Abolish the Department of Homeland Security

Break it up into fewer, smaller agencies that are more accountable to pre-9/11 departments.

https://reason.com/video/2023/03/08/dhs-just-turned-20-its-time-to-abolish-it/
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So the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is celebrating its 20th birthday—the perfect opportunity to rethink the whole concept of "homeland security" and how to best provide it. DHS has grown into a monster that is massively expensive, incredibly ineffective, and reliably destructive of basic civil liberties. It's time to abolish it and replace it with fewer, smaller, and more accountable agencies.

Critics of DHS noted from the start that it didn't actually reduce bureaucracy or streamline much of anything. It just added a new layer of red tape on top of existing agencies while creating new ones, such as Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)—both of which have become legendary for callousness, ineffectiveness, and root-level failures.

Perhaps worst of all, DHS is a determined foe of civil liberties. As the ACLU documents in a new study of the department, DHS routinely undermines our ability to move freely about the very country it's supposed to be protecting.

Any discussion of DHS must include the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), which you might refer to as Thousands Standing Around, the Testicle Squeezing Agency, or any number of different euphemisms. Despite very occasional positive headlines, the TSA rightly looms large in the public imagination as a make-work program gone horribly wrong. Notorious for forcing mothers to test their own breast milk, scaring children, and pantsing the elderly, the TSA spends as much as $667 billion per life saved. On its 10th anniversary, two conservative Republican members of Congress even denounced the TSA, saying the degraded security theater it imposed on travelers did not improve on the safety protocols that were in place before 9/11.

To be fair, DHS' mission is simply too vast to accomplish. Having been tasked to do so many different things—from processing immigration checks to responding to natural disasters to checking passengers on every flight in America to stopping terrorism—it ends up doing all of them poorly. It would be better to break those functions up into smaller agencies that are directly accountable to departments that existed prior to 9/11.

As Richard A. Clarke, a 30-year veteran of security positions in the Defense Department, State Department, and White House, has suggested, it makes sense to create a smaller group tightly focused on terroristic threats that would work directly with the FBI and Office of the Director of National Intelligence. "Preserving the status quo," he writes, "will only perpetuate the mistakes made in the panicked trauma that followed 9/11 and doom these important missions to continued mishandling and lack of success."

As it celebrates its 20th birthday, it's time to blow out the candles on DHS.

Produced by Nick Gillespie and Justin Zuckerman; Sound editing by Ian Keyser; Additional graphics by John Osterhoudt

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