The Department of Homeland Security was supposed to protect Americans from earthquakes, nukes, pandemics, assassins, smugglers, hackers, and hijackers. These are the folks in charge of securing critical infrastructure, meaning everything from voting machines to sports stadiums to the water supply. DHS checks for explosives at airports and border crossings; manages the immigration process and migrant detention centers; helps rebuild after natural disasters; and coordinates intelligence and threat response with the CIA and FBI, as well as state and local law enforcement.
It’s a truly bonkers amount of responsibility, fueled by $80–$150 billion a year in taxpayer money and encompassing an alphabet soup of around two dozen entities, including FEMA, the TSA, Customs and Border Protection (CBP), Secret Service (USSS), Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), Coast Guard (USCG), Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). In a nationally televised address announcing his intention to form the department, Bush said DHS would “unite essential agencies that must work more closely together” and increase “focus and effectiveness.” But the 2002 bill creating the Department of Homeland Security may as well have been called Murphy’s law.
“It was a walking nightmare from the very beginning,” said John Magaw, the founding administrator of the TSA and a former director of the US Secret Service. “It just was not gonna work.”
(A spokesperson for DHS was given ample time to comment on this story but missed multiple deadlines to do so.)
How did the Department of Homeland Security become such a disaster? In recent months, I’ve spoken to a few dozen insiders and watchdogs across every era of DHS, reviewed thousands of pages of documents, and read up on the history and political science behind what makes government agencies effective. An investigation like this one might normally hope to answer the question: Whose fault is this? Who can we point to and fire or malign? But what I’ve found is that those lines of inquiry are irrelevant. This is a boondoggle spanning four presidencies, 11 Congresses, seven secretaries, and seven acting secretaries in a department with very high turnover that oversees 212,000 employees and hundreds of thousands of private contractors at any given moment. It’s not just one person’s fault or a handful of bad apples.
There will always be corrupt officials, lazy civil servants, sociopathic politicians, pedophile teachers, and sadistic prison guards. As James Madison wrote in 1788, “If men were angels, no government would be necessary.” The Constitution’s framers were trying to build a system that would keep the worst human tendencies in check. Evil is banal, yes, but our tendency to blame individuals for bad behavior can distract from the institution incentivizing that bad behavior.
So what is it about this institution in particular that allows wrongdoing to flourish? Why does the Department of Homeland Security suck so much?