(First published on Feb. 26 in the Boston Review)
The Republican majority has refused to
approve new funding for the Department of Homeland Security. Following the lead
of the party’s most conservative members, congressional Republicans will reject
a new DHS budget unless President Obama reverses his November 2014 executive
order to protect more than 4 million immigrants from deportation. Republicans
are right to obstruct the routine annual funding of DHS—but they are doing it
for the wrong reasons.
DHS would be an easy target of standard
conservative critiques of big government. The third largest federal department
is hugely wasteful, unaccountable, unmanageable, and emblematic of governmental
mission creep. Yet President Obama has kept increasing the budget and expanding
the reach of DHS—his most recent initiative is to increase the department’s
role in cybersecurity through $6 billion in contracts with major military and
intelligence contractors including Lockheed Martin and Booz Allen Hamilton.
The DHS funding debate lays bare the
disjuncture between the department’s core mission and its actual operations;
the political standard has largely ignored the DHS counterterrorism mission.
Instead, the dispute over DHS has revolved around the traditional divides over
immigration policy.
This is unfortunate. It is time to
reconsider the notion of a having a homeland security department. Rather then
routinely submitting and approving the budgets of the bureaucratic monstrosity
that DHS has become, the executive branch and Congress should consider
dismantling DHS. Separating immigration policy from the post-9/11 security
framework is fundamental to ending the waste and creating any sustainable and
sensible immigration policy reform.
• • •
A product of post-9/11 fear-driven politics,
DHS is a conglomeration of twenty-two different agencies created by the Bush
administration under the Homeland Security Act of 2002 with little
consideration of the difficulties of merging such diverse agencies as FEMA,
Secret Service, Border Patrol, and the Coast Guard. Prior to the creation of
DHS, immigration and border control came under the jurisdiction of the
Department of Justice and were regarded primarily as issues of regulation and
law. Under DHS, counterterrorism and national security became the dominant
framework for immigration and border policy. President George W. Bush promised
that the new federal department would “improve efficiency without growing
government.” Furthermore, according to President Bush, the new federal
department would eliminate “duplicative and redundant activities that drain
critical homeland security resources.” Yet, with more than 240,000 employees,
DHS is the third largest federal department—surpassing the Department of
Justice and State Department, and with a larger budget than the latter.
Democrats and Republicans alike have continually increased the DHS annual
budgets.
One of the primary indications of the
Department’s dysfunction and lack of direction is the continuing DHS inability
to formulate a concise and consistent definition of “homeland security.” There
was no consensus on the meaning of the term at the time of its creation. And
there was absolutely no consideration of the implications of having
governmental functions such as border control, emergency management, and
immigration enforcement framed as security operations. Nonetheless, the budget
for Customs and Border Protection (CBP), which includes the Border Patrol, has
more than doubled since 2003– rising from $27 billion to $59 billion in
2014—and now accounts for 21 percent of the DHS budget, making it the largest
DHS agency. The CBP is also the nation’s largest law enforcement agency.
The DHS funding debate lays bare the
disjuncture between the department’s core mission and its actual operations.
With
each new director and changes in political issues, DHS tweaks the definition of
the term and its mission statement. Defining
Homeland Security, a
January 2013 report by the Congressional Research Service, underscored the
existential crisis facing DHS as its counterterrorism mission has lost focus.
CRS observed: “Ten years after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, the
U.S. government does not have a single definition for ‘homeland security.’
[Instead,] different strategic documents and mission statements offer varying
missions that are derived from different homeland security definitions.”
For instance, DHS programs now provide
grants to local and state police for purchasing license plate readers,
military-grade vehicles, surveillance equipment, and drones. And DHS continues
to fund dozens of “fusion centers,” which were established as decentralized
counterterrorism intelligence centers but have tracked lawful citizen
organizing, including the Occupy Wall Street movement.
Another sign of DHS dysfunction is the low
morale of department employees and officials. No other federal department
suffers such high rates of job dissatisfaction. Not only does DHS rank as the
department with lowest morale, the level of contentedness within DHS has also
been dropping at a faster rate than any other department—decreasing 7 percent
in the last four years, according to a Government Accountability Office (GAO)
report.
DHS employees and officials cite the
department’s stifling bureaucracy and lack of performance measures among the
many reasons for plummeting morale. The agency has spent at least $2 million on
four studies seeking strategies to improve morale. But no study questioned the
viability of a department with so many clashing cultures and one whose
operations are so diffuse.
No other federal department is subject to
greater congressional oversight. Some ninety congressional committees and
subcommittees monitor DHS operations. But this extensive oversight hasn’t
produced a more effective and cost-efficient department. To the contrary. Doing
the rounds before these congressional committees, DHS officials shape their
statements according to the political agendas of committee chairmen, thereby
further contributing to the mission drift of DHS.
Rather than providing effective oversight,
congressional committees—notably the House Homeland Security Committee and its
Border and Maritime Security Subcommittee—function more as boosters and cheerleaders.
Eager to display their hardline positions on border security or immigration
enforcement, congressional members keep pushing DHS to ramp up its border
security operations, resulting in a trail of monumental boondoggles such as the
virtual border fence, intelligence fusion centers, deployment of military-grade
drones to the border, and a border wall that costs $1–7 billion each mile
(depending on the terrain) to construct. Without effective congressional
oversight and with constant congressional pressure to expand DHS operations,
the department relies heavily on private contractors—many of whom also
generously contribute to the election campaigns of committee members—for the
management and implementation of core DHS functions, such as cybersecurity.
Over the past dozen years, governmental
research and monitoring agencies have published an ever-expanding library of
reports that the agency’s waste and failure. Hundreds of reports by the
Congressional Research Service, GAO, and the DHS Office of Inspector General
have painted a picture of an agency badly divided and highly dysfunctional.
Since its creation, the GAO has identified
DHS as a “high risk” government agency, pointing to the continuing challenge of
integrating twenty-two agencies into one department. The GAO states that DHS
has made progress but that the challenges of managing the mix of diverse
agencies continue to impact “the department’s ability to satisfy its missions.”
According to the GAO, “DHS’s management and mission risks could have serious
consequences for U.S. national and economic security.”
• • •
After more than a dozen years, DHS is still
floundering in its efforts to construct its own headquarters. Originally
projected to cost $3.9 billion, DHS headquarters is $1.5 billion over budget
and twelve years behind schedule. Completion was projected for this year, but
according to the GAO it will not likely be finished until 2026. Meanwhile, the
twenty-two DHS agencies remain scattered in fifty offices in the Washington, DC
area. The GAO says that DHS should consider alternatives.
Dismantling DHS would be likely easier than
consolidating it and refocusing its mission. Indeed, if Obama wants to decouple
immigration and border policies from counterterrorism and security policies,
dismantling DHS may be the only way. Otherwise, the recent immigration
order—paired with a call for increased funding for border security, the hiring
of 20,000 more Border Patrol agents, and a commitment to “crack down on illegal
immigration at the border—just looks like playing politics.
Tom Barry directs the Transborder Program at
the Center for International Policy and is a contributor to the Americas
Program. This news commentary was first published by the Boston Review at: https://www.bostonreview.net/blog/tom-barry-dismantle-department-homeland-security-immigration