HOME LAND SECURITY

The New Republic
Man-Made Disaster by Jeffrey Rosen
Six years on, the Department of Homeland Security is still a catastrophe.
Post Date Wednesday, December 24, 2008
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Michael Chertoff needs an office. When I interviewed the secretary of Homelan Security this summer, we met in a pair of temporary locations between which h shuttles--first in the decaying Nebraska Avenue Complex of the naval station at War Circle (a center for signal analysis during World War II) and later in an unmarked an unfurnished office in the nondescript headquarters of U.S. Customs and Border Protectio in the Ronald Reagan building, near the White House. Chertoff hasn't settled into an offic partly because the six-year-old Department of Homeland Security (DHS) still has n permanent, consolidated headquarters. Instead, the unwieldy amalgam of 22 separat federal agencies operates out of 70 buildings at 40 different locations in the Washingto area. And the lack of a real home is just the beginning of the department's bureaucrati problems. The most recent survey by the U.S. Office of Personnel Management on the jo satisfaction of federal employees in 36 agencies ranked Homeland Security last or nea last in every category. Meanwhile, officials from the Pentagon who have tried to d business with DHS complained to me of organizational chaos at the department Homeland Security employees, they said, are often unaware of overlapping initiative championed by their colleagues, and even by Chertoff himself

This can't have been what Democrats and Republicans had in mind when they celebrated the creation of the department in November 2002--arguably the last moment of bipartisan cooperation that Washington would see for six years. Although hastily thrown together, DHS was hailed by most of official Washington as a necessary response to the extreme vulnerabilities exposed by the September 11 attacks. Today, that bipartisan consensus remains largely intact. In fact, as Barack Obama prepares to take office, some Democrats want to increase the department's budget, which is now over $40 billion per year. "I do think more money has to be spent, order of magnitude twenty to twenty-five percent more," I was told in July by James Steinberg, who emphasized that he was not speaking for the Obama campaign. (He is now expected to become deputy secretary of state. ) "I don't think Secretary Chertoff has fought hard enough within the administration for his share of resources," P.J. Crowley, a homeland security expert at the Center for American Progress, told me in June. "If we continue to suggest we are at war, I wonder if DHS really is on a war-time footing." More recently, the nomination of the charismatic Janet Napolitano to head the department suggests that Obama himself is committed to a strong DHS. In announcing her nomination, Obama said, "She understands the need for a Department of Homeland Security that has the capacity to help prevent terrorist attacks and respond to catastrophe be it man-made or natural." It may still be years away from having a permanent headquarters, but the Department of Homeland Security, apparently, is here to stay.

Should that be cause for celebration or concern? This summer, I talked to security experts on both sides of the political spectrum, and had several conversations with Chertoff, in an effort to answer the following question: Is DHS achieving its mission of making us safer? My reluctant conclusion is that, although Chertoff has performed impressively in an impossible job, the department is hard to justify with any rational analysis of costs and benefits. On the contrary, it's arguably one of the most expensive marketing ventures in political history--an enterprise that seeks to make us feel safer instead of actually making us safer. The best argument for DHS is that the illusion of safety may itself provide tangible psychological and economic benefits: If people feel less afraid, they may be more likely to fly on planes. But even if conceived on these terms--as a more-than-$40-billion-dollar-a-year pacifier--the department is hard to defend, since there's no good evidence that it has, in fact, calmed Americans down rather than making us more nervous.

The only way of calming people down is political leadership that puts the terrorist threat in perspective. But, despite efforts by Chertoff to avoid the color-coded hysteria that defined the department in its early days, DHS officials inevitably feel pressure to exaggerate the terrorist threat--scaremongering that creates further public demand for promises of security that can't be fulfilled. And so the very existence of DHS creates a chain reaction of self-justifying insecurity. For this reason, Republicans (who used to be the stiff-upper-lip party of limited government) and Democrats (who don't trust the government to run the war in Iraq and are generally cautious about spending too much on defense) are willing to sink billions into an institutional money pit that has more to do with symbols than substance. Both parties seem incapable of acknowledging an uncomfortable but increasingly obvious truth: that the Department of Homeland Security was a bureaucratic and philosophical mistake.