Abolish The Dept. Of Homeland Security-Six years on, it's still a catastrophe.

[babylonsister]

Abolish The Dept. Of Homeland Security-Six years on, it's still a catastrophe.

Man-Made Disaster by Jeffrey Rosen
Six years on, the Department of Homeland Security is still a catastrophe.
Post Date Wednesday, December 24, 2008


Michael Chertoff needs an office. When I interviewed the secretary of Homeland Security this summer, we met in a pair of temporary locations between which he shuttles--first in the decaying Nebraska Avenue Complex of the naval station at Ward Circle (a center for signal analysis during World War II) and later in an unmarked and unfurnished office in the nondescript headquarters of U.S. Customs and Border Protection in the Ronald Reagan building, near the White House. Chertoff hasn't settled into an office partly because the six-year- old Department of Homeland Security (DHS) still has no permanent, consolidated headquarters. Instead, the unwieldy amalgam of 22 separate federal agencies operates out of 70 buildings at 40 different locations in the Washington area. And the lack of a real home is just the beginning of the department's bureaucratic problems. The most recent survey by the U.S. Office of Personnel Management on the job satisfaction of federal employees in 36 agencies ranked Homeland Security last or near last in every category. Meanwhile, officials from the Pentagon who have tried to do business with DHS complained to me of organizational chaos at the department. Homeland Security employees, they said, are often unaware of overlapping initiatives championed by their colleagues, and even by Chertoff himself.

This can't have been what Democrats and Republicans had in mind when they celebrated the creation of the department in November 2002--arguably the last moment of bipartisan cooperation that Washington would see for six years. Although hastily thrown together, DHS was hailed by most of official Washington as a necessary response to the extreme vulnerabilities exposed by the September 11 attacks. Today, that bipartisan consensus remains largely intact. In fact, as Barack Obama prepares to take office, some Democrats want to increase the department's budget, which is now over $40 billion per year. "I do think more money has to be spent, order of magnitude twenty to twenty-five percent more," I was told in July by James Steinberg, who emphasized that he was not speaking for the Obama campaign. (He is now expected to become deputy secretary of state. ) "I don't think Secretary Chertoff has fought hard enough within the administration for his share of resources," P.J. Crowley, a homeland security expert at the Center for American Progress, told me in June. "If we continue to suggest we are at war, I wonder if DHS really is on a war-time footing." More recently, the nomination of the charismatic Janet Napolitano to head the department suggests that Obama himself is committed to a strong DHS. In announcing her nomination, Obama said, "She understands the need for a Department of Homeland Security that has the capacity to help prevent terrorist attacks and respond to catastrophe be it man-made or natural." It may still be years away from having a permanent headquarters, but the Department of Homeland Security, apparently, is here to stay.

Should that be cause for celebration or concern? This summer, I talked to security experts on both sides of the political spectrum, and had several conversations with Chertoff, in an effort to answer the following question: Is DHS achieving its mission of making us safer? My reluctant conclusion is that, although Chertoff has performed impressively in an impossible job, the department is hard to justify with any rational analysis of costs and benefits. On the contrary, it's arguably one of the most expensive marketing ventures in political history--an enterprise that seeks to make us feel safer instead of actually making us safer. The best argument for DHS is that the illusion of safety may itself provide tangible psychological and economic benefits: If people feel less afraid, they may be more likely to fly on planes. But even if conceived on these terms--as a more-than-$40-billion-dollar-a-year pacifier--the department is hard to defend, since there's no good evidence that it has, in fact, calmed Americans down rather than making us more nervous.

The only way of calming people down is political leadership that puts the terrorist threat in perspective. But, despite efforts by Chertoff to avoid the color-coded hysteria that defined the department in its early days, DHS officials inevitably feel pressure to exaggerate the terrorist threat--scaremongering that creates further public demand for promises of security that can't be fulfilled. And so the very existence of DHS creates a chain reaction of self-justifying insecurity. For this reason, Republicans (who used to be the stiff-upper-lip party of limited government) and Democrats (who don't trust the government to run the war in Iraq and are generally cautious about spending too much on defense) are willing to sink billions into an institutional money pit that has more to do with symbols than substance. Both parties seem incapable of acknowledging an uncomfortable but increasingly obvious truth: that the Department of Homeland Security was a bureaucratic and philosophical mistake.

To understand how DHS was hobbled from the beginning, it may be helpful to recall the partisan gymnastics surrounding its creation. After September 11, President Bush appointed Pennsylvania governor Tom Ridge to head a new Office of Homeland Security in the White House. When Joe Lieberman first proposed setting up a cabinet-level homeland security department in October 2001, White House conservatives balked at the prospect of a vast new federal bureaucracy. But, as Lieberman's bill began to gain momentum, the White House decided it couldn't let the GOP be outflanked by Democrats in appearing tough on terror. In April 2002, after months of Republican senators fighting against Lieberman's bill, White House Chief of Staff Andy Card convened a secret working group to decide which federal agencies to merge into a homeland security department that would be created on Bush's terms. The mid-level White House staffers who were responsible for designing the new department met regularly with Card, Condoleezza Rice, and Cheney's chief of staff, Scooter Libby. Those staffers later told The Washington Post about the rushed and almost random character of much of their deliberation: The Immigration and Naturalization Service and Federal Emergency Management Agency were in, but, because of internal politics, the FBI was out. The Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory was in because a White House security expert, Richard Falkenrath, called a friend and asked which of the Department of Energy's three research labs to include.

more...

http://www.tnr.com/politics/story.html?id=5248f065-cbd3-4264-ac58-cffdfd947a22

[damntexdem]

1. OK, abolish it, but call it by its real name: Department of Hoaxland Security.

And they should repeal the PoorTrait Act while they're at it.