Homeland Security's Wasted Billions

The Department of Homeland Security has been marred by mismanagement almost since the day it was established. Since 2003, most of the $30 billion given to states to help protect against terrorism has been wasted on localities that didn't need the funds.

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has been marred by mismanagement almost since the day it was established.  Many parts of it have simply been a pork-barrel trough for states to eat up federal funds.

Just this week, it was discovered that the state of Connecticut had spent its recent grant of DHS funds on, among other things: thousands of coffee mugs for state workers, $15,000 for a television talk-show hosted by the Lt. Governor, and $230,000 for a state-of-the-art patrol boat for a em>recreational harbor in the small town of Norwich<.  New Yorkers should be demanding to know why their fleet of Democratic leaders have done nothing about wasted funds for military boats in Connecticut yacht clubs while federal officials plan to slash New York City’s DHS funding.  The NYC region’s one Republican, Congressman Peter King, has also been the only elected official to take the administration to task over this issue.

Since 2003, DHS has handed out more than $30 billion to states in grants to help protect against terrorism.  Most of the money has been wasted, according to a report by The Heritage Foundation.  It discovered that as of this year, less than half of the money has gone to the big cities that face security threats. Indeed, most of it has gone to states and towns with small populations that don’t need it.  As early as 2004, Alaska received $2 million in DHS funds which the state didn’t know what to do with.  It proposed using the money to purchase a commercial jet for state officials.  The list of pork goes on and on, from brand new hazmat equipment for Zanesville, Ohio to $23 million awarded in 2009 for the New Mexico Institute of Mining.  Congress can allocate homeland security funds, in each year’s DHS appropriation act, and often uses it to cater to their favorite special interest group.  Three months before Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab tried to blow up Detroit, Senator Chris Dodd (D-CT) sought to strip $4.5 million for explosive detection screening at airports from the DHS budget and give the money as a grant to subsidize local firefighter salaries.  Dodd’s union backers were happy, but airport screening remained weak, as Mr. Abdulmutallab can attest.

Aside from pork grants, DHS has mismanaged its dealings with private contractors.  In 2008, Congress found that more than $15 billion of the projects that DHS hired contractors to work on were a complete waste of money.  They included ships built for the Coast Guard and then immediately junked, and a border security project with Boeing that DHS stopped after blowing $1.5 billion.

While DHS wastes billions of dollars each year, America is dangerously underfunding the vital parts of homeland security.  The Heritage Foundation’s report finds that funds for additional air marshals have been cut, along with a $225 million cut from border security.

DHS needs to be reformed into an effective organization focused on homeland security and not a slush fund for states.  The process of giving annual grants to states and municipalities should be either done away with or be cut down to only a dozen or so localities to ensure that the legitimate security needs in major cities are addressed.

Next, Congress needs to define what “homeland security” is.  Is it defense against terrorism, or subsidizing firefighter salaries?  Any spending outside of that defined mission needs to be eliminated.  DHS should then be broken up.  The bigger a government institution is, the harder it is to manage.  The idea after 9/11 was to have all of these organizations under one roof so that they could easily coordinate with one another.  Instead, DHS turned into a bloated bureaucracy too big for one Secretary of Homeland Security to control, and with too many appropriations spent in one annual congressional appropriations bill.  That’s one reason why Connecticut’s Lt. Governor can use DHS dollars to pay for his talk show and say it benefits homeland security: it’s too big to scrutinize.  TSA (transportation security) should be an independent organization, as should ICE (immigration and customs).

The Department of Homeland Security has been a case study in how gigantic government organizations are poorly run and incredibly wasteful.  DHS needs to be completely reformed, so that it can do what it was designed to do: protect Americans.