Janet Napolitano is out at the Department of Homeland Security. The former Arizona governor “announced Friday that she would step down to become president of the University of California system.”
Napolitano’s departure has been in the works for several months and she plans to leave her post in early September, according to two administration officials. Napolitano, a former governor of Arizona who had been seen as a potential Democratic presidential candidate, will exit the political stage to run one of the nation’s largest public university systems.
As homeland security chief, Napolitano has been a central figure in the immigration debate as well as the government’s counter-terrorism policies and responses to natural disasters. Her sudden departure leaves Obama with a Cabinet-level vacancy at a critical time, as the House debates a bill to overhaul the nation’s immigration laws.
The Post goes on to say that there are high-level department functionaries who could be in line for the job, though the position would seem to call for someone with a higher national profile because. The New York Times describes the difficulties of the job:
Her departure creates an opening that could be hard for Mr. Obama to fill. The secretary of homeland security presides over a sprawling department with nearly two dozen agencies as varied as the Secret Service, Transportation Security Administration, Coast Guard and Federal Emergency Management Agency. Created by President George W. Bush and Congress after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, it has proved to be a thorny management challenge for everyone who has headed it.
The job put Ms. Napolitano in the middle of a wide range of crises and volatile issues, from the Boston Marathon bombings to Hurricane Sandy. She presided over extensive deportations of immigrants in the country illegally while enacting a new policy intended to allow young immigrants brought here without documents as children to stay.At times, she drew criticism. When a Nigerian man listed in a terrorism database was able to board a Detroit-bound commercial airliner and was later stopped by fellow passengers from blowing up the plane with explosives in his underwear, Ms. Napolitano said “the system worked.”Mr. Obama, in contrast, said there was “systemic failure” and she later explained she meant only that the system worked in response to the attempted bombing not before it happened. After that episode, Ms. Napolitano was rarely the administration’s public face when it came to other terrorism episodes, although her department was in the middle of responding to many of them.
Given the issues on the administration’s plate right now — especially those concerning immigration — the administration may punt and leave the job to a temporary chief, which would avoid a confirmation fight. Or he could think outside of the box. The most interesting — if unlikely — is New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, floated by Matt Rothschild at The Progressive, becauseof his background in law enforcement and in running a state with a massive budget. He wouldn’t take it if offered, I suspect, given the timing (four months before his re-election) and his national ambitions, but thinking about something like this would make New Jersey progressives giddy.
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Hank Kalet 