Aside from Two Failed Wars, What?

Waste appears to be the new American pastime, often piggybacking on our proclivity to fail to prepare, choosing instead to react… and usually overreact. Yup, our leaders read the polls, check the headlines, look up at the weather vanes and then decide what they should do. We haven’t had a real set of leaders in Washington for a very long time. To make matters worse, undereducated (yes, America, there is an anti-intellectual groundswell that has gripped the nation for over a decade) and misinformed elected officials look for sound bites and slogans that create false causation and equally false solutions for complex problems. The result is the very “waste” they always tend to rail about at every election in recent memory.

The greatest near-term government debacle in my opinion, beyond a war in Iraq (against WMDs?) that handed virtual control of this predominantly Shiite nation to our Shiite enemies in Iran and a battle in Afghanistan to support a super-corrupt regime resulting in the strongest Taliban insurgency since the war began, is the Department of Homeland Security. Aside from layering in additional bureaucracies to perform jobs that had already been covered in other agencies, the DHS has wasted more dollars than any governmental agency in memory. When there are more agencies to coordinate, more employees to supervise, more governmental turf and fiefdoms created with concomitant internecine rivalries, the resulting inefficiency combines the false sense that someone is looking out for our security with a waste-creator that has to be making terrorists laugh hysterically at the disruption and costs they have manage to impose on America.

DHS: Billions and billions of dollars of waste and failed programs. The Sept 9^th Huffington Post reports: “In July, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security quietly scuttled a multi-billion dollar program to install high-tech radiation detectors at the nation’s ports. A top priority of the Bush administration, the advanced spectroscopic portal (ASP) devices that the Raytheon Company was being paid to build weren't just way behind schedule and enormously over budget -- they didn't actually appear to work. The failed project cost taxpayers well over $230 million.

“DHS had already pulled the plug on its SBInet program -- an effort to build a ‘virtual fence’ of sensors, cameras and radar along the nation's border -- in January, after paying more than $1.1 billion. The Government Accountability Office, among others, had concluded that poor management and an over-reliance on the prime contractor, Boeing, had caused staggering delays and cost overruns while producing inadequate results.

“And earlier in July, DHS had scrapped its unfinished and dysfunctional Risk Assessment Management Program, a computer application intended to help officials distribute their small army of private security guards between federal buildings, based on the chances of those buildings becoming terror targets. DHS had already shelled out $35 million over three years for a project that contractor Booz Allen had promised to complete in one year for $21 million. With the program axed, some eight years after DHS was founded, the department still isn't able to do something as basic as assess which federal buildings are more vulnerable to attack than others… These are just a few of the most recent -- and in these cases, now staunched -- examples of how DHS has hemorrhaged money since its creation in 2003… According to an estimate by Ohio State University political scientist John Mueller and Australian engineer Mark Stewart, the cumulative increase in U.S. domestic homeland security spending since the 9/11 terror attacks totals about $580 billion.”

TSA only accounts for about $8 billion a year, and the rest, well, is… er… a very, very large number. Just think what our economy would be like if we hadn’t waged two failed wars and had relied instead on the FBI, CIA, Border Patrol and a few other agencies to do what DHS was mandated to accomplish? Can you say, “layoffs” loud and clear? We don’t need this bureaucracy! We should have made the ones we had work better and talk to each other more.

I’m Peter Dekom, and before we listen to kooks telling us to disband Social Security, Medicare and the Department of Education, perhaps we should think about dismantling the Department of Homeland “Security” instead.