PELHAM, N.H. — Republican hopeful Mitt Romney complained yesterday 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-donuts meeting with about 100 supporters, Mr. Romney said the department does some things well, but it has challenges rooted in the fact that it is made up of different agencies “stuck in one big bureaucracy.” He noted that 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,” Mr. Romney said. He said 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, Mr. 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, Mr. 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,” Mr. Romney said. “What I want to do is make sure we’re spending money to keep the bomb from going off.”

Mr. Bush pushed for the creation of the Homeland Security Department — an idea initially championed by congressional Democrats in the wake of the September 11, 2001 attacks — saying it would reduce the nation’s vulnerabilities and help the country respond better to any future terrorist attacks.