Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney complained yesterday in Pelham that one of the Bush administration's chief domestic security accomplishments - the Department of Homeland Security - is inefficient and requires major restructuring.

At a coffee-and-doughnuts meeting with about 100 supporters, Romney said that the department does some things well but that it has challenges because it is made up of different agencies "stuck in one big bureaucracy."

He said he was a member of a Bush administration Homeland Security advisory panel while he was governor of Massachusetts.

"There is such duplication in Washington that you'd really like to take the place apart and put it back together, just smaller and simpler and smarter," Romney said. He said that if he was president, he would expect the department to survive, but "it probably needs to be streamlined."

The department suffers from bisected management by the White House and Congress, which has oversight of the federal bureaucracy, and that results in an ineffective system, Romney said.

If he were president, he would shift the allocation of Homeland Security dollars from an emphasis on first responders to prevention through intelligence, Romney said, adding that he would especially want to support and expand the intelligence gathering done by the FBI.

"When we talk about Homeland Security, we hear about money coming from Washington, which is fine, coming to the states and localities - and most of it goes to buy interoperable radios, mobile command centers, fire trucks - and that's fine, but all that's going to be used after the bomb goes off," Romney said. "What I want to do is make sure we're spending money to keep the bomb from going off."

Bush pushed for the creation of the Homeland Security Department - an idea initially championed by congressional Democrats in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks - saying it would reduce the nation's vulnerabilities and help the country respond better to any future terrorist attacks. Signed into law in November 2002, it's the largest reorganization of the federal government in more than half a century.

Separately, Romney took another jab at the Bush administration's management of the federal bureaucracy. Saying he supports an expanded private health insurance system instead of one run by the government, Romney added: "The last thing I want is the guys managing the Katrina cleanup managing my health care system."

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By GLEN JOHNSON

The Associated Press