DECEMBER 24, 2008
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Michael Chertoff needs an office. When I interviewed the secretary of Homeland Security this summer, we met in a pair of temporary locations between which he shuttles--first in the decaying Nebraska Avenue Complex of the naval station at Ward Circle (a center for signal analysis during World War II) and later in an unmarked and unfurnished office in the nondescript headquarters of U.S. Customs and Border Protection in the Ronald Reagan building, near the White House. Chertoff hasn't settled into an office partly because the six-year-old Department of Homeland Security (DHS) still has no permanent, consolidated headquarters. Instead, the unwieldy amalgam of 22 separate federal agencies operates out of 70 buildings at 40 different locations in the Washington area. And the lack of a real home is just the beginning of the department's bureaucratic problems. The most recent survey by the U.S. Office of Personnel Management on the job satisfaction of federal employees in 36 agencies ranked Homeland Security last or near last in every category. Meanwhile, officials from the Pentagon who have tried to do business with DHS complained to me of organizational chaos at the department. Homeland Security employees, they said, are often unaware of overlapping initiatives championed by their colleagues, and even by Chertoff himself.
This can't have been what Democrats and Republicans had in mind when they celebrated the creation of the department in November 2002--arguably the last moment of bipartisan cooperation that Washington would see for six years. Although hastily thrown together, DHS was hailed by most of official Washington as a necessary response to the extreme vulnerabilities exposed by the September 11 attacks. Today, that bipartisan consensus remains largely intact. In fact, as Barack Obama prepares to take office, some Democrats want to increase the department's budget, which is now over $40 billion per year. "I do think more money has to be spent, order of magnitude twenty to twenty-five percent more," I was told in July by James Steinberg, who emphasized that he was not speaking for the Obama campaign. (He is now expected to become deputy secretary of state. ) "I don't think Secretary Chertoff has fought hard enough within the administration for his share of resources," P.J. Crowley, a homeland security expert at the Center for American Progress, told me in June. "If we continue to suggest we are at war, I wonder if DHS really is on a war-time footing." More recently, the nomination of the charismatic Janet Napolitano to head the department suggests that Obama himself is committed to a strong DHS. In announcing her nomination, Obama said, "She understands the need for a Department of Homeland Security that has the capacity to help prevent terrorist attacks and respond to catastrophe be it man-made or natural." It may still be years away from having a permanent headquarters, but the Department of Homeland Security, apparently, is here to stay.
Should that be cause for celebration or concern? This summer, I talked to security experts on both sides of the political spectrum, and had several conversations with Chertoff, in an effort to answer the following question: Is DHS achieving its mission of making us safer? My reluctant conclusion is that, although Chertoff has performed impressively in an impossible job, the department is hard to justify with any rational analysis of costs and benefits. On the contrary, it's arguably one of the most expensive marketing ventures in political history--an enterprise that seeks to make us feel safer instead of actually making us safer. The best argument for DHS is that the illusion of safety may itself provide tangible psychological and economic benefits: If people feel less afraid, they may be more likely to fly on planes. But even if conceived on these terms--as a more-than-$40-billion-dollar-a-year pacifier--the department is hard to defend, since there's no good evidence that it has, in fact, calmed Americans down rather than making us more nervous.
The only way of calming people down is political leadership that puts the terrorist threat in perspective. But, despite efforts by Chertoff to avoid the color-coded hysteria that defined the department in its early days, DHS officials inevitably feel pressure to exaggerate the terrorist threat--scaremongering that creates further public demand for promises of security that can't be fulfilled. And so the very existence of DHS creates a chain reaction of self-justifying insecurity. For this reason, Republicans (who used to be the stiff-upper-lip party of limited government) and Democrats (who don't trust the government to run the war in Iraq and are generally cautious about spending too much on defense) are willing to sink billions into an institutional money pit that has more to do with symbols than substance. Both parties seem incapable of acknowledging an uncomfortable but increasingly obvious truth: that the Department of Homeland Security was a bureaucratic and philosophical mistake.
To understand how DHS was hobbled from the beginning, it may be helpful to recall the partisan gymnastics surrounding its creation. After September 11, President Bush appointed Pennsylvania governor Tom Ridge to head a new Office of Homeland Security in the White House. When Joe Lieberman first proposed setting up a cabinet-level homeland security department in October 2001, White House conservatives balked at the prospect of a vast new federal bureaucracy. But, as Lieberman's bill began to gain momentum, the White House decided it couldn't let the GOP be outflanked by Democrats in appearing tough on terror. In April 2002, after months of Republican senators fighting against Lieberman's bill, White House Chief of Staff Andy Card convened a secret working group to decide which federal agencies to merge into a homeland security department that would be created on Bush's terms. The mid-level White House staffers who were responsible for designing the new department met regularly with Card, Condoleezza Rice, and Cheney's chief of staff, Scooter Libby. Those staffers later told The Washington Post about the rushed and almost random character of much of their deliberation: The Immigration and Naturalization Service and Federal Emergency Management Agency were in, but, because of internal politics, the FBI was out. The Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory was in because a White House security expert, Richard Falkenrath, called a friend and asked which of the Department of Energy's three research labs to include.
The White House announced the plan on June 6, 2002, the same day Coleen Rowley--a whistle-blower who had accused FBI leadership of ignoring warnings before September 11 about potential terrorists taking flying lessons--testified on the Hill. The Rowley story suggested the Bush administration had all the information it needed to prevent the attacks but had failed to connect the dots. According to Representative Jane Harman, the former ranking member on the House intelligence committee, the announcement may have been timed to move the Rowley story "below the fold" and out of the headlines. "I think they rushed this," Harman told me. "I don't ever think Bush was excited about this department" but he decided it was "politically expedient."
In addition to facing the bureaucratic challenge of merging 22 federal agencies into a single organization, the department was hampered by Congress's refusal to reorganize its oversight process: As a result, DHS at one point had to report to no fewer than 88 congressional oversight committees, a byzantine challenge that wasted the time of the department's leadership.
Tom Ridge, the first secretary of Homeland Security, took over on January 24, 2003. From the beginning, he was criticized for ineffectiveness, and, on his retirement, a terrorism expert told The New York Times that Ridge "seemed more interested in grabbing headlines" than executing an effective terrorism-prevention strategy. (Ridge did not respond to an interview request.) He administered the widely ridiculed color-coded alerts, which were raised to "orange" six times on his watch, and he was assailed by the DHS inspector general, Clark Ervin, for showy but ineffective transportation security measures. "I was issuing one critical report after another until I lost White House support," Ervin, now director of the homeland security program at the Aspen Institute, told me. Ridge resigned after Bush's reelection. In January 2005, Bush nominated Michael Chertoff to replace him.
From the start, Chertoff--a balding man with the razor-thin build of a dedicated runner (he has been quoted in Runner's World)--seemed to understand that his department's ambitious mission had to be defined more precisely. DHS's official charge is to "prevent and deter terrorist attacks and protect against and respond to threats and hazards to the Nation." But trying to prevent the next attack by guessing where it might occur is usually an exercise in futility. If one target is protected, an agile terrorist can always switch to another one; and there are, at least in theory, an infinite number of targets to protect. Moreover, even if this game of haphazard prevention sometimes succeeds, there is bound to be a lot of guesswork involved and therefore a lot of wasted effort. This makes preventing terrorist attacks an extremely expensive proposition--and one that can be difficult to justify on a cost-benefit basis.
Chertoff grasps all of this. (That is one of the reasons he has won bipartisan respect. "He has a quiet intelligence, a very calm demeanor, he's nonpartisan and non-polarizing ... and his instinct is to solve problems, not to score points," says Harman, whose relationship with Chertoff is so amicable that they've gone jogging together.) As Chertoff told me, "You can't eliminate the risk, so you manage the risk." And so he tried to handle public expectations about security with a thoughtfully moderate approach that he called "somewhere between complacency and hysteria." He sought to focus federal efforts on preventing attacks (such as nuclear terrorism) that would strike a significant blow against our economic system, while insisting that smaller events (such as lone bombers on buses) couldn't be prevented and weren't primarily a federal concern.
And yet, even as Chertoff conceded that there was only so much government could do in the realm of prevention, the department continued to spend lavishly on questionable prevention measures. More than one-third of homeland security spending in 2006 was devoted to protecting what DHS calls "critical infrastructure and key assets." That year, DHS asked Congress for more than $2 billion to finance state and local homeland security grants, some of which were devoted to installing surveillance cameras. The cameras were sold to the public as a way of preventing crime. But a comprehensive survey of studies published by the Home Office in Britain--which has more security cameras than any other European nation--found that cameras have "no effect" on violent crime in the United States or the United Kingdom. When I asked Chertoff about the cameras, he conceded something few other officials have been willing to admit: that they don't deter terrorist attacks. "The cameras don't prevent," he told me. "But they allow you to respond and capture. And that's maybe not the best thing, but it's maybe the second-best thing." Even as a tool of investigation, however, it's not clear cameras are worth the cost. The London subway bombers, for example, were caught after they showed up on camera, but they probably would have been caught even if they hadn't been videoed: Intelligence work, rather than the cameras, led to their capture. "The question isn't whether the cameras are useful; the question is whether they're essential--or would it be better to spend that money on the policeman on the beat?" says security expert Bruce Schneier.
Schneier argues that few of the high-profile items DHS has funded can survive a cost-benefit analysis. Sky marshals cost hundreds of millions of dollars per year but have added little to the sensible security measure of reinforcing cockpit doors; instead, sky marshals killed a mentally ill, unarmed passenger at a Florida airport in 2005. The Real ID Act--which Chertoff championed and which requires state driver's licenses and ID cards to conform to a common standard defined by DHS--might allow terrorists without a criminal background to obtain a trusted credential while encouraging security officers to let down their guard. And screening cargo at ports for radioactivity hasn't detected a single nuclear bomb, but it has generated 500 false alarms per day at the Long Beach and Los Angeles ports. John Mueller--a political scientist and author of Overblown: How Politicians and the Terrorism Industry Inflate National Security Threats, and Why We Believe Them--has compared federal homeland security expenditures since September 11 with the expected lives saved as a result of the increased spending and concluded that the annual cost ranged from $64 million to $600 million per life saved. By contrast, the federal government's standard regulatory goal for cost-effective prevention measures is $1 to $10 million per life saved.
Chertoff insists that at least some of the department's focus on prevention of high-impact terrorism has paid off. When I asked him whether DHS deserved credit for the fact that we haven't been attacked since September 11, he reeled off a list of half a dozen or so plots that have been blocked during that time, most notably the plot in August 2006 to use liquid explosives to blow up planes flying from London to the United States.
The 2006 airline-bombing plot, however, doesn't seem like a convincing testament to the success of the department. Last September, after a five-month trial, a British jury refused to find any of the eight bombing suspects guilty of conspiring to target transatlantic planes. (Three defendants were found guilty on conspiracy to murder charges.) One reason the charges failed to persuade a jury, according to press reports, is that British and American officials disagreed about when to arrest the suspects, with the British arguing unsuccessfully that an attack wasn't imminent. Moreover, even if the episode is considered a success for the U.S. government, it's not clear that the Department of Homeland Security deserves most of the credit: It was surveillance by British and American intelligence and law enforcement officials--not the increased security at airports overseen by DHS--that led to the arrests and halted the plot.
The department is hardly the only arm of the federal government to succumb to a prevention-at-all-costs mentality. In fact, Chertoff and DHS deserve credit for trying at times to resist that mindset. In 2007, for example, Congress mandated that, by 2012, all containers bound for the United States must first be scanned for radiation in foreign ports. Chertoff convincingly criticized this requirement as an example of the tendency to "govern by anecdote"--to allow compelling narratives to drive decision-making, as opposed to choosing policies that achieve the greatest good for the greatest number. "My belief is that the genesis of this went back to the 2004 campaign for president, when someone must have told John Kerry that only four percent of containers were being inspected, and four percent sounds like a low number, so that became an easy target," Chertoff told me. We now scan 100 percent of the cargo coming into the country in U.S. ports, but Chertoff argues that it makes little sense to insist on radiation scanning in foreign ports like England, where terrorists are unlikely to build nuclear bombs to be shipped to the United States. This year, Chertoff implemented an initiative to expand overseas scanning on the trade routes with the highest security threats; but, despite his more targeted alternative, the cumbersome congressional mandate remains in place.
If prevention measures like cameras and 100 percent port screening are largely a waste, why is there so much pressure to sink money into them? The answer, as Chertoff understands, is human psychology. When I asked him whether any books or scholars had influenced his thinking about how to measure success in the war on terrorism, he cited Failing to Win: Perceptions of Victory and Defeat in International Politics, by the political scientists Dominic D.P. Johnson and Dominic Tierney, published in 2006. Johnson and Tierney note that the Tet offensive, considered by historians an objective victory for U.S. troops, is widely perceived to be a loss because expectations for the United States were so much greater than for North Vietnam. For Chertoff, examples like this suggest that government officials should lower expectations about how much security the public can reasonably expect.
Nevertheless, I was surprised that Chertoff cited Failing to Win, since one implication of the book is that the Department of Homeland Security should never have been created. Johnson and Tierney argue that people wildly overestimate the risk of being threatened by terrorism. One reason British citizens perceived the evacuation of 340,000 troops at Dunkirk as a victory rather than what it was--a crushing defeat--was because of memorable images of a flotilla of plucky civilian volunteers sailing small vessels from England to rescue the troops. (In fact, many of them were evacuated on warships.) The same elements of psychology lead people to exaggerate the likelihood of terrorist attacks: Images of terrifying but highly unusual catastrophes on television--such as the World Trade Center collapsing--are far more memorable than images of more mundane and more prevalent threats, like dying in car crashes. Psychologists call this the "availability heuristic," in which people estimate the probability of something occurring based on how easy it is to bring examples of the event to mind.
As a result of this psychological bias, large numbers of Americans have overestimated the probability of future terrorist strikes: In a poll conducted a few weeks after September 11, respondents saw a 20 percent chance that they would be personally harmed in a terrorist attack within the next year and nearly a 50 percent chance that the average American would be harmed. Those alarmist predictions, thankfully, proved to be wrong; in fact, since September 11, international terrorism has killed only a few hundred people per year around the globe, as John Mueller points out in Overblown. At the current rates, Mueller argues, the lifetime probability of any resident of the globe being killed by terrorism is just one in 80,000.
This public anxiety is the central reason for both the creation of DHS and its subsequent emphasis on showy prevention measures, which Schneier calls a form of "security theater." But that raises a question: Even if DHS doesn't actually make us safer, could its existence still be justified if reducing the public's fears leads to tangible economic benefits? "If the public's response is based on irrational, emotional fears, it may be reasonable for the government to do things that make us feel better, even if those don't make us safer in a rational sense, because if they feel better, people will fly on planes and behave in a way that's good for the economy," Tierney told me. But the psychological impact of DHS still has to be subject to cost-benefit analysis: On balance, is the government actually calming people rather than making them more nervous? Tierney argues convincingly that the same public fears that encourage government officials to spend money on flashy preventive measures also encourage them to exaggerate the terrorist threat. "It's very difficult for a government official to come out and say anything like, 'Let's put this threat in perspective,'" he told me. "If they were to do so, and there isn't a terrorist attack, they get no credit; and, if there is, that's the end of their career." Of course, no government official feels this pressure more acutely than the head of homeland security. And so, even as DHS seeks to tamp down public fears with expensive and often wasteful preventive measures, it may also be encouraging those fears--which, in turn, creates ever more public demand for spending on prevention.
Michael Chertoff's public comments about terrorism embody this dilemma: Despite his laudable efforts to speak soberly and responsibly about terrorism--and to argue that there are many kinds of attacks we simply can't prevent--the incentives associated with his job have led him at times to increase, rather than diminish, public anxiety. Last March he declared that, "if we don't recognize the struggle we are in as a significant existential struggle, then it is going to be very hard to maintain the focus." If nuclear attacks aren't likely and smaller events aren't existential threats, I asked, why did he say the war on terrorism is a "significant existential struggle"? "To me, existential is a threat that shakes the core of a society's confidence and causes a significant and long-lasting line of damage to the country," he replied. But it would take a series of weekly Virginia Tech-style shootings or London-style subway bombings to shake the core of American confidence; and Al Qaeda hasn't come close to mustering that frequency of low-level attacks in any Western democracy since September 11. "Terrorism kills a certain number of people, and so do forest fires," Mueller told me. "If terrorism is merely killing certain numbers of people, then it's not an existential threat, and money is better spent on smoke alarms or forcing people to wear seat belts instead of chasing terrorists."
of course, and the federal government has an important role to play in addressing it. But the focus on security theater at DHS may be distracting the federal government from the two categories of things it can do well: intelligence--that is, investigation of specific threats before strikes occur--and responding to disasters and attacks after they have happened. "The place where we can get the most leverage for our terrorism dollars is at the beginning, working with overseas police to roll up terrorist financing through effective intelligence, and at the end, with emergency response and disaster relief," says Schneier. "The stuff in the middle that requires us to guess the plot correctly really is a waste of money."
According to policing scholar Dennis Kenney of John Jay College of Criminal Justice, the prevention technologies DHS likes to fund have never been effective in revealing plots before they are hatched and tend to lead to information overload. Instead, Kenney says, "the best police department doesn't have the best technologies; it has good community relations with citizens who want to tell them what's going on." Kenney notes that the New York police uncovered a post-September 11 subway bombing plot because of a tip and arrested the suspects when they arrived at the station. During the Clinton administration, the Justice Department prevented abortion clinic bombings by winning the trust of pro-lifers, who then turned over their members at the radical fringe. And Kenney notes that the Colombian police, in one of the most striking terrorism successes of the past few years, have learned the same lesson: "Fifteen years ago, the military had no way of knowing where to strike; now they have information coming to the Colombian police from the community about where the farc terrorists and narco-terrorists are, because the police have built community trust." In other words, it's rigorous police work--not unwieldy prevention measures designed to detect every possible attack--that probably represents our best hope for stopping terrorists before they strike.
In the other realm where the federal government can play a constructive role--reacting effectively after a disaster has taken place--DHS failed its biggest test so far. Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans six-and-a-half months after Chertoff took office, and the ineptitude of the department's response had a severe human cost. The little noticed bipartisan report on Katrina by the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs found that "Chertoff himself should have been more engaged in preparations over the weekend before landfall" and "his performance in the nation's worst domestic disaster fell short of reasonable expectations." A day after landfall, "DHS officials were still struggling to determine the 'ground truth' about the extent of the flooding despite the many reports it had received about the catastrophe," while "DHS leaders did not become fully engaged in recovery efforts" until three days after the hurricane struck. The report details failure to heed repeated warnings, poor advance planning, broken lines of communication between DHS and the military as well as between state and federal officials, pointless turf wars between DHS and the Justice Department, and incompetence at every level. But the overwhelming conclusion of the document is that the response represented a failure of political leadership. When I asked Chertoff about this, he conceded that, before Katrina, he underestimated the public leadership aspects of his job.
The failures surrounding Katrina suggest that reacting effectively to disaster involves more than coordinating emergency response; it means preparing society to cope, practically and psychologically, with the disasters that are an inevitable part of life. On the practical side, Stephen Flynn of the Council on Foreign Relations believes we need to do a better job of supporting first-responders. Republicans, he argues, have allowed a rigid states' rights ideology to create an artificial distinction between federal and state responses to natural disasters and small-scale acts of terrorism--denying local cops and firefighters the resources and support they need. As for the psychological side: Instead of a security mindset, which assumes we're either safe or not, Flynn's buzzword is resilience--the idea that you can't prevent all hazards but can organize communities to recover quickly once inevitable hazards occur. "The more resilient we become as a society, the less consequential acts of terrorism become, and that requires acting in ways DHS hasn't been acting," Flynn told me. "One is being far more open with the American people about vulnerabilities, and another is empowering us about how we address the vulnerabilities so we don't have an unbounded sense of fear."
In that sense, perhaps Janet Napolitano's best qualification for the problematic job she will soon inherit is her background as an effective and popular governor. After all, the only way to make the public more resilient is through political leadership. Before World War II, people understood that life was fraught with risk, and presidents like Lincoln and Roosevelt could challenge the public to be brave in the face of uncertainty and danger. Today, by contrast, we have come to believe that life is risk-free and that, if something bad happens, there must be a government official to blame. The Department of Homeland Security--with its doomed quest to give Americans the illusion of total security--is the ultimate monument to our anxious age. The biggest contribution Barack Obama could make in the realm of homeland security has nothing to do with port screening or security cameras or federal budgets. Perhaps our new president instead can lead us to rediscover the sense of self-reliance that we long ago forgot how to find within ourselves.
Jeffrey Rosen is the legal affairs editor for The New Republic.
This article originally ran in the December 24, 2008, issue of the magazine.
30 comments
I rarely agree with what is written in TNR, but in this instance I heartily agree, disband this bureaucratic behemouth. It merely lays several new layers of uneeded bureaucracy in DC, that is simply a waste of funds...just as the Office of "national intelligence" overlaid a layer of waste onto our intelligence services. I don't ever see this happening, as no-one fights more fiercely to keep their rice bowl filled, than a government employee fights to keep their funding/budgets. But we have taken a step in the wrong direction with these two deparments.
- Richard A. Vail
December 15, 2008 at 1:38am
Self reliance is contrary to the liberal philosophy.
- Tom
December 15, 2008 at 2:51am
Homeland Security is a massive barely-functioning beaurocratic catch-all. It was odd and perplexing to have Head of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff show up after Hurricane Ike and assure us that he'd make sure FEMA (which is now under Homeland Security)does its job. We didn't feel reassured by Chertoff and FEMA certainly is not doing its job. Whether Homeland Security is disbanded or not, we should make FEMA and other agencies now jammed beneath the Security umbrella funtional entities with clearer oversight.
- marymarcus
December 15, 2008 at 3:30am
Probably the best article on this subject I've ever read. Brilliant. And really, we have become a nation of whiny pussies, we need to harden up a bit.
- Alex
December 15, 2008 at 4:03am
Probably the best article I've read on this subject ever. Brilliant. And yes, people need to look back to the days of WW1 and WW2 and see how people conducted themselves.
- Alex
December 15, 2008 at 4:08am
I have been saying this for a while. I wholeheartedly agree with you. That department--and just about every other creation from George Bush--should be abolished ASAP.
- T
December 15, 2008 at 6:46am
Yeah. Get rid of it. What have THEY ever done? And get rid of the CIA. How many times have you idiots at this sophmoric little Lefty Rag, been clamoring for THAT? And the Patriot Act. Get rid of it. These NAZI Organizations, are just Front Groups for the NEOCONS, so the Skull and Bones organization can take over the world, and give it to the BILDABERGS. And the first time we get hit with a TERRORIST ATTACK, you same idiots will be the FIRST, and the LOUDEST, to complain that we weren't protected. That the 'DOTS weren't connected'. You should try growing up. Besides, shouldn't JEFFREY be divulging our National Security SECRETS on the front page of a major American Newspaper, somewhere? Or is that a different Rosen. What is it with these ROSENS? Makes ya wonder. MERRY CRISTMAS, Jeffery.
- Timothy L. Pennell
December 15, 2008 at 9:19am
I couldn't agree more with Jeffrey Rosen's conclusion regarding the DHS. At the time of the vote to create the Department, I was against. I thought it was a pure waste of money to satisfy a nervous country with no other thought in mind. We already had agencies to perform these function. The most that could be done was to coordinate the efforts of the different agencies but even this has not been accomplished. The department should be abolished or truly have the other agencies fall under this umbrella and given a central office.Right now it is a hodgepodge of of duplicate work with each department head having its own agenda.
- dagumpster
December 15, 2008 at 9:56am
I was at a CT conference this Fall where a recently ex-deputy somebody of DHS presented. He quite wistfully said whoever was elected, the next president might decide to 'split up and drastically redesign, or just dismantle' the whole department, and spoke of one program -- only one, a particular federal-state coordination component -- that really was beneficial and working well with about a dozen of the states. A dozen! (Arizona was one.) I also have an acquaintance at a fairly low level in DHS and he said, "First, eliminate all the contractors -- there's tens of thousands; they cost twice as much and they're doing the same exact jobs employees do -- real good for morale and the budget, right? THEN fire half of the managers. THEN see if it's worth saving."
- Pam
December 15, 2008 at 10:19am
Absolutely correct. "Homeland Security" is Exhibit A in the current case against Big Government, and the data is overwhelming. Among others, see Jeff Goldberg's "The Things They Carried" in last month's Atlantic--repeated successful experiments in violating airport security which prove the current system is okay as "security theater" and at catching dumb terrorists, but little else. This multibillion-dollar charade does little beyond providing jobs for folks who couldn't make the cut for assistant manager at McDonalds.
- Robert Powell
December 15, 2008 at 12:23pm
Since 9/11, and since the esblishment of the Dept of Homeland Securit, no terrorist attacks on the continental US. Why, exactly, I don't know, but somebody at DHS seems to be doing something right.
- JohnB
December 15, 2008 at 1:22pm
Jeffery, If you are stating that the DHS should be abolished because it has proven to--under Bush, strategy maestro that he is--misallocate resources, I think you are making the wrong case. Misaollcated resources call for new leadership. I would argue that the DHS (further) convolutes the handling of security issues becuase it steers the objectives of the CIA and FBI, who ought to have their own objective(s) to be useful.
- dylanposer
December 15, 2008 at 1:34pm
Most of the Federal spending goes toward "feeling more secure". Be it DHS, global warming or environmentalists, it is the same. The politicians use information that is available to them and then put the "scare spin" on it. I hope you use the same argument against other intangible spending initiatives that have no definitive benchmarks.
- djaymick
December 15, 2008 at 1:52pm
Could the government ever bring itself to admit that it is powerless to protect its citizens against invaders? I think not, but Chertoff has essentially done so, with his stubborn refusal to even attempt something as simple as sealing the border. Tom Ridge also refused to pursue border security. Americans have all the evidence they need. It isn't necessary for the government to admit its illegitimacy, and after all , if a government cannot protect its people, it has no legitimacy. It's up to individuals to arm themselves and prepare to fight for their own suvival, because the government is impotent in this regard.
- Rick LaBonte
December 15, 2008 at 2:32pm
The problem with the Department of Homeland Security is very simple. While they have a goal to keep the nation safe, they have no comprehensive strategy to do so. The chaotic 22 agencies spread over 40 locations in 70 different buildings only attests to this fact. Business organization 101 is form follows function.
- John Charles
December 15, 2008 at 4:10pm
I'm afraid your analysis reflects the fact that you are an outsider and don't have any reasonable sense for the pre-DHS and post-DHS world. The number of changes to security since 911 and since 2002 are actually breath-taking. And DHS has improved dramatically in the last 3 years. Here's an example: Before 911, consider what measures were in place to protect the public from terrorism threats at a large public gathering like the upcoming inaugural. Answer -- a few, but nothing remotely like what is in place now. Let's start with border protection and Visa reform. It is now substantially harder to place a cell in the US to perform the type of operation we saw on 911. Second, even if a cell successfully enters the U.S., or is homegrown, there are a number means for sensing the presence or release of WMD in the areas where they might be ultized. Depending on the circumstances, this could be a tool to identify a potential attack, or to reduce radically the impact of such an attack. Third, the targets of potential attack have been substantially "hardened" over recent years, meaning that the most vulnerable infrastructure and instrumentailities of attack in the U.S. have been made less vulnerable or available. It is much harder to hijack a commercial plane and slam it into a crowd, for instance. Similarly, it is more difficult to accumulate sufficient potential explosive in the U.S. to create a massive blast. And there are many many other ways in which our security situation is improved. It is true that Congress and the Courts have attempted to compromise the effectiveness of certain methods to detect planning and imminent attacks, but these limitations are certainly not the fault of the Department of Homeland Security. Instead, they reflect the judgment of mostly non-security professionals that terrorist attacks are unlikely and that the programs make them uncomfortable from a civil rights perspective. Congress certainly has discretion to do that, but should also be held accountable for it by the press. In any event, there is a mountain of detail your article omits. It would be good to know about that stuff before opining.
- Former Official
December 15, 2008 at 4:13pm
The Department of Homeland Security has done little. I guess some will say we have not been attacked but I can claim the same since I decided to park my car on the right side of the driveway rather than the left. The Agency has been a conduit for pork projects ranging from herding cattle to buying toys for the boys in little hamlets throughout the country. In the mean time we have no emergency communication system to link all the departments but I do get the opportunity to look to see if my shoes are in good condition at the airport. We are educating 3 year old children on how stupid the Government can and making older people in wheel chairs feeling relevant as we check to see if they are packing fire arms. Of course we still do not look at cargo in ships but have attempted to award contracts for doing so to non -US firms. We have solved the illegal worker problem by now having out of work bankers, auto workers etc who I guess can now toil in the fields. Homeland Security all kidding aside has done little to turn FEMA into a rapid emergency response agency that does little than send people with computers and forms to those areas hard hit. We have put the Federal Government in the position of being responsible for problems that should be the States, and this by the GOP who rails against big Government. Homeland Security, a bad idea in response to an attack by evil people who no matter how hard we try is a threat that can never be truly eliminated. We can however get rid of this useless overarching agency.
- geek
December 15, 2008 at 6:25pm
I disagree. The whole idea of the Department of Homeland Security is that all the agencies that have the responsibility to protect the homeland under one roof. The department has only been around for six years. There have been problems with it, but like the Department of Defense, it took a long time for them to have their own building and even longer for them to establish precedents and function. I am in college at Virginia Commonwealth University, and I am actually majoring in this topic. Give it time for younger people who have been trained in how the department operates. The Defense Department was started in WWII and it took till the end of the Korean War for them to establish the functions and limits of ther responsibilities. Give them a chance they have done some very good work in a very short time. And to those who say they have no strategy to defend the homeland, they have a published strategy called the Homeland Security Strategy 2007. They also have the National Response Plan which is a "all hazard" plan which provides basic guidence for all State Local and Federal responses to hazards, along with specific plans for hazards that every community may face. These include terrorism, earthquakes, fires, tornados, and other disasters. These have all been standardized, so the local state and federal responders use the same termonology and work off the same plan allowing for more cooperation. One point i do agree on is that the department has a need for its own building. Also i would consider allowing FEMA to be an independent agency reporting directly to the president. Overall though the DHS has done a very good job in a short period of time.
- Stephen H. HS college major
December 15, 2008 at 8:15pm
Schneier is a security expert who cares more about civil rights than security and you've bought his arguments hook, line, and sinker. The 1 in 80,000 yearly mortality rate for terrorist attacks is bad math. Just ask yourself, with all of the nihilist groups trying to get and use nukes, what is the probability that one will get one in the next 500 years. Once you've thought about that for a few minutes, you'll conclude that the question isn't if, but when. Now recalculate that terrorism mortality rate. Schneier in his monthly CRYPTO-GRAM emails constantly measures the success of a security measure by the number of attackers it caught, but the true success has to include the number that it discouraged from attacking in the first place. Schneier writes about the Mumbai attacks that: "Specific countermeasures don't help against these attacks. None of the high-priced countermeasures...would have made, any difference...metal detectors." This isn't really true. Ask why that specific attack wouldn't have work as well in Israel? (1) You can't just sail a ship into Israel. They actually watch their shores and know who comes in. (2) You can't get into any public building without going passed an armed guard and a metal detector. Sure, with guns you can just shoot the guard, but then you'll be shot, leaving the death toll at 1. (3) Everyone in Israel is paranoid, thinking about security, and you're never more than a few feet from someone who is armed. Counter-measure do work. There is an inherant trade-off between money spent and civil rights lost, and lives saved. A proper DHS would calculate these risks, taking the long-term view, not Schneier's silly "there were no attacks this year so by induction they'll be none next year" approach, and spend their budget to save the most lives.
- Martin
December 15, 2008 at 8:26pm
It is truly amusing to see so many pontificate about that which they have no firsthand knowledge. DHS is a government agency, so by definition it is inefficient and wasteful, but if you evaluate it on performance, no terror attacks since 9/11 tells you all you need to know. The author of this article must expect FEMA to erase the effects of Hurricane Ike, but just like Katrina, it can't be done. Quit grinding your political axe, Mr. Rosen. We tire of your uninformed opinions.
- Current Official
December 15, 2008 at 8:28pm
I was opposed to the formation of the Homeland Security Department from the first. As a federal employee for 41 years, I saw first hand how well competent employees perform and the pride they take in that performance. By tossing veteran federal employees into a hopper, at the same time stripping them of many of the contractual conditions of their employment (Max Cleland was smeared and lost his senate seat over arguing for the rights of the federal employees involved), was a guaranteed failure. Many of the experienced people left immediately. Tom Ridge, the first department head, left for a lobbying job after a relatively short tenure, taking many staff with him. The same happened with subsequent department heads, as the competency level of the department continued to decline. The agencies that were cobbled together should have been placed under strong leadership and left to do their jobs, which they knew well. We would all be much safer.
- annieR
December 16, 2008 at 12:11am
I admit that I do find it passing strange - remember, it was the Dems who wanted the DHS in the first place, and W said no. Eventually, he came around, and we got the DHS, an amalgam of parts of other agencies. So, what do we do with the pieces of this dysfunctional bureaucracy? Why, we put them all back into the dysfunctional bureaucracies whence they came. Or start a new one. You people would bitch if they hung you with a new rope.
- butchie b
December 16, 2008 at 2:34pm
You also failed on the Hurricane Katrina issue. The primary responder to disasters is the state and local government. FEMA and DHS are not the primary responder to disasters. FEMA funds and trains state and local officials and the Governor of the state where a disaster occurs is the official with authority over resources and action, usually through his National Guard and what the Stafford Act, that created and governs FEMA, the Governors Authorized Representative (GAR). It is those two officials that are supposed to plan and respond to a disater. FEMA also funds the benefits that go to the state and local governments and to individuals. However, the rescue work, debris removal, organizing food and shelter is the responsibility of the state and local government. How can you blame FEMA for lack of action, when it is just a funder and trainer? Mayor Nagin and Governor Blanco were the officials responsible for the failure to evacute New Orleans and the failure to provide shelter and rescue. The DHS and the rest of the federal government responded appropriately, rescue, provided by the military services, funding provided for by FEMA. In fact, FEMA stepped in when Nagin and Blanco failed utterly. Nagin was more concerned about helping corrupt local congressmen get to their stolem money than helping his people. All the major failures of Hurricane Katrina were the result of failures by Negin and Blanco. Shame on you for claiming that FEMA was a DHS failure, when it was a Democrat Party failure from top to bottom. Even worse, like most leftists, you seem to be more concerned with telling people that they should not be concerned about terrorism. Only one in 80,000 chance of being affected by terrorism. The purpose of terrorism is the terrorize as Lenin said, but also to delegitimize governments, showing that they cannot protect their people. They don't have to kill alot to prove that. It seems that you have a high level of acceptable casualties. You seem to think that Americans deserve to be killed in small numbers. I can sense your seathing hatred of white Americans there, because if it were the Klan attacking blacks, you would have said millions for security, not one penny for tribute. You were very concerned about cost effectiveness, but you mentioned the cost of Air Marshals, but did not bother to tell us that arming pilots would be a cheaper and more effective alternative. But you don't like guns in civilian hands, so you ignored that. You did not seem to think that the airline plot amounted to much because there were no criminal convictions, but briefly mention that some were convicted of attempted murder. So, you don't think there was a plot? Does it matter if we stopped the plot three months early? Should they have waited to make arrests closer to the anticipated attack date? What sense does that make? And you do not mention the real problems with DHS, such as that the new TSA federal employees are as unable to find weapons at checkpoints at the same rate that contract security personnel at airports where screening is contracted out. You also fail to mention that most of DHS employees dealing with border security have a primary mission that is only partially related to counterterrorism. The mundane daily work of ICE and CBP is stopping drug smuggling and illegal immigration. While they may stop some terrorists, in reality they are doing the same job they did before DHS, which still has to be done. In the end you never addressed the real issues. The FBI is the primary counterterrorism agency. FEMA may respond some day to a terrorism incident, if it is of a huge scale, but any terrorism incident will most likely not require giving out blue tarps to keep out the rain or repairing thousands of houses. The reponders will be like the police in Bombay, local cops and the local FBI office's SWAT team. Or the CIA overseas catching a terrorist and waterboarding him to get information. It is unlikely it will be a ICE agent. While a unified border agency was a rational idea, long considered but always rejected by both the legacy INS and Customs because of interagency rivalry, what we got was three border agenices in DHS; ICE, CBP, and USCIS. So, in reality, DHS is as unable to rationally respond to security issues that are within its area of jurisdiction and competance. ICE, CBP, and USCIS do not work any closer than the legacy INS and Customs. So, while I agree with you that DHS has not worked, you are completely wrong as to the reasons. You get some wrong (FEMA), denigrate the anti-terrorism message, and miss the real reasons that DHS has failed.
- Federale
December 16, 2008 at 6:57pm
No, TOM, it's self delusion that is indispensible to the raging-conservative philosophy.
- pts
December 16, 2008 at 10:13pm
The DHS must be the dummest bureaucracy on earth. I am a German citizen and on a visit to the US I bought a GPS device and a slingshot online. Why slingshot, why GPS devise? The US makes the best GPS devices and they are much cheaper there than in Germany and a slingshot just for the hell of it. I never got either. Why? The DHS didn´t allow it. I could have bought both at any normal store but the very fact that I bought it online made it traceable. Crazy, crazy, crazy!!! A bureaucracy seemingly running wild. I hope in the US good sense prevails and the adults take over and close down this particular Kindergarten.
- Tom Lessoskallow
December 16, 2008 at 11:17pm
DHS is a disaster, not because the idea of a Dept. of Homeland Security is inherently wrong, but rather because the DHS we have was born with numerous congenital defects, due in large part to decisions driven by Bush's incoherent and incompetent philosophy of governance. FEMA's failure in Katrina had far less to do with its placement in DHS than it did with the fact that its leadership under Bush, first Joseph Albaugh and later Michael Brown, had no concept of FEMA's true responsibilities or of what emergency response actually entails. James Lee Witt (Clinton's FEMA Administrator) left FEMA with capabilities which Albaugh and Brown deliberately and systematically set about destroying. That started before 9/11 and well before DHS was established. If the boss is clueless, as Brown clearly was when Katrina hit, and if FEMA is used to provide employment rewards for campaign workers and party hacks with no actual qualifications for the positions they held, it will not matter where FEMA is stuck in the bureaucracy. And, to be fair, it must be acknowledged that it was not FEMA alone that failed. Nagin and Blanco also failed. Incompetence is not limited to the federal government. Nor is incompetence necessarily the rule at the federal level. The US Coast Guard, also in DHS, performed magnificently in Katrina. (Note: it is not coincidental that there are NO political appointees at any level in the Coast Guard.) Abolishing DHS will not fix the underlying problems in our national approaches to the issues which DHS was established to address. That would only rearrange the deckchairs on the good ship S.S. CONFUSION. DHS needs to be fixed. That means reducing the reliance on contractors, reducing the number of political appointees, providing clearer thinking at the national strategy level, adequately funding some things and eliminating requirements for things which make absolutely no sense (e.g., 100% screening for containers while leaving other paths into the country essentially unchecked), national acceptance that there is no guarantee of 100% safety and security, and emphasizing resilience as the strategy of first preference over fences and the 4 Gs - guns, gates, guards and gadgets. While we're at it, we also ought to stop borrowing money from China so that the federal government can give it to state and local governments so they can buy "toys for boys" and other junk they can't afford to buy or own. Other than the equipment vendors, no one benefits from these grants. Finally, the $40 Billion DHS budget needs to be put into a bit of perspective. The majority of that is spending that was already going on for the 22 agencies that were merged into DHS. Three is new money but it is only a fraction of what DHS gets. If DHS were abolished, the 22 agencies would presumably return to their former homes and the money being spent to perform continuing legacy missions would continue to be spent on those continuing functions. Don't abolish DHS. Make it work, and work correctly.
- Bob R
December 18, 2008 at 12:54pm
"First, eliminate all the contractors -- there's tens of thousands; they cost twice as much and they're doing the same exact jobs employees do -- real good for morale and the budget, right? THEN fire half of the managers. THEN see if it's worth saving." Couldn't that be said of any federal bureaucracy?
- Marc
December 18, 2008 at 4:20pm
I am involved with community disaster preparedness efforts, in and about Palo Alto, CA. I concur with the conclusions of this lucid and well considered article. When living in England during the IRA bombings, I observed that excellent law enforcement,coupled with investigative efforts and citizen support for stopping the bombings proved far more effective than the Bush hysteria and political mayhem of so-called Homeland Security. The article failed to point out the loss of civil liberties in the name of homeland security. I would hope that the Obama administration will put the breaks on real id and intrusive surveillance of the American people.
- Alice Smith
December 19, 2008 at 2:02am
Mr. Rosen makes a number of valid points, but I think there's a bigger issue. The issue is whether the goal is to have improved communication among the DHS components, or to increase the respective components ability to respond rapidly to emergencies. If you believe that the ability to respond rapidly to emergencies is critical, as I do, you must remove layers of bureaucracy. Including all of the components under the DHS umbrella adds layer upon layer of bureaucracy and consequently slows response time. Just ask FEMA. Unfortunately, when Congress created DHS, they didn't exempt the Department from the same federal regulations that apply to all, or most, other Federal agencies. The risk of creating small, independent, fast-acting organizations is what I call the "Jamie Gorelick" hazard. Someone like Ms. Gorlick is likely to insist upon communications barriers, or "walls" preventing the organizations from communicating with each other. And that sort of defeats the purpose of having them in the first place.
- dlb703
December 19, 2008 at 8:13am
DHS "is" only an Administrative oversight of all the agencies it in tales. For instance, FEMA give 20% of its operating budget to DHS for no other reason then to fund the bureaucracy. This is not an opinion, it is fact...like I said, I am in the know. Should the agencies be brought out of DHS, they would all get their full operating budget and be allowed to actually do their job. Taking all these agencies and putting them under another layer of politics only hurts America. Trust me, DHS had "nothing" to do with the lack of terrorist attacks since 911. You can think the CIA, NSA, and FBI for that. None of which are a part or report to DHS. Also, as said earlier...OMG, contractors. If people only knew. They really do cost twice as much as normal federal employees. The reason the Gov't uses them is because they can be fired without any hope of contesting their employment status and it gives the Gov't the ability to claim they did not cause the problem when the crap hits the fan. Also, did you know that as a federal employee, you can fight your firing if you are a lazy no good tub of lard. You can literally hold your employment status over a year with pay while a quasi court decides your fate. And the worst part about it, most of the time they promote the person to fix the problem. So either way, the tax payer gets screwed. Remember, the Gov't can do anything for you that you can do for yourself, just for 5 times the cost.
- In The Know
December 27, 2008 at 4:30am