[Peace-discuss] Time to abolish DHS

[C. G. Estabrook]

Time to abolish DHS

By: Gene Healy | 09/26/11 8:05 PM
Examiner Columnist Follow Him @genehealy
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.
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.

DHS' headquarters project hit a speed bump recently when the House  
voted to eliminate funding for the project.

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.

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.

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."

The issue isn't simply waste. DHS largess often threatens civil  
liberties and privacy in ways that garden-variety pork does not.

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.

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."

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."

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.

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.

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.

Examiner Columnist Gene Healy is a vice president at the Cato  
Institute and the author of "The Cult of the Presidency."


Read more at the Washington Examiner: http://washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/columnists/2011/09/time-abolish-dhs#ixzz1ZJDDdSoU
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.chambana.net/pipermail/peace-discuss/attachments/20110928/de62d5ae/attachment.html>