Homeland Insecurity

After the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the U.S. government did what it does best: added another governmental bureaucracy to deal with the problem, embracing all things border, disaster and terrorist related. Created as a cabinet level function, today the Department of Homeland Security is the third largest such bureaucracy with around 200,000 employees and a budget allocation of $98 billion (about a third of that capacity was kept in reserve). Lots of governmental functions were moved out of their former cabinet structures and into DHS, including all our immigration (except passport control which remains with the Department of State), border control and customs capacities (including the Coast Guard), our disaster relief agency (FEMA), and even our Secret Service (the folks charged with guarding our President, etc).

And they added a whole lot in the way of aide to states (where most of the first responders reside), administrative bureaucracy by the boatload and everyone’s favorite, the lovely shoe-bomb-checking Transportation Services Administration that makes us feel so secure, and this group certainly enhances the joie de vivre of air travel. With around 60 thousand employees and north of $8 billion a year, TSA added a whole lots of new federal employees, and to their credit, we haven’t seen a lot of exploding airliners or massive terrorist attacks on U.S. soil. But then, our FBI, NSA, CIA, etc. think that the credit should really go to them. Most of these TSA officers make between $25-40K/year, not huge sums by any standards, but in the aggregate rather substantial but at a level where you know you are getting folks who aren’t particularly high on employability criteria. But do you really feel that these folks will actually catch or dissuade a clever terrorist with death and destruction on their mind? If they really want to get through? Really?

You’d think that a new shiny agency like DHS, huge and at the center of attention with lots of reality television shows highlighting their work would be a bureaucracy with intense pride and high morale. After all, these folks are protecting our nation, right? But among all the agencies of the federal government, DHS has been ranked as the absolute worst large agency to work for per the Partnership for Public Service (based on their annual Office of Personnel Management survey) and reported in the December 14^th Washington Post. Even the folks who work there don’t like the place!

There cannot be the slightest doubt that we need to secure the entry points to our nation, both for practical and security reasons. But in this era of budget busting priorities, we really need to examine (i) our proclivity to solve new problems by adding new bureaucracies and lots of additional people (rather than reallocate priorities, eliminate old inefficiencies, among our existing assets) and (ii) our seeming need to use military threats and force to get our way globally (shoot first and ask questions later), a tactic that seems to generate an increasing number of people who want to terrorize us in response. Politicians like to put on a tough face for the electorate, which has resulted in too many minor criminals being incarcerated with life sentences under three strikes laws (at around $40K+ each/year to jail), rattle our sabers (and then using them!) way too quickly, which has dragged us into the last few unwinnable, budget-destroying, deficit exploding wars.

And with any bureaucracy, particularly one that has grown this large in such a very short time, there is the question of waste. And when a conservative Oklahoma Republican Senator, Tom Coburn, is on the wasteful-spending attack in this seemingly sacrosanct bastion of conservative support, you know there are big problems here. “[F]ierce budget hawk … Coburn…  pounced on ridiculous grants doled out by the Department of Homeland Securitysupposedly to help local police and fire departments prepare for terrorist attacks. Mr. Coburn’s recent report on the department’s decade-long, $7 billion program, called the Urban Areas Security Initiative, offers many depressing examples of locally misspent money.

“There was an armored car in New Hampshire whose duties included patrolling the annual pumpkin festival. Car-bomb barriers and surveillance cameras, purchased by authorities in Peoria, Ariz., to protect spring-training fans. License plate reading machines in Louisiana used to track car thieves. An $88,000 truck-mounted, piercingly loud device for crowd control in Pittsburgh. And $1,000 fees for first responders to attend a ‘zombie Apocalypse’ demonstration at a counterterrorism conference in California to learn how to handle chaotic events, with actors playing the living dead.” New York Times, December 9^th.

Truth is that most of these state grants probably are effective, “setting nationwide training standards for more than four million first responders; building search-and-rescue disaster teams for the riskiest areas; improving communications among multiple jurisdictions of first responders; and upgrading bomb squads with robotic technology.” NY Times. Perhaps, this even represents the best use of such federal funds.

What is troubling, however, is our unwillingness to address the bigger questions. Why is our defense budget so huge when we keep losing (or not winning) wars and are pissing off so many people with our failed perception that folks really want us to be the global cop? Is the current TSA-configuration the best and most appropriate way to secure our national points of entry? Is the cost of DHS justified in the level of increased value-added services, or was there a much more efficient way to deploy our existing forces to defeat terrorism and respond to natural disasters?

I’m Peter Dekom, and we really have to stop spending without really examining the alternatives; there can be no sacred cows.