April 1, 1967.
Mission
The mission of the Department of Transportation, a cabinet-level
executive department of the United States government, is to develop
and coordinate policies that will provide an efficient and
economical national transportation system, with due regard for need,
the environment, and the national defense. It is the primary agency
in the federal government with the responsibility for shaping and
administering policies and programs to protect and enhance the
safety, adequacy, and efficiency of the transportation system and
services.
The Department of Transportation consists of the Office of the
Secretary and eleven individual Operating Administrations: the
Federal Aviation Administration, the Federal Highway Administration,
the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration, the Federal
Railroad Administration, the National Highway Traffic Safety
Administration, the Federal Transit Administration, the Maritime
Administration. The Saint Lawrence Seaway Development Corporation,
the Research and Special Programs Administration, the Bureau of
Transportation Statistics, and the Surface Transportation Board. The
Homeland Security Act of 2002 authorized the establishment of the
Department of Homeland Security, which, on March 1, 2003, assumed
management of the United States Coast Guard and the Transportation
Security Administration, formerly DOT Operating Administrations.
History
From its inception the United States government wrestled with
its role in developing transportation Infrastructure and
transportation policy. Often, the result has been confusion and
needless complexity, leading to an overabundance of aid for some
means of transportation and inadequate support for others. The law
that established a cabinet-level Department of Transportation did
not pass Congress until ninety-two years after the first such
legislation had been introduced. Lyndon Johnson called it "the most
important transportation legislation of our lifetime . . . one of
the essential building blocks in our preparation for the future. . .
."
Passage of the Department of Transportation enabling act in 1966
fulfilled a dream at least as old as that of Thomas Jefferson's
Treasury secretary, Albert Gallatin. Even before that, the Coast
Guard and the Army Corps of Engineers had helped to foster trade and
transportation. To enhance the prosperity of struggling new states
and to fulfill the need for rapid, simple, and accessible
transportation, Gallatin recommended in 1808 that the federal
government subsidize such internal improvements as the National
Road.
Just before he left office in June 1965, Najeeb Halaby,
administrator of the independent Federal Aviation Agency (as it was
then called), proposed the idea of a cabinet-level Department of
Transportation to Johnson administration planners. He argued that
the department should assume the functions then under the authority
of the under secretary of commerce for transportation. Moreover, he
recommended that the Federal Aviation Agency become part of that
department. As he later wrote, "I guess I was a rarity-an
independent agency head proposing to become less independent."
Frustrated because he thought the Defense Department had locked the
Federal Aviation Agency out of the administration's supersonic
transport decision-making, Halaby decided that a Department of
Transportation was essential to secure decisive transportation
policy development. After four-and-a-half years as administrator, he
concluded that the agency could do a better job as part of an
executive department that incorporated other government
transportation programs. "One looks in vain," he wrote Johnson, "for
a point of responsibility below the President capable of taking an
evenhanded, comprehensive, authoritarian approach to the development
of transportation policies or even able to assure reasonable
coordination and balance among the various transportation programs
of the government."
Charles Schultze, director of the Bureau of the Budget, and Joseph
A. Califano, Jr., special assistant to the president, pushed for the
new department. They urged Boyd, then under secretary of commerce
for transportation, to explore the prospects of having a
transportation department initiative prepared as part of Johnson's
1966 legislative program. On October 22, 1965, the Boyd Task Force
submitted recommendations that advocated establishing a Department
of Transportation that would include the Federal Aviation Agency,
the Bureau of Public Roads, the Coast Guard, the Saint Lawrence
Seaway Development Corporation, the Great Lakes Pilotage
Association, the Car Service Division of the Interstate Commerce
Commission, the subsidy function of the Civil Aeronautics Board, and
the Panama Canal.
With modifications, Johnson agreed, and on March 6, 1966 he sent
Congress a bill to establish a Department. The new agency would
coordinate and effectively manage transportation programs, provide
leadership in the resolution of transportation problems, and develop
national transportation policies and programs. The department would
accomplish this mission under the leadership of a secretary, an
under secretary, and four staff assistant secretaries whose
functions, though unspecified, expedited the line authority between
the secretary and under secretary and the heads of the operating
administrations.
With the proposed legislation Johnson sent Congress a carefully
worded message recommending that it enact the bill as part of his
attempt to improve public safety and accessibility. Johnson
recognized the dilemma the American transportation system faced.
While it was the best-developed system in the world, it wasted lives
and resources and had proved incapable of meeting the needs of the
time. "America today lacks a coordinated transportation system that
permits travelers and goods to move conveniently and efficiently
from one means of transportation to another, using the best
characteristics of each." Johnson maintained that an up-to-date
transportation system was essential to the national economic health
and well-being, including employment, standard of living,
accessibility, and the national defense.
After much compromise with a Congress that was jealous of its
constitutional power of the purse and its relationship with the
older bureaucracies, Johnson signed into law the Department of
Transportation enabling act on October 15, 1966. Compromise made the
final version of the bill less than what the White House wanted.
Nevertheless, it was a significant move forward, producing the most
sweeping reorganization of the federal government since the National
Security Act of 1947.
On April 1, 1967, the Department opened for business, celebrating
the "Pageant of Transportation" five and a half months after Johnson
had signed the enabling legislation. Dignitaries from the
department, the Smithsonian Institution, the transportation
industry, and the public gathered for ceremonies on the Mall
celebrating the start of the new department. Alan S. Boyd, named by
Johnson as its first secretary, guaranteed that the new department
would "make transportation more efficient, more economical, more
expeditious and more socially responsible."
By April 1, this newest cabinet-level department was suddenly the
fourth largest, with a blueprint of organization, an order providing
for essential authorizations, and several leading officials on the
job. It brought under one roof more than thirty transportation
agencies and functions scattered throughout the government and about
ninety-five thousand employees, most of whom had been with the
Federal Aviation Agency, the Coast Guard, and the Bureau of Public
Roads.
To Alan S. Boyd, the former Civil Aeronautics Board chairman and
under secretary of commerce for transportation, fell the challenge
of setting up the new department: structuring it around Congress's
recommendations in the enabling act, organizing it, and setting it
in motion. The new secretary faced a host of problems: creating his
own immediate office, providing appropriate missions for his
assistant secretaries, building the new Federal Highway
Administration and the Federal Railroad Administration, helping to
start the National Transportation Safety Board, and setting up an
organization and management plan for the entire department.
Acknowledging the connection between transportation systems and the
needs of urban areas, the White House drafted a plan to transfer
urban mass transit functions to the Department that formerly resided
in the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). As
mandated by the Department of Transportation Act, Johnson directed
the secretaries of housing and urban development and transportation
to inform Congress where the most "logical and efficient
organization and location of urban mass transportation functions
within the Executive Branch" would be. When this failed to resolve
the issue, Johnson transferred most of HUD's mass transit capacity
to the Department of Transportation, effective July 1, 1968.
Responsibility for these programs resided in the newly established
Urban Mass Transportation Administration (now the Federal Transit
Administration).
By the conclusion of Boyd's administration, the department embraced
the Coast Guard, the renamed Federal Aviation Administration, the
Federal Highway Administration, the Federal Railroad Administration,
the Saint Lawrence Seaway Development Corporation, the Urban Mass
Transportation Administration, and, tangentially, the National
Transportation Safety Board. Boyd's most significant achievement was
to organize the department and to get it operating as a constructive
governmental entity.
During his first administration, Richard M. Nixon presided over
several transportation-related matters, including the bailout of the
Penn Central Railroad, the launching of Amtrak, and the attempted
extension of federal support for supersonic transport. He nominated
as his secretary of transportation the moderate, thrice-elected
governor of Massachusetts, John A. Volpe. A modern Horatio Alger,
Volpe headed a construction firm that built hospitals, schools,
shopping centers, public buildings, and military installations along
the Eastern Seaboard and in other parts of the country. In 1968, the
former federal highway administrator had been a rumored
vice-presidential nominee--until Maryland governor Spiro Agnew
received the nod.
In 1970, the Highway Safety Act authorized the establishment of the
National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. Although the law
added somewhat to the department's safety mission, the Federal
Highway Administration originally had handled most of the functions
that the new agency assumed. Besides establishing another operating
administration and adding to the secretary's span of control and
coordination workload, the Highway Safety Act separated highway
administration into two parts: design, construction, and maintenance
on the one hand; and highway and automobile safety on the other.
Such organization ran counter to the original Departmental
organizing concept for the various modes of transportation: unlike
the Coast Guard and the Federal Aviation Administration, for
example, the Federal Highway Administration no longer bore
responsibility both for facilities and infrastructure and for safety
programs.
Volpe gave highest priority to coordinating the missions of the
diverse agencies placed under the department's umbrella and
developing a "balanced" transportation policy. Symbolic of this
effort was the establishment of the Transportation Systems Center in
Cambridge, Massachusetts. He thought that he had effectively begun
to coordinate separate agencies, each of which had its own
constituencies on Capitol Hill, in industry, and among the public.
For years, these agencies had acted autonomously and with little
coordination or teamwork among themselves. Volpe believed he had
begun to forge them into a united transportation agency.
During Volpe's tenure the Department assumed a higher profile in
resolving national transportation problems. These included airline
hijackings, the sick-out of the fledgling Professional Air Traffic
Controllers Organization, the decision to end federal support for
production of the supersonic transport and to handle applications
for Concorde landing slots, the financial insolvency of the Penn
Central Railroad and the creation of Amtrak, and the Coast Guard's
handling of the case of the defection of the Lithuanian seaman Simas
Kudirka.
On December 6, 1972, Nixon named Dr. Claude S. Brinegar to succeed
Volpe. Brinegar, a senior vice president of the Los Angeles-based
Union Oil Company, had a Ph. D. in economic research and was a
self-styled "non-political" professional manager. Reserved in
management style and pragmatic in political philosophy, Brinegar
successfully steered the department through Watergate and the energy
crisis of 1973-1974. Moreover, he charted the Administration's
response to the "Northeast Rail Crisis," the Regional Rail
Reorganization Act of 1973, and at the urging of Congress, drafted a
written National Transportation Policy in March 1974.
When Gerald R. Ford, Nixon's successor, decided to run for president
in his own right, Brinegar indicated that he had no wish to join the
campaign. He returned to California, and Ford named William T.
Coleman, Jr., to succeed him. Coleman had served on several airline
and transit boards, including the Southeastern Pennsylvania
Transportation Authority, Philadelphia's transit system. Coleman was
a distinguished lawyer who, with Thurgood Marshall, had played a
major role in landmark civil rights cases, including Brown v. the
Board of Education of Topeka, which ended de jure school segregation
in 1954. Later, Coleman met and impressed Ford, when the then-House
Minority Leader served on the Warren Commission investigating the
assassination of John F. Kennedy; Coleman was senior consultant and
assistant counsel to the commission. During Coleman's tenure, on
April 1, 1975, Congress granted the National Transportation Safety
Board, which had been established within the Department, its
independence from the department. On the other hand, Coleman
delineated a Statement on National Transportation Policy in
September 1975 and National Transportation Trends and Choices in
January 1977, which, while set aside by his immediate successor,
"used the knowledge of the past to look into the future" and "to
creat[e] a planning and decision making framework to guide that
future."
Ford lost the election of 1976 to Jimmy Carter, the former governor
of Georgia. For secretary of transportation, Carter chose Brock
Adams, a six-term member of the House of Representatives from
Washington. Adams, a leading authority on transportation matters in
the House, had been Brinegar's nemesis and the primary author of the
legislation that reorganized the bankrupt northeastern rail lines
into the Government-backed Conrail system.
Adams's establishment of the Research and Special Programs
Directorate on September 23, 1977, subsequently the Research and
Special Programs Administration (RSPA), was a significant
institutional development. When Adams created RSPA, he combined the
Transportation Systems Center, the hazardous materials
transportation and pipeline safety programs, and diverse program
activities from the Office of the Secretary that did not readily fit
in any of the existing operating administrations. The establishment
of the RSPA set a precedent in that it was a creation of the
Secretary, not Congress. (Passage of the Pipeline Safety Act of 1992
gave RSPA equal statutory standing with the other operating
administrations.) RSPA simultaneously moved crosscutting research
and development pursuits from the Office of the Secretary to an
autonomous operating administration.
During Adams's administration, the Inspectors General Act of 1978
established for the department, and other executive agencies as
well, an inspector general, appointed by the president and confirmed
by the Senate. The mission of the inspector general was to help the
secretary cope with waste, fraud, and abuse. Although housed in the
department and given the rank of assistant secretary, the inspector
general was generally autonomous.
Before leaving office, Adams recommended that the Federal Highway
Administration and the Urban Mass Transportation Administration be
reorganized into a Surface Transportation Administration, an idea to
which James Burnley and Federico Peña would later return. Adams was
succeeded by Neil E. Goldschmidt, mayor of Portland, Oregon, since
1972, and later president of the United States Conference of Mayors.
Meanwhile, legislative triumphs in transportation deregulation
included the Railroad Regulatory Act (better known as the Staggers
Rail Act), the Truck Regulatory Reform Act, the International
Airlines Reform Act, and the Household Goods Regulatory Reform Act.
Goldschmidt expressed an interest in government industrial policy,
an early example of which was the Chrysler Corporation Assistance
Program, worked out largely by the Treasury Department. When
Congress drafted the Chrysler Loan Guarantee Act of 1979, he began a
review of the automobile industry's problems. Goldschmidt also
established the Office of Small and Disadvantaged Business
Utilization in the Office of the Secretary. It was responsible for
carrying out policies and procedures consistent with federal
statutes to provide policy guidance for minority, women-owned, and
disadvantaged businesses taking part in the department's procurement
and federal financial assistance activities.
Ronald Reagan's first secretary of transportation, Andrew L.
("Drew") Lewis, Jr., a management consultant and political leader
from Pennsylvania, successfully negotiated the transfer of the
Maritime Administration from the Commerce Department to DOT and
provided the department with the maritime connection it needed to
formulate an effective national transportation policy. The
department assumed greater visibility during the air traffic
controllers' strike in August 1981, during which Lewis spoke for the
administration. After personally negotiating with the Professional
Air Traffic Controllers Organization in the days leading up to the
strike, Lewis forcefully explained the government's response to the
strike-firings and no amnesty for strikers. Lewis was also
responsible for the enactment of the Surface Transportation
Assistance Act of 1982.
Lewis's successor, Elizabeth Hanford Dole, had been Reagan's
assistant for public liaison. A consumer adviser in two
administrations and a member of the Federal Trade Commission during
the Nixon and Ford administrations, Dole brought to her new position
experience in consumer and trade matters. At DOT, she focused on
many safety-related issues, including drunk driving and the
so-called "Dole brake light." Responding to a Supreme Court ruling,
Dole authorized deadlines for the installation of air bags and other
passive restraints in motor vehicles, which resulted in major
increases in seat belt usage by the public, and incentives to
manufacturers to equip new cars with air bags.
While Dole was secretary, the Commercial Space Launch Act of 1984
gave the department a multifaceted new mission to promote and to
regulate commercial space launch vehicles. Because no operating
administration had a comparable mission and because of its modest
funding, Dole located the Office of Commercial Space Transportation
in the Office of the Secretary.
The Airline Deregulation Act of 1978 and the Civil Aeronautics Board
Sunset Act of 1984 had abolished the board and transferred to the
department many of its functions relating to the economic regulation
of the airline industry. Specifically, these included the aviation
economic fitness program, functions related to consumer protection,
antitrust oversight, airline data collection, and the review of
international route negotiations and route awards to carriers. On
January 1, 1985, the Office of the Secretary took over most of these
functions, under the jurisdiction of the Office of the Assistant
Secretary for Policy and International Affairs.
Continuing a trend begun when the department transferred the Alaska
Railroad to the state of Alaska, the Department divested itself of
entities that it thought should be in the private sector. Dole moved
to end Federal Railroad Administration ownership of Conrail, finally
realized in April 1987. She also encouraged the establishment of the
Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority in June 1987,
transferring administration of Washington National Airport and
Dulles International Airport from the Federal Aviation
Administration to that authority.
To succeed Dole, who had departed to help her husband's campaign for
the Presidency, Reagan chose James H. Burnley IV, her deputy and
former general counsel. While deputy secretary, Burnley had helped
to negotiate the sale of Conrail, directed the privatization of
Amtrak, enabled the transfer of the Washington airports to the
regional authority, and helped to assemble an air traffic control
work force in the wake of the 1981 strike. He also helped to produce
the department's policies on aviation safety and security.
Disappointed with the Federal Aviation Administration's apparent
foot-dragging on safety regulations, and seeking to increase the
secretary's management oversight capacity within the department,
Burnley proposed to curtail the autonomy of the operating
administrations. A working paper recommended integration of the
functions of the Maritime Administration, the Federal Aviation
Administration, and the surface transportation administrations under
three under secretaries, for water, air, and surface transportation,
respectively. Burnley offered his reorganization proposal at the
conclusion of Ronald Reagan's second term in the hope that it would
provide Congress, his successor, and the public with an alternative
to proposals according to which one agency or another would leave
the department.
His successor, Samuel K. Skinner, a George H. W. Bush appointee,
chose instead to emphasize the establishment of a National
Transportation Policy. Skinner also welcomed expansion of the
department's role in crisis management response. His handling of a
succession of disasters, both natural and manufactured, earned
Skinner the Washington moniker "the Master of Disaster." For
Skinner, it began with additional evidence that a terrorist bomb had
destroyed Pan American Airways flight 103. (The explosion over
Lockerbie, Scotland, on December 21, 1988, had killed 270, including
eleven on the ground. ) In rapid sequence followed the machinists'
strike at Eastern Airlines (March 1989) and the company's subsequent
bankruptcy, the Exxon Valdez oil spill (March 1989), the Loma Prieta
earthquake (October 1989), and Hurricane Hugo (September 1990), all
high-profile incidents that took place during Skinner's first
twenty-one months in office.
For Skinner, establishment of a national transportation policy
became the department's highest priority. In Moving America,
national transportation policymakers outlined six objectives: to
maintain and expand America's national transportation system; to
nurture a sturdy financial footing for transportation; to keep the
nation's transportation industry vigorous and competitive; to
guarantee that the transportation system enhances public safety and
the national security; to maintain the environment and the quality
of life; and to ready American transportation technology and
expertise for the next century. By March 1990, conditions had
persuaded Skinner that to realize these goals, diverse departmental
offices would have to work together. As a result, the secretary
launched the National Transportation Policy-Phase 2 under the
leadership of Thomas D. Larson, administrator of the Federal Highway
Administration. NTP-Phase 2 activities combined to help the
department inventory its strengths and weaknesses and identify room
for improvement.
On December 18, 1991, Bush signed into law the Intermodal Surface
Transportation Efficiency Act (ISTEA), derived in part from the NTP,
which provided a six-year reauthorization to restructure the
department's highway, highway safety, and transit programs. One
effect of this legislation was that the Urban Mass Transportation
Administration became the Federal Transit Administration. The ISTEA
legislation also required the department to establish two new
organizational entities: the Bureau of Transportation Statistics,
which was to provide timely transportation-related information
through the compilation, analysis, and publishing of comprehensive
transportation statistics, and the Office of Intermodalism, in the
Office of the Assistant Deputy Secretary, which was charged with
coordinating and initiating federal policy on intermodal
transportation.
Skinner, meanwhile, had become White House chief of staff. A month
and a half later, Bush named Andrew H. Card, Jr., his deputy White
House chief of staff, to be secretary of transportation. Disaster
response to Hurricane Andrew, which hit southern Florida in August
1992, highlighted Card's eleven-month term at the helm of the
department.
Bush lost the election of 1992 to Arkansas governor Bill Clinton. In
a move to enhance diversity in his cabinet, Clinton selected
Federico Peña, an Hispanic American and the former mayor of Denver,
Colorado, initially to head the "cluster group" that dealt with
transportation issues during the transition, and ultimately to
manage the Department of Transportation.
In March 1993, Clinton announced an initiative that the Democratic
Leadership Council embraced, a plan for a six-month National
Performance Review (NPR) of the federal government. Following a
highly successful program analysis by Texas governor Ann Richards,
Clinton asked Vice President Al Gore to head his administration's
effort to improve the quality of the government and to reduce the
cost of delivering services to the American taxpayer. The NPR
challenged federal agencies to identify what worked and what did
not, to propose new ways of doing the job that would eliminate red
tape and improve both operations and customer service, and to think
about doing their work in smarter, more cost-effective ways.
While the NPR laid the groundwork for "reinventing government," the
department had been responding to several congressional initiatives,
including the Chief Financial Officers Act of 1990, the Federal
Managers' Financial Integrity Act, and the Government Performance
and Results Act of 1993. The outcome was the DOT Strategic Plan,
which Peña announced in January 1994.
The plan delineated the department's mission and enumerated seven
broad strategic goals to carry out: "tying America together" through
an effective intermodal transportation system; investing
strategically in transportation infrastructure; creating a new
alliance between the nation's transportation and technology
industries in order to make them more efficient and economically
competitive; promoting safe and secure transportation; actively
enhancing the environment; "putting people first' in the
transportation system; and transforming the Department. Meanwhile,
the department continued to be at the center of the federal
government's crisis management response team, as exemplified by its
response to flooding in the Mississippi River Basin in the summer of
1993 and the Northridge earthquake of January 1994.
The NPR had promised a government that not only would do its job
better, but would cost the taxpayers less as well. Consequently, the
Clinton administration was able, by December 19, 1994, to propose a
"middle-class" tax cut, one that would be funded in part by
restructuring several federal departments and agencies, including
the Department of Transportation. That same day, Peña outlined a
plan to restructure the department by the end of the decade. After a
month and a half of workshops and discussions with Congress, the
public, and department employees throughout the country, Peña
announced a restructuring plan for the department. Pending
congressional approval, three operating administrations, a Federal
Aviation Administration, a new Intermodal Transportation
Administration, and the Coast Guard, would replace the current ten.
Where Congressional approval was not necessary, Peña moved ahead,
transferring the Office of Commercial Space Transportation from the
Office of the Secretary to the Federal Aviation Administration, and
launching the Transportation Administrative Services Center (TASC)
to provide fee-based administrative services previously financed by
the Working Capital Fund, both within DOT and to other government
agencies.
Following his reelection in 1996, Clinton selected Federal Highway
Administrator Rodney E. Slater to succeed Peña at DOT. The second
former federal highway administrator (after Volpe) and the second
African-American (after Coleman) to become Secretary, Slater was
instrumental in getting ISTEA re authorized, with the passage of the
Transportation Equity Act for the 21st Century, the largest public
works legislation in history. During his first year and a half at
DOT, airline and railroad mergers again became fashionable.
Department negotiators helped to avert a strike against Amtrak--and
Congress mandated that Corporation's overhaul; the National Highway
Traffic Safety Administration issued regulations allowing consumers
to turn off their airbag switches where necessary; and the United
States finalized a long-sought, liberalized aviation agreement with
Japan.
Also, in keeping with his conviction that transportation was about
"more than concrete, asphalt, and steel," Slater announced the
Garrett A. Morgan Technology and Transportation Futures program to
encourage students to choose careers in transportation; a "Safe
Skies for Africa" Initiative to promote sustainable improvements in
aviation safety and airport security in Africa; and on October 8,
1998, proposed the idea of creating a unified Department, ONE DOT,
able to act as an integrated, purposeful leader increasing
transportation efficiency and effectiveness.
In the wake of the Presidential Election of 2000, the eventual
winner, Texas Governor George W. Bush (R), reached out to the
Democratic Party for his nominee to head DOT. After the closest race
in 112 years, the issue hung--for five weeks--on the contested vote
in Florida, with electoral votes that could have swung the election
to either Bush or his Democratic rival, Vice President Al Gore.
Following a U.S. Supreme Court ruling that essentially certified the
Republican standard bearer's victory, Bush chose former San Jose
Mayor and Congressman Norman Y. Mineta (D-CA), a Japanese-American
who, along with his family, had been held in a relocation camp in
Wyoming during World War II. Mineta, age sixty-nine, was, when Bush
nominated him to become the nation's fourteenth Secretary of
Transportation, Bill Clinton's Secretary of Commerce. After an
extraordinarily close election, Bush turned to a Democrat who was
not changing parties, just Cabinet posts, to heal the partisan
breach. As such, Mineta would become the first Asian-Pacific
American to serve as Secretary of Transportation-and the first DOT
Secretary to have served in a previous Cabinet position.
Less than eight months into the new Bush Administration, on
September 11, 2001, radical Islamic extremists with the group Al
Qaeda, hoping to sow terror and confusion among Americans,
commandeered four American domestic airliners, and transformed them
into missiles that were used to destroy the World Trade Center in
New York City and to hobble the Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia,
killing thousands. Under Mineta's command, DOT managers and FAA air
traffic controllers performed a herculean task by bringing the rest
of the fleet down safely. Responding to this new form of terrorism,
Congress passed and, on November 19, 2001, Bush signed into law the
Aviation and Transportation Security Act, which, among other things,
called for the establishment of a completely new Transportation
Security Administration in the Department of Transportation, to
increase security at airports and other transportation venues. On
February 16, 2002, the Transportation Security Administration opened
for business, and was due to become fully operational by year's end.
On June 6, 2002, Bush asked for a broad-based reorganization of the
Federal government, which, by establishing a Cabinet-level
Department of Homeland Security, proposed to transfer the Coast
Guard and the Transportation Security Administration out of the
Department of Transportation.
Congress passed the Homeland Security Act of 2002, DHS's enabling
legislation, which Bush signed into law on November 25, 2002. On
January 25, 2003, former Pennsylvania governor Tom Ridge was sworn
in as that Department's first Secretary. On March 1, the Department
of Homeland Security became fully operational. Four days earlier, on
February 25, 2003, in an historic “Change of Watch” ceremony replete
with color guard, speeches, silent drill team, and John Philip Sousa
marches, Mineta ceremoniously transferred civilian leadership of the
Coast Guard to the new department. The following day, Mineta
formally handed over the Transportation Security Administration to
Homeland Defense: “On Saturday, March 1, . . . [w]e hand over an
agency that is fully intact and which does credit to both of our
departments.. “Creating TSA was by far the toughest, most
challenging, and most satisfying endeavor I've ever undertaken.
Starting from a blank sheet of paper on Nov. 19, 2001, we created an
agency of more than 60,000 employees that is truly fulfilling its
goal of protecting Americans, as they travel across our country, and
beyond. . . . Not only have we improved security for the traveling
public, but [we] have also cut waiting times at checkpoints,
fulfilling our promise of delivering world-class security and
world-class customer service.”
R. Dale Grinder Departmental
Historian |
