Twenty years ago, President George W. Bush signed legislation authorizing the largest reorganization of the federal government in more than half a century — piecing 22 offices from five departments into one enormous bureaucracy: the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).
In a paper published this week, we set out 15 reforms to DHS for the Biden administration and Congress to consider. We call for important fixes to the way DHS operates–but its problems run deep, and this moment requires a serious reckoning, which includes a fundamental restructuring.
From the beginning, creating DHS was a bad idea — and many of the people who helped make it happen had misgivings. When Democratic Senator Joe Lieberman proposed it, White House conservatives reportedly balked because it would mean a vast new federal bureaucracy. But President Bush reportedly decided it was “politically expedient” to sign the bill. So Congress and the White House essentially wrote a blank check –one of many that spawned a post-9/11 national security state that threatened to put the country on a permanent war-time footing — and wrongly treated the “homeland” as if it was under continuous, existential threat.
Into the new agency went components of immigration, intelligence-gathering and disaster management; DHS also swallowed the Coast Guard and the Secret Service. “The process for deciding which existing agencies would be moved to DHS, and which ones would stay in other departments, was haphazard at best,” wrote journalist Dara Lind. A former high-level DHS official likened it to a “shotgun marriage” among agencies “some of whom still don’t recognize the department as a department.” The result was poor management and accountability, even as the agency’s budget and staffing continued to balloon.
The sprawling agency was intended to be united around a mandate to “protect the American homeland” — a framing that begs the question, protect from whom? The answer became clear over the last two decades: Activists and peaceful protestors, immigrants with deep community and family ties, people seeking refuge in this country, non-citizens encountered on the high seas, anyone going through the airport. In truth: Potentially anyone.
This overbroad and elastic mandate was always a danger to civil liberties. Back in 2002, we warned that DHS would reach into every nook and cranny of our lives and liberty. We called the initial blueprints for the agency constitutionally bankrupt.
And in many ways, our fears have been realized. “DHS’s overbroad mandate and unchecked powers have turned it into a tinderbox, now ignited by a president willing to trample on the constitutional limits of presidential powers,” ACLU Executive Director Anthony Romero wrote in August 2020. In July, the Trump administration had sent DHS personnel to racial justice protests across the country — as we collectively reckoned with the killing of George Floyd and our nation’s history of police brutality and racism.
Many of us remember the startling news reports from that summer: DHS agents beat demonstrators, grabbed individuals and forced them into unmarked vans, and unlawfully arrested dozens.
“If there is one thing we have learned from the authoritarianism on display in Portland, it’s that we have to remove the loaded weapon that sits on the proverbial coffee table in the Oval Office,” our Romero warned. We called for the dismantling of the department into its component parts and for a reduction of its budget to “allow for more effective oversight, accountability and public transparency” and ensure “the spun-off agencies will have clearer missions and more limited functions.”
For many observers, DHS attacks on protestors were the tip of the iceberg — and not far below the water’s surface was the recent horror of DHS separating parents from their children at the border (some of those children are still missing); the…
Read More: 20 Years Later, It’s Time to Overhaul the Department of Homeland Security | News & Commentary