And now for number 8:

No. 8: Redesign the Department of Homeland Security

The creation of DHS was not a mistake by way of concept, but it has been a huge mistake by way of design. As it now exists, DHS cannot make America safer; it can only make us more vulnerable. It is a clear and present danger to us all.

The original proposal for a Department of Homeland Security—developed before 9/11, by the way, by the Hart-Rudman Commission on whose staff I served for more than two years—recognized the need for some coordinating mechanism for domestic security comparable to the National Security Council for American national security policy in the wider world. We had our three main border security agencies—the Border Patrol, the Customs Service and the Coast Guard—in three different Executive departments (Justice, Treasury and Transportation). This made absolutely no sense. Also, the INS was an internal contradiction: half of its job was keeping certain people out of the country, and the other half of its job was letting certain people in. You don’t have to be a management professional to see how stupid this was.  

The original DHS proposal was to amalgamate these three relatively small agencies into one new Executive Department, and bring FEMA in, as well, to serve as its organizational framework. FEMA always had a small Washington footprint, with most of its assets pushed out in its ten regional centers, close to where problems and their first-responders were. The idea was to create a DHS that, like FEMA, had a small Washington presence and that pushed resources and responsibilities out to the regions. This was subsidiarity and common sense at work.

There was no good reason to make DHS more centralized than that, anymore than, on the foreign policy side, the NSC needs to swallow the Defense and State Departments and the intelligence community. There would be an EOP (Executive Office of the President) office for domestic security comparable to the NSC, and the new Executive department, DHS, could be comparable in size to, say, the Department of Education, or maybe even smaller.

That’s not what happened. There is an EOP office for homeland security, but DHS as it exists today is a bureaucratic monstrosity, a slow and ponderous behemoth that has not one hope in a million of operating within the decision cycle of terrorist adversaries who want to strike us in our homeland. It has swallowed other agencies whole, and buried them beneath multiple layers of bureaucracy. 

Even so, DHS does not control more than 25 percent of what the government spends on homeland security. It is a textbook case of how not to align strategy, resources and operational capacity. DHS is also understaffed for its size, which shows you what happens when people who don't really believe in government design a new department or agency. This has led it to depend overwhelmingly on contractors, but its staff is even too small to manage that right.  What a mess.

DHS today is not reformable anymore than it is manageable. It needs to be ripped apart, and reconfigured according to the original design. As it stands, DHS is more a liability to our security than it is an asset.