Bloomberg | On Friday, Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano resigned
to take up a post running California’s university system. With her
departure, there are now 15 vacant positions
at the top of the department. That suggests it would be a particularly
humane moment to shut the whole thing down. The U.S. Department of
Homeland Security was a panicked reaction to the Sept. 11 attacks. It
owes its continued existence to a vastly exaggerated assessment of the
threat of terrorism. The department is also responsible for some of the
least cost-effective spending in the U.S. government. It’s time to admit
that creating it was a mistake.
In 2002 the George W. Bush administration presented a budget request
for massively increased spending on homeland security, at that point
coordinated out of the Office of Homeland Security. “A new wave of
terrorism, involving new weapons, looms in America’s future,” the White
House said. “It is a challenge unlike any ever faced by our nation.” In
proposing a new cabinet-level agency, Bush said, “The changing nature of
the threats facing America requires a new government structure to
protect against invisible enemies that can strike with a wide variety of
weapons.” Because of “experience gained since Sept. 11 and new
information we have learned about our enemies while fighting a war,” the
president concluded that “our nation needs a more unified homeland
security structure.”
More than a decade later, it’s increasingly clear that the danger to
Americans posed by terrorism remains smaller than that of myriad other
threats, from infectious disease to gun violence to drunk driving. Even
in 2001, considerably more Americans died of drowning than from terror
attacks. Since then, the odds of an American being killed in a terrorist attack
in the U.S. or abroad have been about one in 20 million. The Boston
marathon bombing was evil and tragic, but it’s worth comparing the three
deaths in that attack to a list
of the number of people in the U.S. killed by guns since the December
2012 massacre in Newtown, Conn., which stood at 6,078 as of June.
This low risk isn’t evidence that homeland security spending has
worked: It’s evidence that the terror threat was never as great as we
thought. A rather pathetic Heritage Foundation list
of 50 terrorist plots against the U.S. foiled since Sept. 11 includes
such incidents as a plan to use a blowtorch to blow up the Brooklyn
Bridge and “allegedly lying about attending a terrorist training
center”—but nothing involving weapons of mass destruction. Further,
these are alleged plots. The list of plausible plots, let alone actual
crimes, is considerably smaller. From 2005 to 2010, federal attorneys declined
(PDF) to bring any charges against 67 percent of alleged
terrorism-related cases referred to them from law enforcement agencies.
That hasn’t stopped a bonanza of spending. Homeland security agencies got about $20 billion in the 2002 budget. That rose to about $60 billion
(PDF) this year. Given that spending is motivated by such an elusive
threat, it’s no surprise a lot is wasted. The grants made by DHS to
states and cities to improve preparedness are notorious for being
distributed with little attention to either risk or effectiveness. As an
example, economist Veronique de Rugy has highlighted the $557,400
given to North Pole, Alaska, (population 1,570), for homeland security
rescue and communications equipment. “If power companies invested in
infrastructure the way DHS and Congress fight terrorism, a New Yorker
wouldn’t be able to run a hair dryer, but everyone in Bozeman, Mont.,
could light up a stadium,” de Rugy complained.
Or take the U.S. Coast Guard—which recently got in hot water
with the U.S. Government Accountability Office because it was 10 years
into a 25-year, $24 billion overhaul to build or upgrade its 250
vessels, had spent $7 billion on the project, and had only two new ships
in the water to show for it. Reassuringly, the head of the Coast Guard
admitted, “We weren’t prepared to start spending this money and
supervising a project this big.”
The DHS also runs the U.S. Secret Service, an agency that just spent
an estimated $100 million guarding a weeklong presidential trip to
Africa. That would be more than the entire economic output of Tanzania
during Barack Obama’s visit. The Secret Service traveled around the
continent with 56 vehicles, including three trucks full of bulletproof
glass. The cancellation of a planned Obama family safari at least meant
there was no need for the assault team armed with high-caliber rounds
against the threat of Taliban-sympathizing cheetahs.
The problem with DHS is bigger than a bloated budget misspent. An
overweight DHS gets a free pass to infringe civil liberties without a
shred of economic justification. John Mueller, a political science
professor at Ohio State University, notes
that the agency has routinely refused to carry out cost-benefit
analyses on expensive and burdensome new procedures, including scanning
every inbound shipping container or installing full-body scanners in
airports—despite being specifically asked to do so by the GAO. Again,
it’s unsurprising that the result
of a free hand in enforcement has been excessive and counterproductive
security measures, as I’ve argued before: like TSA agents taking away a
GI Joe doll’s four-inch plastic gun because it was “a replica,” and
deterring so many passengers from airline travel that more than 100
people have died on the roads because they substituted a dangerous means
of transportation (driving) for a safe one (flying). Fist tap Arnach.
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