Government audits routinely find the DHS guilty of waste and mismanagement. The Government Accountability Office has for years included the DHS on its list of “high risk” government agencies. A 2010 National Academy of Sciences report accused the agency of failing to rigorously evaluate projects to see whether the benefits outweigh the costs. Many of the 22 agencies falling under the DHS umbrella are among the most dysfunctional in government, including FEMA, the TSA, and the Secret Service.
Morale at the department is dreadful. In October of last year, the Washington Post reviewed a new survey of 40,000 DHS employees. It found that only 42 percent of those employees are satisfied with the department, 25 percent have a positive view of their boss’s ability to “generate high levels of motivation and commitment in the workforce,” and 39 percent believe department leaders “maintain high standards of honesty and integrity.”
It is true, as we are frequently reminded, that there has not been a major terrorist attack on the U.S. homeland since 9/11, but it’s hard to attribute that to the DHS. For example, a report from the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs looked at more than 70 “fusion centers” operated by the DHS to collate information and found that they had produced virtually no useful intelligence to support federal counter-terrorism efforts. According to the committee, the intelligence forwarded by the centers was often shoddy and rarely timely, it sometimes encroached on citizens’ civil liberties and Privacy Act protections, it was occasionally taken from already-published public sources, and more often than not it was unrelated to terrorism.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member