“It’s like an agency no one wanted and everyone is stuck with,” said Juliette Kayyem, assistant secretary for intergovernmental affairs at DHS from 2009–2010.
“Even for someone who is kind of cynical, it was shocking,” said John Roth, the DHS inspector general from 2014–2017. “You do a little scratching, and there was just rot underneath.”
“I would call it unwieldy,” said Kevin McAleenan, who served as acting secretary of homeland security in 2019 after working at the department since it was founded. McAleenan recalled moments when he saw people at headquarters “trying to direct activities they didn’t understand very well and mission sets they weren’t familiar with and legal frameworks they hadn’t studied, and I thought, ‘This isn’t going to work. We’re not going to overcome the problem of expertise or, in this case, the lack of expertise.’”
Some consider the Department of Homeland Security successful because there has not been another major terrorist attack in the United States since 9/11. And it’s true that only about a hundred people have died on US soil from Islamic terrorism in the past two decades. But domestic terrorism and mass shootings are on the rise, with Americans now justifiably afraid of malls, parades, supermarkets, churches, and elementary schools. Militias plot against democracy. A deadly virus has killed over a million Americans. Foreign governments infiltrate social media and snatch our data. Storms and wildfires grow bigger and more frequent every year. Tens of thousands of migrants linger in refugee camps at the southern border. Those that make it across face what one high-level whistleblower called “a system that involves widespread abuse of human beings.”
All of this is under the purview of DHS.
The Department of Homeland Security was supposed to protect Americans from earthquakes, nukes, pandemics, assassins, smugglers, hackers, and hijackers. These are the folks in charge of securing critical infrastructure, meaning everything from voting machines to sports stadiums to the water supply. DHS checks for explosives at airports and border crossings; manages the immigration process and migrant detention centers; helps rebuild after natural disasters; and coordinates intelligence and threat response with the CIA and FBI, as well as state and local law enforcement.
It’s a truly bonkers amount of responsibility, fueled by $80–$150 billion a year in taxpayer money and encompassing an alphabet soup of around two dozen entities, including FEMA, the TSA, Customs and Border Protection (CBP), Secret Service (USSS), Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), Coast Guard (USCG), Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). In a nationally televised address announcing his intention to form the department, Bush said DHS would “unite essential agencies that must work more closely together” and increase “focus and effectiveness.” But the 2002 bill creating the Department of Homeland Security may as well have been called Murphy’s law.
“It was a walking nightmare from the very beginning,” said John Magaw, the founding administrator of the TSA and a former director of the US Secret Service. “It just was not gonna work.”
(A spokesperson for DHS was given ample time to comment on this story but missed multiple deadlines to do so.)
How did the Department of Homeland Security become such a disaster? In recent months, I’ve spoken to a few dozen insiders and watchdogs across every era of DHS, reviewed thousands of pages of documents, and read up on the history and political science behind what makes government agencies effective. An investigation like this one might normally hope to answer the question: Whose fault is this? Who can we point to and fire or malign? But what I’ve found is that those lines of inquiry are irrelevant. This is a boondoggle spanning four presidencies, 11 Congresses, seven secretaries, and seven acting secretaries in a department with very high turnover that oversees 212,000 employees and hundreds of thousands of private contractors at any given moment. It’s not just one person’s fault or a handful of bad apples.
There will always be corrupt officials, lazy civil servants, sociopathic politicians, pedophile teachers, and sadistic prison guards. As James Madison wrote in 1788, “If men were angels, no government would be necessary.” The Constitution’s framers were trying to build a system that would keep the worst human tendencies in check. Evil is banal, yes, but our tendency to blame individuals for bad behavior can distract from the institution incentivizing that bad behavior.
So what is it about this institution in particular that allows wrongdoing to flourish? Why does the Department of Homeland Security suck so much?
by Amanda Chicago Lewis, The Verge | Read more:
Image: Ryan Peltier
