Homeland Insecurity

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You could practically hear the House members choke on the news. "All these Senators were out there implying that we were lily-livered," a senior House Democratic aide griped. "We made the right decision," Gephardt insisted. "What message would it send to the terrorists if we stupidly put people back in harm's way, to be infected by anthrax? That hardly, to me, is an intelligent response." After a briefing Thursday afternoon by Capitol police, Gephardt told his staff the situation in Daschle's office was even worse than earlier thought. One aide said that decontaminating it would require fumigating that entire section of the Hart Building with gas and leaving it closed for two to three weeks. "It's a good thing we left," Gephardt reportedly told his staff, "and we probably should have left earlier." Senate leaders doubted the Hart Building would be closed that long, but it was no wonder Gephardt kept spinning: the decision was clearly toxic even if the air was not. By the time the report of the contaminated mailroom came Saturday, it was too late to do much more than damage control.

But this was just the Legislative Branch; it's not Congress's job to manage the crisis. That belongs to the Executive Branch, where it remained far from clear which executive, if any, was in charge. Ridge, who had been all but invisible since his swearing-in as Homeland chief the week before, joked with reporters that "I thought it was the appropriate time to come out." While he was quick to insist yet again that he had all the firepower he needed and could walk into the Oval Office any time he wanted--"I have the President's ear," he said--he also said flat out that he didn't have "technical operational authority" to do much of anything. In his private briefings with lawmakers from both parties, "nobody was swept off their feet," a Democratic lawmaker told TIME. "He was asked what his first priority was, and there was a 60-second silence."

When Ridge's office was created, its architects assumed that the weight of the Sept. 11 attacks would give him all the leverage he needed. The collective sense of mission generated by the attacks would help him cut through the sludge among the 46 agencies he was assigned to coordinate. But last week, even as Ridge briefed the President at least three times on the anthrax investigation, the FBI and the CIA were doing briefings as well. In fact, the very scope of the threat may work against Ridge's assuming central control, even if he could. Other agencies are too busy responding to those attacks to hand over authority, because either they don't have the time or they don't want to let go or both. An Administration official has seen the first draft of the yet-to-be-signed Executive Order setting up Ridge's job, and says it is "just a laundry list of 'coordinate this, coordinate that,' with no authority to do anything. Everybody likes Ridge, so everybody's going to be slow to start criticizing, but what I hear over and over is, 'I bet he regrets taking the job.'"

Some on the Hill found Ridge's performance practically stirring compared with that of Thompson. The Health Secretary tried to assure people that the government was prepared to respond to a mass bioterrorism event but ended up signaling that it was nowhere near ready. He asked Congress for money to increase the amount of antibiotics in U.S. stockpiles 600% and acquire 300 million doses of smallpox vaccine--which will take at least one year. So just how prepared should we consider ourselves between now and then? Thompson maintains the public-health system can cope, but just in case, the FDA rushed through a formal approval for antibiotics like penicillin and doxycycline to treat anthrax. Those drugs are much cheaper and more widely available, and the move allowed Thompson to say it probably wouldn't be necessary to break Bayer's patent on Cipro in order to buy up generic forms of the drug for U.S. stockpiles. Although the pill reportedly costs less than 25[cents] to make, Bayer charges the government $1.83, and the frightened public is shelling out about $5 a pill. Generic companies have told the government they would charge it no more than 50[cents]. Thompson is negotiating with Bayer for a similarly cheap deal.

While he praised the nimbleness and skill of the public-health network, the system had been through a tense fire drill. It had taken a week and a half to nail down the diagnosis of anthrax at NBC. At first the baby believed to have been infected at ABC News was thought to have a spider bite. Testing at the CDC lab in Atlanta was delayed for 14 hours after a 1-hr. power failure. Most health-care workers have never seen a case of anthrax, though they are learning what it looks like fast. Many of the national Emergency Response Network's 100-odd public-health labs, flooded with suspicious samples to test, had to learn to do triage: the disease detectives at the CDC were reportedly coaching other labs on how to assess the risks and decide which substances to test first. They also alerted health officials to watch for the signs of other diseases, like plague (fever, cough, chest pain), smallpox (flulike symptoms and rash) and botulism (drooping eyelids, difficulty swallowing, blurred vision). While there was "no evidence" of the threat of any such diseases, says acting deputy director of the National Center for Infectious Diseases Julie Gerberding, "we do live in an era when those threats can become a reality."