The creation of a Department of Homeland Security promises to be the largest reshuffling of the federal government since 1947. In 1947, the War and Navy departments combined to create the Department of Defense, while the Central Intelligence Agency and National Security Council were born.

The new department will employ 170,000 employees and have a budget of $37.5 billion.

But Jon Pevehouse, a professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin, said he believes the department will do little to change current government policy.

“In theory, there will be more coordination between the people who supervise the airport screeners and the people who collect the intelligence information abroad,” Pevehouse said. “I’m a little less hopeful that this is going to change much in everyday policy.”

At the Brookings Institute, a nonpartisan think tank focused on public policy in the areas of economics, foreign policy and governance, governance division director Paul Light said the department would be a huge bureaucracy.

“The department would eventually include at least 200,000 employees, including 30,000 baggage screeners not counted in the president’s initial proposal, 22 separate agencies, dozens of largely incompatible financial management systems, and 100 or so personnel systems,” Light said in an editorial appearing on the Institute’s website. “The department would have to negotiate contracts with at least 18 labor unions, including 33,000 members of the American Federation of Government Employees [and] 12,000 members of the National Treasury Employees Union.”

Pevehouse agrees.

“The analogy I would use is right after the Bay of Pigs, Robert McNamara, who was Secretary of Defense, decided we weren’t getting enough cooperation in our intelligence community, so he created the Defense Intelligence Agency, which was a whole new bureaucratic structure and not to the extent that Homeland Security is,” he said.

The bill could affect college students across the country. Pevehouse said the changing power structure could alter policies concerning immigration and students wishing to study in the United States, but he believes most of the effects are most likely far in the future.

“In the long term, there may be some effects. In the end, I just think this is going to be just a combination of existing structures and putting them under new bosses,” he said. “Now, the long-term question is if you get a new boss, and you get a different position that can be controlled by different political actors, you can get policy changes. But that is hard to predict.”

A provision in the Homeland Security bill will allow for the construction of a homeland-security research center at a U.S. university. Senate Democrats say the legislation is written to favor Texas A&M as the likely site for the center, while Republicans say the center could go to any university.

“The purpose of this center or centers shall be to establish a coordinated, university-based system to enhance the Nation’s homeland security,” the bill reads.

The bill also said the center would go to institutions with strong backgrounds in first-responder training, to those institutions with demonstrated expertise in responding to nuclear, biological and chemical threats, food safety, and port and waterway security.

Robert Dingman, a professor of history at the University of Southern California, said the timeline before Homeland Security is fully online could be significant.

“You’ve created this huge bureaucracy that you have to put together and get it to work together, and that is going to take a while.”