NSPD 51 / HSPD 20

Overview

The National Security and Homeland Security Presidential Directive is a policy statement issued by George W. Bush on 2007-05-09. It sets guidelines under which the United States would continue operating in the event of a national emergency.

It was apparently released by the President on his own authority, without any kind of approval process.

Key Concepts

• The definition of Catastrophic Emergency: any incident, regardless of location, that results in extraordinary levels of mass casualties, damage, or disruption severely affecting the U.S. population, infrastructure, environment, economy, or government functions.
• Continuity of Government (COG): a coordinated effort within the Federal Government's executive branch to ensure that National Essential Functions continue to be performed during a Catastrophic Emergency.
• Continuity of Operations (COOP): an effort within individual executive departments and agencies to ensure that Primary Mission-Essential Functions continue to be performed during a wide range of emergencies, including localized acts of nature, accidents, and technological or attack-related emergencies.
• Enduring Constitutional Government (ECG): a cooperative effort among the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of the Federal Government, coordinated by the President, as a matter of comity with respect to the legislative and judicial branches and with proper respect for the constitutional separation of powers among the branches, to preserve the constitutional framework under which the Nation is governed and the capability of all three branches of government to execute constitutional responsibilities and provide for orderly succession, appropriate transition of leadership, and interoperability and support of the National Essential Functions during a catastrophic emergency.
• National Essential Functions (NEFs): that subset of Government Functions that are necessary to lead and sustain the Nation during a catastrophic emergency and that, therefore, must be supported through COOP and COG capabilities.
• Primary Mission Essential Functions (PMEFs): those Government Functions that must be performed in order to support or implement the performance of NEFs before, during, and in the aftermath of an emergency.
• Continuity of Government Readiness Conditions (COGCON), a system that "establishes executive branch continuity program readiness levels, focusing on possible threats to the National Capital Region" – from the sound of it, something similar to the color-coded terror threat level system but reporting on governmental readiness to deal with threat rather than the threat itself, though the language is vague enough that it remains to be seen what measures will be required by the COGCON system under various conditions.

Threat

Many have interpreted this directive as the President giving himself the ability to assume unlimited authority – by defining the president's authority as unlimited in a "catastrophic emergency", coupled with giving the president the authority to declare such an emergency.

Both of the following must be established in order for this theory to hold water:

• the power of the president to declare a catastrophic emergency
• the nature of the powers granted to the president when a catastrophic emergency has been declared

First, what does the directive say about declaring an emergency?

• The definition of catastrophic emergency requires "extraordinary levels of mass casualties, damage, or disruption severely affecting the U.S. population, infrastructure, environment, economy, or government function". In other words, nobody has the power to declare a catastrophic emergency if it doesn't meet those criteria.

The mildest conditions which meet the requirements for a catastrophic emergency, then, would involve "extraordinary levels of disruption severely affecting the economy" or "...severely affecting government function". Does this allow Bush to, say, declare that a really bad day on Wall Street represents "extraordinary levels of disruption severely affecting the economy"? Or perhaps the next major scandal involving multiple members of the administration would involve "extraordinary levels of disruption severely affecting government function"?

• As far as the power to declare a catastrophic emergency, assuming that actual conditions arguably meet the criteria above, the directive only seems to go so far as establishing the COGCON system and giving the president the ability to "determine and issue the COGCON Level". COGCON seems to be defined as a system purely for determining readiness levels, not threat levels.

However, according to the DMSO Mission Assurance Lexicon, COGCON is:

A rating system specifically designed to relate COOP actions to threat and alert posture. The new system, COOP COGCON, shows actions designated by ratings of 1 through 4, with 1 being the highest, that should be accomplished when the government’s "level of concern" changes from a range of Guarded (i.e., COGCON 4) to High (COGCON 1).

This sounds very much like a threat level assessment of the sort which could be used to order that Catastrophic Emergency measures be taken. More research is needed to find out just what degree of control is given to the president by giving him the ability to set the COGCON level. Primary question: where is the substance of COGCON?

Links

Reference

• 2007-05-09 official White House press release

Discussion

• 2007-05-24 Bush makes power grab