Foreign Policy

Washington
,
Mar 4, 2009
 –
As part of a 60-day review underway on whether the Homeland
Security Council should be merged into the National Security Council,
the Obama White House has invited outside national security experts for
periodic consultations on the matter.

Randy Beardsworth, a former DHS

official, chaired a meeting on the subject at the Eisenhower office
building Thursday, sources told The Cable. Attendees included the
Heritage Foundation’s James Jay Carafano and the Project on National
Security Reform’s executive director James R. Locher III. About two dozen people attended the meeting Thursday, most of them at the deputy assistant secretary level.

Beardsworth
could not immediately be reached, but a message on his phone said he
was taking a few weeks off from a job with a private-sector homeland
security firm, presumably to work on the review for the White House.
(The White House did not immediately respond to a query about what his
exact role is).

“I made the standard case about why they
should integrate,” Carafano said. “I didn’t get a sense that it’s
horribly controversial.”

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