The U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and U.S. Customs & Border Protection (CBP) have announced the implementation of a regional command center in Arizona. For the commercial trade community this a giant red flag and most likely means big trouble ahead. Why? Because most of the uniformity issues that the legacy U.S. Customs Service painstakingly stamped out in the late 1990's were the direct result of being previously organized in a regional structure. Under that structure each region had a Regional Commissioner and over time each region became its own little fiefdom, opting for a variety of "port practices" that differed from each other. Let's face it, the one thing that an importer into the U.S. needs most is predictability and the uniform application of laws and regulations at the more than 300 U.S. ports of entry.

 

The old regional organization embraced by the U.S. Customs Service in the 1960's was dismissed by the leadership in the late 1980's as an abysmal failure in management. Each customs region developed varying port practices for handling commercial trade, and this caused all sorts of problems for the trade community at large. This structure also completely undermined the authority and single point of command enjoyed by U.S. Customs headquarters in Washington, rendering them ineffective at managing their own operations. The regional structure was ultimately broken down, and the U.S. Customs Service spent years identifying and eliminating uniformity issues and differing port practices caused by this ill-fated structure.

 

In 2002, as the first Director (and subsequent Secretary) of DHS, Tom Ridge, settled into his newly created post, he and his brain-trust came up with an idea to "regionalize" DHS. As a new department, DHS was made up of 22 separate government agencies, and the U.S. Customs Service was among them. At the time DHS went public with their plan to regionalize I was employed by the second largest U.S. importer, and I was also a sitting member of the Commercial Operations Advisory Committee (COAC). As such, I felt obligated to inform Secretary Ridge that a regional concept for CBP came with lots of baggage and was ill-advised. I went out of my way to appear at every public venue I could to debate and challenge him on the merits of his regional concept. We even privately had a few laughs about how relentlessly I pursued him and about how passionate I was about my cause. Thankfully, Secretary Ridge finally got the message and scuttled his regionalization plan leaving CBP and the existing headquarters structure alone.

 

The trade community is now faced with the same wolf in sheep's clothing and dilemma: the "unified command center" in Arizona. The big difference, however, is that this concept is apparently being driven from within the walls of CBP. More importantly, perhaps, is that rather than being a concept, the genie is already out of the bottle, and the unified command prototype has already been created and deployed. In the coming months the trade community will need to speak out and become quite vocal if they intend to slow this initiative down. CBP is reportedly impressed with this new structure and has plans to deploy it in other parts (or regions) of the country as well.

 

Commissioner Alan Bersin and Deputy Commissioner David Aguilar would be well-advised to take a step back when considering a regional structure; failure to do so might just set CBP and the trade back 20 years. To be sure there's a lot of negative history for them to review including multiple Government Accountability Office (GAO) reports criticizing and/or condemning the regional structure. To aid them in their search I have compiled a short list of GAO "must reads" below:

These reports are available in the archives of the GAO website.