DHS Secretary Michael Chertoff, 17Dec07, in response to question: “…how do you make the determination as to whether something ought to be a federal program emanating out of Washington, D.C., versus finding the best practice out in the community and turning that into a national program?” “That is a great question, which strikes at the heart of one of the most challenging parts of the job. I think we all recognize -- although it's sometimes hard to know whether people in Washington will share this view -- that the federal government really can't be and shouldn't be the nanny for everything; to take care of everything directly. First of all, it would be astronomically expensive, but beyond that, it would really take the decision-making out of the hands of people who know best of what is the right way to implement things, and put it in a remote bureaucracy in Washington. “I think the genius of our system is an appropriate level of responsibility for the appropriate task. So let me divide it into three categories. “I think for most of what we do, in terms of protecting and responding and even preventing, a lot of the responsibility has to be in the hands of the private sector and local communities. That's because they know what is best and what works best. Now, we can do a couple things. We can lay out some guidance to the right way to do things. We can convey information that gives people a sense of what the threats are and what the challenges are, and what works and what doesn't. We can help facilitate network-sharing. We can even, in some circumstances, put down performance standards, like we're doing with the chemical industry, for example. “But in the end, we don't want to micromanage. We want to say, here's what you need to be able to do, here's the right way to do it -- or, here's the right kinds of things you have to be able to do, but you decide what is the best way to actually implement it based upon your knowledge and your experience about how to get things done in your community or your business. Now, this…doesn't satisfy those who enjoy or believe that the only way to deal with an issue is what I call "Soviet-style" management, where there's that heavy hand of government on everything. But I do think it's particularly apt in the 21st-century world, which is a world of networking, which is not hierarchical. “The second stage is dealing with matters that ought to be really state responsibilities, particularly in the area of prevention where we're dealing, again, with concerns about homegrown terrorism. In many cases, the challenges are what we would call "low-signature threats" -- threats that may not be detectable from spies and satellites, but require community-based policing and community-based knowledge to detect and deter and prevent threats before they come into effect. Because of that, again, we don't want to have the federal government become the choke point to which all this information has to pass before action takes place. That's why we're supporting fusion centers, including fusion centers with responders as well as police officials, so that states and localities can take action quickly to address issues. Now, we want to be able to have visibility into that, we want to share information up and down, but we don't want to slow up the process. “Finally, we do recognize there are some matters that are national responsibilities, and those ought to be areas where we do get our hands dirty and our boots on the ground, so that while with respect to the other categories of information our role could be to enable, to assist, to give information, to set standards, and to help fund, in the area of national priorities, we actually have to be operators, and we have to focus and make sure we can do those operational incidents. “What do those include? Well, it includes securing our borders; that's why we're putting a lot of effort into that. It includes looking at high-consequence terrorists attacks that could have a national or at least a regional impact; that's where we do use the tools of our intelligence community. It involves really catastrophic responses that overwhelm local and state government; and that's why we're doing planning with the National Guard and the military for the first time in a way we've never done before, so that in that kind of emergency, we really could step in and play a national role. “I think by keeping a different step of strategies for the appropriate level, we are maximizing our scope and we're minimizing our intrusiveness and the heavy hand of Washington”. (DHS, Remarks by Secretary Michael Chertoff to the National Congress for Secure Communities, 17 Dec 2007)