Homeland Security: A Costly Mess (MIT Center for Int'l Studies, via AlterNet)

Homeland Security: A Costly Mess

By Cindy Williams, MIT Center for International Studies. Posted May 9, 2007.



The Dept. of Homeland Security was created to bring coherence to the disparate activities of numerous agencies involved in domestic security. Four years later, the United States is not getting what it should out of the reorganization.

In January 2003, the Bush administration drew 22 disparate agencies and some 170,000 employees into a new Department of Homeland Security (DHS). Proponents of the reorganization hoped a single department under a single cabinet secretary would foster unity of effort across a substantial portion of the federal activities related to domestic security.

A key tool would be the department's budget. With all the agencies beholden to him for their money, the secretary could promote and reward much-needed integration across the department. He could wield the budget tool to expand high priority activities, eliminate or defer the less important or redundant ones, and reallocate the workforce to fill gaps in high-risk areas.

A look at budgets since the department was established reflects little in the way of realignment, however. Department funding rose by more than 40 percent between 2003 and 2007, but there has been only minimal reallocation of budgets from areas of lower risk or priority to functions the department says are more important. With the exception of added spending to support the Secure Border Initiative announced by President Bush in November 2005, the department's main operating components each enjoy about the same share of the DHS budget today as they did when the department was created. The result is that -- despite the heavy cost in both dollars and institutional disruption -- the United States is not getting what it should out of the reorganization.

This article looks at annual DHS budgets for evidence of altered priorities or reallocation of resources. Finding little in the way of change, it considers several explanations for the persistent pattern and ends with recommendations for improving budgetary processes and outcomes in DHS.

The Money Trail: DHS Budgets Since 2003

DHS has seven main operating components: the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), Customs and Border Protection (CBP), Citizenship and Immigration Services (CIS), Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the Secret Service, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), and the Coast Guard. These components together command a bit less than three-quarters of the DHS budget (see figure 1 below).

Remarkably, the share of the department's budget devoted to each of these components has varied little from the year the department opened until today (see table 1). From 2003 to 2007, no more than one percent of the DHS budget migrated into or out of the Secret Service, FEMA's internal operating accounts, the Coast Guard, or Citizenship and Immigration Services. Of the seven units, only TSA, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and Customs and Border Protection acquired or lost more than one percent. .....(more)

To read the complete piece, go to this link (and scroll down the page a bit): http://www.alternet.org/story/51571/