Five Years of “Homeland Security”
Five years after its birth, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is a disaster of bureaucratic excess, pork-barrel spending, managerial incompetence, and missed opportunities, according to Ivan Eland, director of the Independent Institute’s Center on Peace & Liberty.
“The department’s growing pains have made it a slow learner and a downright ugly child,” Eland writes in his latest op-ed. “Born in an atmosphere of tension and fear, and cobbled together from pieces of other government departments and agencies, the prospects for this Frankenstein offspring were always dim.”
DHS has 208,000 employees, a $38 billion annual budget, and 86 congressional committees and subcommittees looking over its shoulder. What it doesn’t have is a coherently organized and smartly executed plan to enhance homeland security. Instead, it has a color-coded “terror alert” system useless for anything except domestic political consumption, the tragic failure of its Hurricane Katrina operations, worthless promises to complete a $22 billion electronic baggage inspection system in 16 years, and myriad other failures and disappointments. “Thus, at the age of five, DHS has all the bureaucratic sclerosis of an octogenarian and is on the road to juvenile delinquency,” concludes Eland.
See: www.independent.org
April 2nd, 2008 at 7:13 am
It’s a typical government program…
November 12th, 2008 at 7:54 pm
All this homeland security stuff and I don’t feel more secure. If we didn’t have our troops in 130 countries, maybe we wouldn’t have terrorists trying to attack us.