Crisis Bureaucracy: Homeland Security and the Political Design of Legal Mandates

Policymakers fight over bureaucratic structure because it helps shape the legal interpretations and regulatory decisions of agencies through which modern governments operate. In this article, we update positive political theories of bureaucratic structure to encompass two new issues with important implications for lawyers and political scientists: the significance of legislative responses to a crisis, and the uncertainty surrounding major bureaucratic reorganizations. The resulting perspective affords a better understanding of how agencies interpret their legal mandates and deploy their administrative discretion. We apply the theory to the creation of the Department of Homeland Security. Two principal questions surrounding this creation are: (1) why the President changed from opposing the creation of a new department to supporting it and (2) why his plan for such a department was far beyond the scope of any other existing proposal. We argue that the President changed his mind in part because he did not want to be on the losing side of a major legislative battle. But more significantly, the President supported the massive new department in part to further domestic policy priorities unrelated to homeland security. By moving a large set of agencies within the department and instilling them with new homeland security responsibilities without additional budgets, the president forced these agencies to move resources out of their legacy mandates. Perversely, these goals appear to have been accomplished at the expense of homeland security. Finally, we briefly discuss more general implications of our perspective: first, previous reorganizations (such as FDR's creation of a Federal Security Agency and Carter's creation of an Energy Department) also seem to reflect presidential efforts to enhance their control of administrative functions, including some not directly related to the stated purpose of the reorganization; and, second, our analysis raises questions about some of the most often-asserted justifications for judicial deference to agency legal interpretations.

Probing multipartite entanglement in a coupled Jaynes-Cummings system

We show how to probe multipartite entanglement in $N$ coupled Jaynes-Cummings cells where the degrees of freedom are the electronic energies of each of the $N$ atoms in separate single-mode cavities plus the $N$ single-mode fields themselves. Specifically we propose probing the combined system as though it is a dielectric medium. The spectral properties and transition rates directly reveal multipartite entanglement signatures. It is found that the Hilbert space of the $N$ cell system can be confined to the totally symmetric subspace of two states only that are maximally-entangled W states with 2N degrees of freedom

Adding backbone to protein folding: why proteins are polypeptides

It is argued that the chemical nature of the polypeptide backbone is the central determinant of the three-dimensional structures of proteins. The requirement that buried polar groups form intramolecular hydrogen bonds limits the fold of the backbone to the well known units of secondary structure while the amino acid sequence chooses among the set of conformations available to the backbone. ‘Sidechain-only’ models, based for example on hydrophobicity patterns, fail to account for the properties of the backbone and thus will have difficulty capturing essential features of a folding pathway. This is evident from the incorrect predictions they make for the conformations of the limiting cases of all-hydrophobic or all-polar sequences