Washington ? In the first flash of partisan dissent to President Bush’s homeland security plan, Democrats on Thursday assailed a provision that could allow leaders of the proposed new Cabinet agency to bypass federal personnel rules that protect civil servants.

The Democratic criticism emerged as Tom Ridge, Bush’s point man on homeland security, appeared before House and Senate committees to give his first formal testimony to Congress since he came to Washington last fall to help improve domestic defenses against terrorism.

Homeland Security Director Tom Ridge testifies on Capitol Hill before the House Government Reform Committee. Skeptical lawmakers raised pointed questions Thursday about whether the proposed Homeland Security Department would do a better job of analyzing intelligence than the CIA or the FBI.

Ridge, a former congressman and governor of Pennsylvania, received a warm reception. So did most of the administration’s plan to consolidate several agencies scattered across the government into one Department of Homeland Security.

But Democratic criticism on the civil service issue showed the 2-week-old proposal was entering a tough new phase as Congress begins debating how to turn it into law.

While most lawmakers have voiced general support for Bush’s push to fold 169,000 employees into a new department meant to counter terrorism and other domestic threats, Democrats zeroed in on a little-publicized provision of the draft bill the administration sent to Congress earlier this week.

The provision would allow the secretary of homeland security and White House personnel officials to replace existing civil service regulations with a new merit-based management system. The existing rules aim to shield career government employees from political influence, granting many of them collective bargaining rights and other protections.

The Bush proposal is fiercely opposed by two unions that represent roughly 50,000 of the affected federal workers, the American Federation of Government Employees and the National Treasury Employees Union. Now Democratic allies are coming to their defense.

“There is unanimous (Democratic) opposition to the administration’s proposal to circumvent the civil service laws of the country, as they are contemplating,” Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, D-S.D., said. “We can’t do that. We’re not going to rewrite or totally exempt this or any federal agency from the laws pertaining to civil service.”

Ridge, in written testimony, defended the administration’s initiative as an attempt to develop a “motivated, high-performance and accountable work force.”

Under questioning from the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee, he added that Bush wanted to “make the agency a lot more agile and give it some of the tools that it may need to deal with … personnel challenges.”

In a subsequent hearing held by the House Government Reform Committee, Rep. Tom Lantos, D-Calif., told Ridge that Democrats considered civil service protections for federal employees “non-negotiable.”

Ridge also faced questions on how the proposed executive shake-up would address intelligence lapses that occurred before the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

In one sharp exchange, Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., grilled Ridge on why Bush’s plan would not require that the Department of Homeland Security be given access to certain intelligence related to terrorist threats.

“It seems to me that it leaves the problem, the gaps, the cracks unanswered,” Levin said, “because right now we have a situation where the CIA and the FBI and other agencies do not share data.”