The Case for Abolishing the DHS

http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-07-15/the-case-for-abolishing-the-dhs#r=rss

by danso • 13 years ago

317 72 13 years ago

Dirlewanger2• 13 years ago

Yeah, while I'm sure a good deal of the public feels repugnance toward DHS, anyone short of a much-needed cowboy like Rand Paul ain't shutting down this abomination. More government is all the rage nowadays, haven't you noticed?

betterunix2• 13 years ago

I doubt that the majority of Americans feel repugnance toward the DHS. Most people I have met seem to believe that the DHS is important to keep us and our children safe from terrorists. Most people fall victim to the classic "something must be done, this is something, and therefore it must be done" fallacy.

Dirlewanger2• 13 years ago

Sorry, when I wrote that I was thinking the TSA. Forgot that the DHS is more of a shell organization.

tsotha4• 13 years ago

Rand Paul couldn't do it either, any more than Reagan could shut down the Dept. of Education. It has to be done in Congress, and there's no appetite for shutting down anything, ever, in Congress.

The reason we have fourteen separate agencies with intelligence operations is as they lose the trust of elected leaders new ones are created, leaving the old ones intact.

JonSkeptic• 13 years ago

Talk about sensationalist news. "The Case for Abolishing the DHS".

It may be one of the scariest departments in the government right now, but it serves a fundamental purpose: to secure the nation from the many threats we face. *http://www.dhs.gov/about-dhs). It should be steered back towards protection (and probably toward creating a better mission statement as well), not dismantled.

When dealing with code and servers, sometimes you have to delete something and start over and it usually sucks to have to do it; imagine how bad it would be with an entire DEPARTMENT of the government. The article states that there are 15 vacancies at the top: this is an opportunity. Update it, fill it with new, ethical, honest leadership and it could be everything it was originally meant to be.

Shame on Businessweek for adding nothing to the discourse but for an emotional headline.

dllthomas• 13 years ago

Shutting down DHS wouldn't necessarily mean shutting down everything that falls under the DHS umbrella. As recently as 2000 there was no DHS. It was created to improve coordination between agencies; if it's not doing a good job of that, then split them apart again.

RyanZAG• 13 years ago

As a non-American, the DHS has always come across to me as some form of large scale elaborate joke. I'm genuinely curious if the department you are spending billions of dollars on has actually accomplished anything at all of any practical use?

mpyne4• 13 years ago

Almost everything DHS is doing now was being done before DHS. Even TSA was being handled by private security under FAA regulations, IIRC.

So while it may seem like an elaborate joke, it's not. Coast Guard does search and rescue work nearly every day, FEMA responds to natural disasters, etc.

forgotAgain2• 13 years ago

Shame on Businessweek for adding nothing to the discourse but for an emotional headline.

Thank you Business Week for participating in a rational discussion about our nation's deep dive into fear.

It's time to raise our heads from the sand, take a look around, and start making a positive contribution to the world again.

bgilroy26• 13 years ago

The number of downvotes the user has received despite representing the minority in the discussion here indicates they were right about the level of emotion.

dasil003• 13 years ago

I realize it's just an emotional headline if you didn't RTFA, but had you done that you would see they cited quite a few expenditures that are utterly wasteful when put in context.

darkarmani• 13 years ago

but it serves a fundamental purpose: to secure the nation from the many threats we face.

The biggest threat we face is the DHS. What if its fundamental purpose is reached by dismantling itself?

Which is more likely, being killed or injured by a terrorist attack or being killed, arrested, molested, or detained by the DHS? Trick question -- flying on an airplane pretty much ensures you get molested by the DHS.

JackFr• 13 years ago

Indeed it is one of the scariest departments simply because of its name. "Homeland Security" is ironically, especially un-American sounding, in that no one ever uses the word 'homeland'. See http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/kausfiles_sp...

They should have gone all in originally and just named it the "Committee for Internal Security".

jivatmanx2• 13 years ago

I have heard Dianne Feinstein use the word "Homeland" outside of the context of the department itself. I'd guess that Lindsey Graham and others are also doing this.

The more traditional phrase, Republic, used by Benjamin Franklin, and in the pledge of Allegiance is, as your article points out, more closely ties the U.S. to certain philosophical principles, whereas the term homeland is restricted to the physical, geographic location and the individuals in it.

If the lexicon is reduced to physical protection, than it's less vulnerable to arguments of lost liberty.

ericssmith• 13 years ago

I was also creeped out (still am) by the name, especially given the spirit of the times (eg yellow ribbons etc). I had the same sense as described here: http://www.alternet.org/speakeasy/alyssa-figueroa/dissecting...

I was also surprised at the time by often seeing "Department of Defense", as we were bunker busting and daisy cutting the crap out of people across the globe. I also just recently learned that we don't know the number of US military installations around the globe (700?, 900?) and instead of dismantling them after collapse of USSR, we found new justifications.

betterunix2• 13 years ago

"It may be one of the scariest departments in the government right now, but it serves a fundamental purpose: to secure the nation from the many threats we face"

1. The actual threats we face are a secret.

2. There is no evidence that the DHS is or ever was actually protecting us from anything.

3. There is no evidence that the DHS is or ever was doing a better job of protecting us than the intelligence, military, and law enforcement communities had done before the DHS was established.

ctdonath• 13 years ago

DHS was supposed to sensibly help coordinate existing departments with common goals hindered by bureaucratic divisions.

Instead we have something increasingly akin to a military which considers citizens at best suspicious and at worst presumed enemy combatants. Catholics, Evangelicals, and other predominant religious denominations are listed as indicators of potential terrorists. Anyone getting on an airplane with so much as a soda or can opener is presumed smuggling weapons. Anyone exhibiting self-sufficiency/survivalist tendencies is declared suspect. Vehicle checkpoints asking citizenship & business & destination are operated hundreds of miles inland. DHS employees are admonished to obey orders without question. Ammunition procurement[1] exceeding whole militaries is normalized. "Drone assassination" of citizens on home soil is declared (not legislated) lawful. Wholesale civilian monitoring (to wit NSA scandal) is common, and its consequences far from transparent now (save vague "a few terrorists were stopped"). Defacto national IDs are imposed/coerced (a la "Deine Papiere, bitte"). Wasn't long ago that every one of these points, and a whole lot more, were indicative of the worst oppressive governments; their recent commonality all a consequence of DHS.

This isn't just a result of a few vacancies at the top. This is systemic of the American leadership viewing the American people, and their historical values, being considered hostile opponents.

[1] - Yes, I'm aware of the alleged budgetary long-term purchasing theories. Even taking that into account, it's a whole lotta firepower intended against...who exactly?

oofabz• 13 years ago

The DHS includes the Coast Guard, Customs, Immigration, and FEMA. Abolishing these critical functions would be like throwing the baby out with the bath water.

cgi_man• 13 years ago

All of those functions existed before DHS. DHS can be abolished and those will be moved to other services.

saryant• 13 years ago

And those functions can be moved out of DHS, just as they were pre-9/11.

wmeredith• 13 years ago

As stated in the article (RTFA), these could be moved out of the DHS bureaucracy as they were before 9/11.

danso• 13 years ago

I think the debate is not over whether to abolish the concept of Homeland Security period, but whether Homeland Security as an umbrella-department (that encompasses such agencies as TSA, FEMA, Secret Service) makes more sense than having these agencies as a part of other departments...the Secret Service used to be part of the Treasury, TSA could become part of the Dept. of Transportation, etc.

It's not just about changing-names...in a large bureaucracy, the organization of agencies and officers is a real factor in how that bureaucracy effectively functions.

In any case, I think DHS could be seen as an example as poorly conceived bureaucracy...it's a department that will forever be waging turf battles with the FBI, the NSA, and the DoD, among other groups in charge of our security.

Shivetya• 13 years ago

This is the case for many of the "Department of" organization the United States has; it probably applies just as well to other countries similar organizations.

The issue with removing the DHS is, most people see it only as Airport security and they WANT THAT GONE. How do you deal with the tens of thousands of unionized government workers who do that job? Do we just hide them elsewhere?

I doubt it will ever be gone, even the Department of Education; only active since 1980; has produced no credible results and yet eats 69 billion a year. Many of the services people attribute to it are actually handled by other Departments. For the most part it just doles out grants - why can't that be elsewhere?

We need to broaden our approach to reducing government agencies. First item on the agenda is consolidating or eliminating similar programs. Then from that eliminating programs that are obsolete or no longer needed. The list goes on and on. So just picking one isn't enough, its government that needs a rethink.

cafard2• 13 years ago

People don't want to be perv-scanned, and they don't want to have to take their shoes off. I don't think they object to a 20th-Century level of inspection.

rayiner5• 13 years ago

has produced no credible results and yet eats 69 billion a year. Many of the services people attribute to it are actually handled by other Departments. For the most part it just doles out grants - why can't that be elsewhere?

The purpose of the Department of Education isn't to "produce credible results." It's a welfare program for minorities, the poor, and the disabled (I don't meant that pejoratively). ~72% of that $65 billion goes to just three things: Pell Grants, Title I grants (direct aid to municipalities for the disadvantaged), and IDEA grants (direct aid to municipalities for the disabled). Sure, you're funneling money to the people statistically least likely to benefit from it, but that's not the point. The point is that everyone can get at least a minimum level of education, even if they are poor or have a learning disability. It's the minimum basic guarantee we give to people in a society where we pretend to be a meritocracy but tolerate dramatically unequal starting positions for different people.

Municipalities could not provide this guarantee on their own. White flight in the 1960's and 1970's left inner city school districts decimated. E.g. Chicago Public Schools (CPS) is 86% black or hispanic and 87% low-income. 24% of the system's budget comes from federal sources (about $1.65 billion). 31% comes from the state, and 36% from local property taxes.

Inner city schools in the U.S. are mostly similar in terms of demographics, and the result of a fragile political compromise. Middle class people fund the systems, but don't want to send their kids to schools that are 85-90% low-income minorities. As a result, you can tax them only so much before they just move out to the suburbs. State and federal funding keeps these school districts in existence, and with state budgets strapped as they are, the DoE is the lynchpin that keeps the whole thing from collapsing.

skwirl• 13 years ago

I'm not sure I follow what you are trying to say. If the TSA was moved back to the Department of Transportation and the Secret Service was moved back to the Department of the Treasury, then you'd simply add two departments to the turf battle war instead of having the one.

NSA is part of the DoD, so let's group them together. Under your plan to eliminate "poorly conceived" bureaucracy, you'd change the potential interactions from this:

FBI-DoD, FBI-DHS, DoD-DHS

To this:

FBI-DoD, FBI-Treasury, FBI-Transportation, DoD-Treasury, DoD-Transportation, Treasury-Transportation

Wasn't DHS designed exactly to simplify this very issue? As a software engineer looking at a domain model with DHS compared to the old system, it seems like the DHS system has better separation of concerns, better cohesion, and reduced coupling.

Retric• 13 years ago

The DoD is to large to be really be considered an organization by it's self. For example Army, Navy, Airorce, NSA and everyone has there own support aircraft with there own support network even though the cost savings of integrating them all under a single organization would be huge.

bane• 13 years ago

Realistically the smaller than department sized organizations still need to talk to each other.

FBI-DoD still looks like FBI-NSA, FBI-Army CIS, FBI-Navy CIS, FBI-Army Intelligence, FBI-DIA, FBI-... etc. etc. and on and on.

Within DHS, I'd wager FBI till has to talk to TSA separate from SS.

llamataboot• 13 years ago

Some of us want to have the debate about the concept of "homeland security", while we are at it we can talk about having a department of peace instead of a department of defense

rayiner5• 13 years ago

Less than 70 years ago, within the lifetime of a person, the industrialized powers of the world fought a war that killed 60 million people. Absolutely nothing has changed about human nature in that evolutionary blink of an eye. The relative peace of today is just circumstances. That is the reason we have a department of defense rather than a department of peace. At any given moment we are just a set of circumstances away from cataclysm. It's not like the coming century isn't ripe for conflict. Water resources are stretched thin. Development outstrips oil production. Capital is shifting from western countries to Asia. If we don't see a major war between western powers and India/china over access to middle eastern oil I'll be shocked (pleasantly).

at-fates-hands• 13 years ago

The ironic thing about the DHS was it was supposed to make the communication lines between the FBI, the CIA and other federal law enforcement agencies better. This is one of the major failings of what happened on 9/11 - a total lack of sharing of intelligence between the CIA and FBI.

And here we are, almost 15 years later and nothing has changed or improved. Several commentators even argued if the DHS actually worked, several of the recent terror attacks would have been prevented.

Either fix it, or get rid of it.

mathattack4• 13 years ago

Adding a bureaucracy to improve communications is like adding a junior programmer to a late project. It totally misses the nature of the problem.

mpyne4• 13 years ago

Well, it can make sense when the added bureaucracy aligns well with an unexpected functional requirement that otherwise cuts across organizational boundaries. Even if you don't move every agency under the new structure, simply having a single point of responsibility for that new function can help with communication flow.

I think that's the real issue, is that functional requirements cropped up with no point of focus, but when they instituted a new agency to handle that they wrapped it up with a whole Department and a grab-bag of other tangentially-related agencies.

cafard2• 13 years ago

Information sharing has definitely made strides, whether or not through DHS--else how could Manning and Snowden come up with such quantities to leak?

snowwrestler2• 13 years ago

Information sharing has most definitely improved. One example is the Prism program, in which the FBI is responsible for data collection and then pipes it to the NSA. Not saying that is good for the country overall, but the agencies are definitely sharing more data.

dsl• 13 years ago

That has nothing to do with DHS. As a result of the 9/11 Commission's recommendations, the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004 put the Office of the Director of National Intelligence "in charge" (in an oversight capability) of the 17 major intelligence agencies we have here in the US.

For better or worse it dramatically increased intelligence sharing and cooperation, as well as effectively tearing down the walls between domestic and foreign intelligence work.

ianstallings• 13 years ago

They're gonna have an uphill battle. The DHS is digging in, literally: http://www.gsa.gov/portal/content/133423

DC institutions don't just go away. They fight tooth and nail to survive. So if you want to make it go away, prepare for a tough fight.

ferdo2• 13 years ago

DHS is just another excuse for government contractors and unions to screw taxpayers.

SwellJoe• 13 years ago

As far as I know, unions had no involvement in the creation of DHS. There are unions for DHS employees, just as there are for police, firefighters, etc...but, it's difficult for me to see a connection between the creation of the entity and those unions (which didn't exist as DHS employee unions until after DHS employees existed).

ferdo2• 13 years ago

They certainly were involved with smoothing out the rough patches in the beginning so they could get their piece of the pie:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/08...

If one group is plundering another group, it makes little difference if they planned the plunder or are participating in the pillage after the raid.

shill• 13 years ago

"The U.S. Department of Homeland Security was a panicked reaction to the Sept. 11 attacks."

The Hart-Rudman Commission recommended the creation of a National Homeland Security Agency in January of 2001.

9/11 panic was just the grease to ram a massive new bureaucracy through a congress controlled by the party of 'limited government'.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._Commission_on_National_Sec...

homosaur2• 13 years ago

Yes, thank you. Everything post-9/11 was already on the table including DHS and the invasion of Iraq. 9/11 was for the Bush administration the simply a huge amount of grease on that wheel.

jivatmanx2• 13 years ago

Yes, In fact, warantless wiretapping actually began 7 months before 9/11

http://digitaljournal.com/article/352455

tsotha4• 13 years ago

Bush didn't want to create the DHS. He was forced to by the "something must be done" crowd.

dredmorbius2• 13 years ago

The fact that the department was considered previously doesn't make its instantiation a panicked act. There are lots of contingencies and scenarios which are modeled and proposed in government. Only a small fraction are accepted.

charonn0• 13 years ago

For example, the planned US invasion of Canada[1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_Plan_Red

dredmorbius2• 13 years ago

Edit: Doesn't make its instantiation NOT a panicked act.

That is: even though DHS was considered in advance, it, the so-called PATRIOT Act, and the ill-fated war on Iraq, and numerous other errors were rammed through Congress.

mayneack• 13 years ago

In fact, many interest groups and other NGOs make said plans in advance so that they can mobilize during a controversy instead of having to throw together a several hundred page document before people get bored.

sigzero• 13 years ago

The only thing needed is "information sharing" between the branches. We do not need the DHS for that.

mtgx• 13 years ago

The DHS is about to become much worse soon, if the NYPD chief becomes its next boss:

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130714/22284823796/up-ag...

vermontdevil• 13 years ago

Last time a government agency was shut down was the Civil Aeronautics Board a long time ago.

Can't recall any big agencies ever shutting down since the New Deal days.

cpr• 13 years ago

Even the name "Homeland Security" is an abomination.

A "homeland" implies some kind of empire where there's a homeland, vs. outlands. The US should not be an empire (as it is today). It needs to return to being a simple nation among equals.

Naming things has power; propaganda power if nothing else.

newnewnew• 13 years ago

What's the last federal bureaucracy that was abolished?

This is never gonna happen. The size of government only goes one way.

rayiner5• 13 years ago

The size of the executive branch, including the postal service, peaked under Bush I: http://voices.washingtonpost.com/federal-eye/2010/09/how_man....

The current number of civilian executive branch employees is somewhere between where it was in 1964 and 1970. Adjusted for population, the executive branch is 40% smaller than it was during its peak under Nixon.

Now, the picture gets murkier if you include contractors, but they're not part of the bureaucracy per se and it's not like contractors were doing poorly, employment wise, during the Cold War.

Federal discretionary spending as a percentage of GDP is not exactly monotonically increasing: http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/RL34424.pdf (17). Aside from the recent bailouts and stimulus in response to the recession, it's smaller in percentage terms than it was at the peak of big government in the 1970's. Both defense and non-defense components of discretionary spending are smaller as a percentage of GDP.

As a practical matter, agencies don't get abolished. But they do get marginalized. Congress underfunds them relative to their original mandate, which forces them to shrink relative to the rest of the government and the rest of the economy. Is there hope of their doing this with DHS? Possibly. The long-term trend for all defense-related spending is sharply downward.

djKianoosh• 13 years ago

The DHS budget is about 1/10 of the DOD budget. Just saying. If people want to make more of an impact...

"Abolish" is a bit of a sensational word to use, especially because even if the department is shut down, all the agencies under it would shift to other departments or form new one(s).

linuxhansl• 13 years ago

Never going to happen. Power, once gained, will not be given up without a fight.

The Case for Abolishing the DHS

Related Stories