Let's just kill "Homeland Security"

Created in 2002 in the mad crush of panic, paranoia, and patriotic pants-wetting after the 9/11 attacks, DHS has always been a stupid idea. Even at the time, creating a new cabinet-level department responsible for 22 different agencies and services was suspect. Exactly how was adding a new layer of bureaucracy supposed to make us safer (and that’s leaving aside the question of just what the hell “homeland security” actually means)? DHS leaders answer to no fewer than 90 congressional committees and subcommittees that oversee the department’s various functions. Good luck with all that.

But don’t feel sorry for the shmoes running DHS. Over the last decade, the budget for DHS has doubled (to $54 billion in 2014) even as its reputation for general mismanagement, wasteful spending, and civil liberties abuses flourishes. The Government Accountability Office (GAO) routinely lists DHS on its “high risk” list of badly run outfits and surveys of federal workers have concluded “that DHS is the worst department to work for in the government,” writes Chris Edwards of the Cato Institute. He also notes, a “Washington Post investigation found that many DHS employees say they have ‘a dysfunctional work environment’ with ‘abysmal morale.’” Somewhere, the Postmaster General is pumping his fist.

It only gets worse when you look at the sheer amount of junk DHS spends money on. The Customs and Border Patrol (CBP), for instance, built 21 homes for agents in a remote part of Arizona. The price tag was $680,000 per house in a part of the country where the average home sold for less than $90,000. When the TSA isn’t hiring defrocked, child-molesting priests, Edwards notes that it is shelling out hundreds of millions of dollars on radiation detectors for cargo containers that don’t work and full-body airport scanners without bothering to “perform a cost-benefit analysis…before rolling them out nationwide.”