The Case for Abolishing the DHS | Hacker News Reader

The Case for Abolishing the DHS

businessweek.com

317 pointsdanso72 comments

"The U.S. Department of Homeland Security was a panicked reaction to the Sept. 11 attacks."

The Hart-Rudman Commission recommended the creation of a National Homeland Security Agency in January of 2001.

9/11 panic was just the grease to ram a massive new bureaucracy through a congress controlled by the party of 'limited government'.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._Commission_on_National_Sec...

Yes, thank you. Everything post-9/11 was already on the table including DHS and the invasion of Iraq. 9/11 was for the Bush administration the simply a huge amount of grease on that wheel.

Yes, In fact, warantless wiretapping actually began 7 months before 9/11

http://digitaljournal.com/article/352455

Bush didn't want to create the DHS. He was forced to by the "something must be done" crowd.

Bush didn't want to wipe his butt without permission. That's what happens when you elect a weak leader with no experience and it's at the root of what's happening now with Obama. These guys were and are over their heads. It took Bush 6 years to grow a pair and actually stand up to Cheney. In a vacuum of leadership, stronger personalities dominate. Say what you will about that horrible troll monster, Cheney does not want for personality.

Bush wasn't a weak leader. But he was a politician, and the people were demanding Something Be Done. I think he decided it doesn't matter that much whether or not yet another agency is created.

The fact that the department was considered previously doesn't make its instantiation a panicked act. There are lots of contingencies and scenarios which are modeled and proposed in government. Only a small fraction are accepted.

For example, the planned US invasion of Canada[1]

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_Plan_Red

Someday we'll have all that bacon for ourselves. Muahahahaha!

Edit: Doesn't make its instantiation NOT a panicked act.

That is: even though DHS was considered in advance, it, the so-called PATRIOT Act, and the ill-fated war on Iraq, and numerous other errors were rammed through Congress.

In fact, many interest groups and other NGOs make said plans in advance so that they can mobilize during a controversy instead of having to throw together a several hundred page document before people get bored.

I think the debate is not over whether to abolish the concept of Homeland Security period, but whether Homeland Security as an umbrella-department (that encompasses such agencies as TSA, FEMA, Secret Service) makes more sense than having these agencies as a part of other departments...the Secret Service used to be part of the Treasury, TSA could become part of the Dept. of Transportation, etc.

It's not just about changing-names...in a large bureaucracy, the organization of agencies and officers is a real factor in how that bureaucracy effectively functions.

In any case, I think DHS could be seen as an example as poorly conceived bureaucracy...it's a department that will forever be waging turf battles with the FBI, the NSA, and the DoD, among other groups in charge of our security.

This is the case for many of the "Department of" organization the United States has; it probably applies just as well to other countries similar organizations.

The issue with removing the DHS is, most people see it only as Airport security and they WANT THAT GONE. How do you deal with the tens of thousands of unionized government workers who do that job? Do we just hide them elsewhere?

I doubt it will ever be gone, even the Department of Education; only active since 1980; has produced no credible results and yet eats 69 billion a year. Many of the services people attribute to it are actually handled by other Departments. For the most part it just doles out grants - why can't that be elsewhere?

We need to broaden our approach to reducing government agencies. First item on the agenda is consolidating or eliminating similar programs. Then from that eliminating programs that are obsolete or no longer needed. The list goes on and on. So just picking one isn't enough, its government that needs a rethink.

People don't want to be perv-scanned, and they don't want to have to take their shoes off. I don't think they object to a 20th-Century level of inspection.

> has produced no credible results and yet eats 69 billion a year. Many of the services people attribute to it are actually handled by other Departments. For the most part it just doles out grants - why can't that be elsewhere?

The purpose of the Department of Education isn't to "produce credible results." It's a welfare program for minorities, the poor, and the disabled (I don't meant that pejoratively). ~72% of that $65 billion goes to just three things: Pell Grants, Title I grants (direct aid to municipalities for the disadvantaged), and IDEA grants (direct aid to municipalities for the disabled). Sure, you're funneling money to the people statistically least likely to benefit from it, but that's not the point. The point is that everyone can get at least a minimum level of education, even if they are poor or have a learning disability. It's the minimum basic guarantee we give to people in a society where we pretend to be a meritocracy but tolerate dramatically unequal starting positions for different people.

Municipalities could not provide this guarantee on their own. White flight in the 1960's and 1970's left inner city school districts decimated. E.g. Chicago Public Schools (CPS) is 86% black or hispanic and 87% low-income. 24% of the system's budget comes from federal sources (about $1.65 billion). 31% comes from the state, and 36% from local property taxes.

Inner city schools in the U.S. are mostly similar in terms of demographics, and the result of a fragile political compromise. Middle class people fund the systems, but don't want to send their kids to schools that are 85-90% low-income minorities. As a result, you can tax them only so much before they just move out to the suburbs. State and federal funding keeps these school districts in existence, and with state budgets strapped as they are, the DoE is the lynchpin that keeps the whole thing from collapsing.

I think his point was that if the goal is to funnel money by writing checks, it could be achieved by an entity smaller in size than 5,000 employees. If there're no measurable results, even better.

What makes you think that it could be achieved by a smaller entity? The grants go to thousands of municipalities all over the country and 10 million Pell Grant recipients. Also, the department oversees $150 billion in annual direct student loans to 13 million students every year. Figuring out who is eligible for grants, how much different programs should get, etc, is not a trivial task. Also, the Dept. of Ed.'s mandate is complicated by Title I and IDEA. The purpose of Title I is to combat racial discrimination in education among historically disadvantaged minorities, and the purpose of IDEA is to combat educational discrimination among the disabled. These are hairy and complicated problems to deal with (e.g. the Department is charged with dealing with the states, who look for every way possible to avoid providing services to minorities and the disabled).

The program management overhead of the Dept. of Ed. is about $1.8 billion: http://www2.ed.gov/about/overview/budget/budget12/summary/ed.... Out of that $1.8 billion, $1 billion goes to administering student loans and Pell Grants. Assuming that it costs about the same to administer a student loan versus a Pell Grant, we can estimate that maybe $450 million is spent administering Pell Grants. That reduces the overhead, excluding student loans (which aren't included in the $65 billion discretionary budget) to $1.25 billion, or 1.9%.

72% of the entire Department of Education budget goes to direct grant programs to college students and local municipalities?

2013 discretionary budget was $68 billion: http://www2.ed.gov/about/overview/budget/budget14/summary/14....

Pell Grants were $22.8 billion, Title I Grants to Local Education Agencies (called College and Career-Ready Students now), was $14.5 billion. Special education grants to states was $11.6 billion (IDEA is state level, not municipal level, my mistake). $48.9 / $68 = 72%.

There are some more in there too ($0.1 billion in grants for Indian education, etc), but those three are the budget drivers.

Head-explodey. Thank you.

I'm not sure I follow what you are trying to say. If the TSA was moved back to the Department of Transportation and the Secret Service was moved back to the Department of the Treasury, then you'd simply add two departments to the turf battle war instead of having the one.

NSA is part of the DoD, so let's group them together. Under your plan to eliminate "poorly conceived" bureaucracy, you'd change the potential interactions from this:

FBI-DoD, FBI-DHS, DoD-DHS

To this:

FBI-DoD, FBI-Treasury, FBI-Transportation, DoD-Treasury, DoD-Transportation, Treasury-Transportation

Wasn't DHS designed exactly to simplify this very issue? As a software engineer looking at a domain model with DHS compared to the old system, it seems like the DHS system has better separation of concerns, better cohesion, and reduced coupling.

The DoD is to large to be really be considered an organization by it's self. For example Army, Navy, Airorce, NSA and everyone has there own support aircraft with there own support network even though the cost savings of integrating them all under a single organization would be huge.

Realistically the smaller than department sized organizations still need to talk to each other.

FBI-DoD still looks like FBI-NSA, FBI-Army CIS, FBI-Navy CIS, FBI-Army Intelligence, FBI-DIA, FBI-... etc. etc. and on and on.

Within DHS, I'd wager FBI till has to talk to TSA separate from SS.

Some of us want to have the debate about the concept of "homeland security", while we are at it we can talk about having a department of peace instead of a department of defense

Less than 70 years ago, within the lifetime of a person, the industrialized powers of the world fought a war that killed 60 million people. Absolutely nothing has changed about human nature in that evolutionary blink of an eye. The relative peace of today is just circumstances. That is the reason we have a department of defense rather than a department of peace. At any given moment we are just a set of circumstances away from cataclysm. It's not like the coming century isn't ripe for conflict. Water resources are stretched thin. Development outstrips oil production. Capital is shifting from western countries to Asia. If we don't see a major war between western powers and India/china over access to middle eastern oil I'll be shocked (pleasantly).

The ironic thing about the DHS was it was supposed to make the communication lines between the FBI, the CIA and other federal law enforcement agencies better. This is one of the major failings of what happened on 9/11 - a total lack of sharing of intelligence between the CIA and FBI.

And here we are, almost 15 years later and nothing has changed or improved. Several commentators even argued if the DHS actually worked, several of the recent terror attacks would have been prevented.

Either fix it, or get rid of it.

Adding a bureaucracy to improve communications is like adding a junior programmer to a late project. It totally misses the nature of the problem.

Well, it can make sense when the added bureaucracy aligns well with an unexpected functional requirement that otherwise cuts across organizational boundaries. Even if you don't move every agency under the new structure, simply having a single point of responsibility for that new function can help with communication flow.

I think that's the real issue, is that functional requirements cropped up with no point of focus, but when they instituted a new agency to handle that they wrapped it up with a whole Department and a grab-bag of other tangentially-related agencies.

Maybe we're arguing the same thing. I kind of view it like... If there's a group of people who aren't talking, adding someone to facilitate communications doesn't add much. Improving the structure is better than adding on top of it. (This is sometimes why PMOs fail. Adding someone to make sense of a bunch of projects doesn't address why they weren't making sense previously)

Right, mere facilitation is no good, you need to give that new person directive authority and make that function their job.

That's actually one of the things I'm struggling with in my current job. I oversee a collection of units that can easily track a certain pool of wastefully-utilized resources, but have no actual power to fix it.

Those with actual directive authority over the individual elements of that pool have no incentive to correct things other than some guy 8 levels higher in the chain of command being irritated.

And a third party that actually does the work that would get elements of this pool out of the pool drag their feet on it completely as for them it's "just admin".

So I get to make reports on this waste everyday but with little effective power to fix it. Standing up an audit team that would have the power to fix requires resources, resources which no one seems to have now...

It sounds like you're being underutilized. Many times people "Create an organization" to solve a problem as a way to say they're doing something, without actually having to get dirty themselves.

I don't know your situation well, but perhaps it may be time to look around.

I'm a freaking O-3, I have nowhere near enough 'pull' required to tell organizations led by O-5 all the way through O-9s to get their collective organizations off of their collective asses, even if I felt like 'getting dirty'.

But, even if I felt like it, what happens when I leave and the next guy comes along who doesn't care at all? The situation I'm talking about here isn't one of my primary duties, it merely happens to be related. Right now this issue is essentially no one's primary duty, which is one of the problems.

My proposed solution is a tested principle from software refactoring, applied to organizations writ large. In fact I've often been surprised at how well software engineering practices can translate over to organizational systems design practices.

Ah - got it now. Harder to look around when you're in the military, and the stakes are higher.

I've noticed similar in software practices (especially project management and metrics) leading broader org design. I'm not sure if it's because the failures are bigger, or the orgs are more willing to experiment, but software firms do seem to drive HR and organizational design trends.

Information sharing has definitely made strides, whether or not through DHS--else how could Manning and Snowden come up with such quantities to leak?

Information sharing has most definitely improved. One example is the Prism program, in which the FBI is responsible for data collection and then pipes it to the NSA. Not saying that is good for the country overall, but the agencies are definitely sharing more data.

That has nothing to do with DHS. As a result of the 9/11 Commission's recommendations, the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004 put the Office of the Director of National Intelligence "in charge" (in an oversight capability) of the 17 major intelligence agencies we have here in the US.

For better or worse it dramatically increased intelligence sharing and cooperation, as well as effectively tearing down the walls between domestic and foreign intelligence work.

I didn't say that it did--just that information sharing has improved.

Even the name "Homeland Security" is an abomination.

A "homeland" implies some kind of empire where there's a homeland, vs. outlands. The US should not be an empire (as it is today). It needs to return to being a simple nation among equals.

Naming things has power; propaganda power if nothing else.

They're gonna have an uphill battle. The DHS is digging in, literally: http://www.gsa.gov/portal/content/133423

DC institutions don't just go away. They fight tooth and nail to survive. So if you want to make it go away, prepare for a tough fight.

Yeah, while I'm sure a good deal of the public feels repugnance toward DHS, anyone short of a much-needed cowboy like Rand Paul ain't shutting down this abomination. More government is all the rage nowadays, haven't you noticed?

I doubt that the majority of Americans feel repugnance toward the DHS. Most people I have met seem to believe that the DHS is important to keep us and our children safe from terrorists. Most people fall victim to the classic "something must be done, this is something, and therefore it must be done" fallacy.

Sorry, when I wrote that I was thinking the TSA. Forgot that the DHS is more of a shell organization.

Rand Paul couldn't do it either, any more than Reagan could shut down the Dept. of Education. It has to be done in Congress, and there's no appetite for shutting down anything, ever, in Congress.

The reason we have fourteen separate agencies with intelligence operations is as they lose the trust of elected leaders new ones are created, leaving the old ones intact.

Last time a government agency was shut down was the Civil Aeronautics Board a long time ago.

Can't recall any big agencies ever shutting down since the New Deal days.

What's the last federal bureaucracy that was abolished?

This is never gonna happen. The size of government only goes one way.

The size of the executive branch, including the postal service, peaked under Bush I: http://voices.washingtonpost.com/federal-eye/2010/09/how_man....

The current number of civilian executive branch employees is somewhere between where it was in 1964 and 1970. Adjusted for population, the executive branch is 40% smaller than it was during its peak under Nixon.

Now, the picture gets murkier if you include contractors, but they're not part of the bureaucracy per se and it's not like contractors were doing poorly, employment wise, during the Cold War.

Federal discretionary spending as a percentage of GDP is not exactly monotonically increasing: http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/RL34424.pdf (17). Aside from the recent bailouts and stimulus in response to the recession, it's smaller in percentage terms than it was at the peak of big government in the 1970's. Both defense and non-defense components of discretionary spending are smaller as a percentage of GDP.

As a practical matter, agencies don't get abolished. But they do get marginalized. Congress underfunds them relative to their original mandate, which forces them to shrink relative to the rest of the government and the rest of the economy. Is there hope of their doing this with DHS? Possibly. The long-term trend for all defense-related spending is sharply downward.

DHS is just another excuse for government contractors and unions to screw taxpayers.

As far as I know, unions had no involvement in the creation of DHS. There are unions for DHS employees, just as there are for police, firefighters, etc...but, it's difficult for me to see a connection between the creation of the entity and those unions (which didn't exist as DHS employee unions until after DHS employees existed).

They certainly were involved with smoothing out the rough patches in the beginning so they could get their piece of the pie:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/08...

If one group is plundering another group, it makes little difference if they planned the plunder or are participating in the pillage after the raid.

The DHS is about to become much worse soon, if the NYPD chief becomes its next boss:

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130714/22284823796/up-ag...

The DHS budget is about 1/10 of the DOD budget. Just saying. If people want to make more of an impact...

"Abolish" is a bit of a sensational word to use, especially because even if the department is shut down, all the agencies under it would shift to other departments or form new one(s).

Never going to happen. Power, once gained, will not be given up without a fight.

The only thing needed is "information sharing" between the branches. We do not need the DHS for that.

The DHS includes the Coast Guard, Customs, Immigration, and FEMA. Abolishing these critical functions would be like throwing the baby out with the bath water.

All of those functions existed before DHS. DHS can be abolished and those will be moved to other services.

And those functions can be moved out of DHS, just as they were pre-9/11.

As stated in the article (RTFA), these could be moved out of the DHS bureaucracy as they were before 9/11.

Talk about sensationalist news. "The Case for Abolishing the DHS".

It may be one of the scariest departments in the government right now, but it serves a fundamental purpose: to secure the nation from the many threats we face. *http://www.dhs.gov/about-dhs). It should be steered back towards protection (and probably toward creating a better mission statement as well), not dismantled.

When dealing with code and servers, sometimes you have to delete something and start over and it usually sucks to have to do it; imagine how bad it would be with an entire DEPARTMENT of the government. The article states that there are 15 vacancies at the top: this is an opportunity. Update it, fill it with new, ethical, honest leadership and it could be everything it was originally meant to be.

Shame on Businessweek for adding nothing to the discourse but for an emotional headline.

Shutting down DHS wouldn't necessarily mean shutting down everything that falls under the DHS umbrella. As recently as 2000 there was no DHS. It was created to improve coordination between agencies; if it's not doing a good job of that, then split them apart again.

As a non-American, the DHS has always come across to me as some form of large scale elaborate joke. I'm genuinely curious if the department you are spending billions of dollars on has actually accomplished anything at all of any practical use?

Almost everything DHS is doing now was being done before DHS. Even TSA was being handled by private security under FAA regulations, IIRC.

So while it may seem like an elaborate joke, it's not. Coast Guard does search and rescue work nearly every day, FEMA responds to natural disasters, etc.

> Coast Guard does search and rescue work nearly every day

Over 100 cases every day.

Shame on Businessweek for adding nothing to the discourse but for an emotional headline.

Thank you Business Week for participating in a rational discussion about our nation's deep dive into fear.

It's time to raise our heads from the sand, take a look around, and start making a positive contribution to the world again.

The number of downvotes the user has received despite representing the minority in the discussion here indicates they were right about the level of emotion.

I think the commenter was downvoted because they dismissed the original article as nothing more than an "emotional headline". Even a casual reading of the article shows otherwise.

I realize it's just an emotional headline if you didn't RTFA, but had you done that you would see they cited quite a few expenditures that are utterly wasteful when put in context.

> but it serves a fundamental purpose: to secure the nation from the many threats we face.

The biggest threat we face is the DHS. What if its fundamental purpose is reached by dismantling itself?

Which is more likely, being killed or injured by a terrorist attack or being killed, arrested, molested, or detained by the DHS? Trick question -- flying on an airplane pretty much ensures you get molested by the DHS.

Indeed it is one of the scariest departments simply because of its name. "Homeland Security" is ironically, especially un-American sounding, in that no one ever uses the word 'homeland'. See http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/kausfiles_sp...

They should have gone all in originally and just named it the "Committee for Internal Security".

I have heard Dianne Feinstein use the word "Homeland" outside of the context of the department itself. I'd guess that Lindsey Graham and others are also doing this.

The more traditional phrase, Republic, used by Benjamin Franklin, and in the pledge of Allegiance is, as your article points out, more closely ties the U.S. to certain philosophical principles, whereas the term homeland is restricted to the physical, geographic location and the individuals in it.

If the lexicon is reduced to physical protection, than it's less vulnerable to arguments of lost liberty.

I was also creeped out (still am) by the name, especially given the spirit of the times (eg yellow ribbons etc). I had the same sense as described here: http://www.alternet.org/speakeasy/alyssa-figueroa/dissecting...

I was also surprised at the time by often seeing "Department of Defense", as we were bunker busting and daisy cutting the crap out of people across the globe. I also just recently learned that we don't know the number of US military installations around the globe (700?, 900?) and instead of dismantling them after collapse of USSR, we found new justifications.

"It may be one of the scariest departments in the government right now, but it serves a fundamental purpose: to secure the nation from the many threats we face"

1. The actual threats we face are a secret.

2. There is no evidence that the DHS is or ever was actually protecting us from anything.

3. There is no evidence that the DHS is or ever was doing a better job of protecting us than the intelligence, military, and law enforcement communities had done before the DHS was established.

DHS was supposed to sensibly help coordinate existing departments with common goals hindered by bureaucratic divisions.

Instead we have something increasingly akin to a military which considers citizens at best suspicious and at worst presumed enemy combatants. Catholics, Evangelicals, and other predominant religious denominations are listed as indicators of potential terrorists. Anyone getting on an airplane with so much as a soda or can opener is presumed smuggling weapons. Anyone exhibiting self-sufficiency/survivalist tendencies is declared suspect. Vehicle checkpoints asking citizenship & business & destination are operated hundreds of miles inland. DHS employees are admonished to obey orders without question. Ammunition procurement[1] exceeding whole militaries is normalized. "Drone assassination" of citizens on home soil is declared (not legislated) lawful. Wholesale civilian monitoring (to wit NSA scandal) is common, and its consequences far from transparent now (save vague "a few terrorists were stopped"). Defacto national IDs are imposed/coerced (a la "Deine Papiere, bitte"). Wasn't long ago that every one of these points, and a whole lot more, were indicative of the worst oppressive governments; their recent commonality all a consequence of DHS.

This isn't just a result of a few vacancies at the top. This is systemic of the American leadership viewing the American people, and their historical values, being considered hostile opponents.

[1] - Yes, I'm aware of the alleged budgetary long-term purchasing theories. Even taking that into account, it's a whole lotta firepower intended against...who exactly?

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