<html><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; "><div class="pane-node-title"><h1>Time to abolish DHS</h1></div>
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<span class="by">By:</span>
<span class="author"><a href="http://washingtonexaminer.com/people/gene-healy">Gene Healy</a></span> |
<span class="date">09/26/11 8:05 PM</span><br>
<span class="date"><em>Examiner Columnist <a href="http://twitter.com/genehealy">Follow Him @genehealy</a></em></span>
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<span class="BodyCopy">Two years ago this month, the federal
government broke ground on what was supposed to be a massive new
headquarters for the Department of Homeland Security. Situated on the
St. Elizabeths Hospital campus in Southeast Washington, the $3.4 billion
project was designed to bring together some 15,000 employees of our
newest Cabinet department, which in less than a decade has become
notorious for waste, mismanagement and inflicting pointless humiliation
on airline travelers.</span><p><span class="BodyCopy">Depending on your sense of humor, you may get a
mordant chuckle out of the fact that, before the government adopted the
St. Elizabeths moniker in 1916, the property was known as the
Government Hospital for the Insane.</span></p><p><span class="BodyCopy">DHS' headquarters project hit a speed bump recently when the House voted to eliminate funding for the project.</span></p><p><span class="BodyCopy">That's a start, but in a new study, my Cato
Institute colleague David Rittgers makes a provocative and compelling
argument for going much further. He argues that, 10 years after the
Sept. 11 attacks, it's time to abolish the Department of Homeland
Security.</span></p><p><span class="BodyCopy">Rittgers sees particular danger in DHS' grant
programs, under which the department has ladled out some $34 billion to
states and localities since its inception.</span></p><p><span class="BodyCopy">The talismanic properties of the phrase
"homeland security" enable politicians "to wrap pork in red, white and
blue in a way not possible with defense spending," Rittgers argues. "Not
every town can host a military installation or build warships, but
every town has a police force that can use counterterrorism funds." As a
result of the "gold-rush pathology" encouraged by the grants -- to
offer just one example -- the midsize town of Grand Forks, N.D., now
"has more biochemical suits and gas masks than police officers to wear
them."</span></p><p><span class="BodyCopy">The issue isn't simply waste. DHS largess often threatens civil liberties and privacy in ways that garden-variety pork does not.</span></p><p><span class="BodyCopy">Over the past decade, homeland security grants
have been used in an apparent attempt to turn Main Street America into a
London-style Panopticon, funding security cameras in sleepy hamlets
nationwide. And, as investigative journalist Radley Balko notes, DHS
handouts also further a burgeoning culture of police paramilitarization,
funding armored personnel carriers for such "unlikely terrorist
targets" as the towns of Adrian, Mich., and Germantown, Tenn.</span></p><p><span class="BodyCopy">All this has done very little to enhance
public safety -- not that you'd learn that from the agency itself, which
is especially resistant to using cost-benefit analysis. In 2006, a
senior economist at DHS admitted, "We really don't know a whole lot
about the overall costs and benefits of homeland security."</span></p><p><span class="BodyCopy">In a new book, "Terror, Security, and Money,"
professors John Mueller and Mark G. Stewart closely examine that
question and, using a set of assumptions weighted in favor of the
government, conclude that, to justify the increased post-Sept. 11
spending, we "would have to deter, prevent, foil, or protect against
1,667 otherwise successful [attempted Times Square car bomb-type]
attacks per year, or more than four per day."</span></p><p><span class="BodyCopy">As Rittgers points out, abolishing DHS doesn't
mean ending legitimate federal counterterrorism functions -- it means
undoing a giant, costly government reorganization that left us no safer
and considerably less free. Some of the department's component parts
would return to their parent agencies. Others would be shuttered or
privatized.</span></p><p><span class="BodyCopy">Until recently, it seemed as if appropriations
labeled "homeland security" would join "defense" as a budgetary sacred
cow. The House GOP's "Pledge to America" took DHS dollars out of its
proposed freeze on "non-security spending." That may be changing,
however, as shown by Congress' willingness to hold up the agency's
headquarters expansion.</span></p><p><span class="BodyCopy">On the principle of last hired, first fired,
if we're going to start downsizing the Cabinet, there's a lot to be said
for starting with the most recent addition.</span></p><p><span style="font-style:italic;" class="EndEmailTag">Examiner</span><span style="font-style:italic;" class="EndEmailTag"> Columnist Gene Healy is a vice president at the Cato Institute and the author of "The Cult of the Presidency."</span></p> </div><div style="overflow: hidden; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); background-color: transparent; text-align: left; text-decoration: none; border: medium none;"><br>Read more at the Washington Examiner: <a style="color: #003399;" href="http://washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/columnists/2011/09/time-abolish-dhs#ixzz1ZJDDdSoU">http://washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/columnists/2011/09/time-abolish-dhs#ixzz1ZJDDdSoU</a><br></div></body></html>