Last May, I contributed to a Center for a New American Security report called “Reforming the Department of Homeland Security.” Authored by former federal prosecutor Carrie Cordero, the report wisely recommended updating DHS’s legislative mandate, developing transparent guidelines for its domestic operations, mandating management changes to facilitate internal oversight, and exercising better congressional oversight.
CNAS’s good advice was not taken, as shown by the long hot summer DHS has endured thus far.
Whichever presidential candidate prevails in November, the next executive will have to determine what to do about the crisis in the government’s third-largest department. Here is a suggestion that, in view of events subsequent to its publication, goes beyond those contemplated in CNAS’s report: consider dissolving DHS.
The far-left aside, no one seriously suggests getting rid of DHS’s 22 components. Many serve critical functions, and their fine public servants possess deep expertise. The Coast Guard has saved lives for 230 years. The old Customs Service was established by one of Congress’s first acts. Many DHS components can return to departments that once hosted them, such as the Treasury Department, in the case of Customs and Border Protection. New ones such as the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency might be welcomed by the Departments of Defense or Justice, or by the intelligence community.
The DHS, despite the best efforts of good people, remains a conglomerate of fissiparous entities. It never cohered or developed an institutional culture as a single department. The department was an understandable response to Sept. 11. While President George W. Bush might have sacked officials on whose watch the attack happened, in individual cases, this made no sense: The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff was to retire in weeks, and the FBI director was sworn in the week before. Instead, a new bureaucracy was set up, seeking to knit together disparate functions, such as aviation security and immigration enforcement, that failed to coordinate and stop the attack.
Emblematic of compromises surrounding the establishment of DHS, despite a stated mission of stopping the next attack, it lacked legal authority to collect human intelligence or lead criminal investigations of terrorism. Arguably unrelated missions such as cyberdefense and emergency management were tacked on.
To be fair to DHS, despite strong early defense secretaries such as James Forrestal and George Marshall, aided by respected Joint Chiefs chairmen such as Omar Bradley, it still took 40 years for the Department of Defense to gel as an entity leading just four uniformed services. Defense only became “joint” after the Goldwater-Nichols Act of 1986.
Not only has DHS never had the jointness of the military’s assignment system and unified combatant commands, but it also lacks anything similar to a Joint Staff, which coordinates across that department. Instead, DHS is 22 feudal fiefdoms. DHS secretaries such as Jeh Johnson and John Kelly, who had military backgrounds, attempted to operationalize DHS’s joint task forces, but they were successfully resisted by component chiefs defending resources and turf.
Also unlike the Pentagon, where the Office of the Secretary of Defense staff is (if anything) too big, the secretary’s office at DHS consists of a handful of individuals. It is more like the front office of a small local business than a department with 240,000 employees worldwide and a $52 billion budget. This is the vestige of a penny-wise and pound-foolish decision by Republicans who, in the days before the GOP yawned at multitrillion-dollar annual deficits, insisted that DHS have a very small headquarters.
Again unlike the military, whose seniors cultivate close relationships with powerful congressional armed services committee and defense appropriations subcommittee chairmen, oversight of DHS is divided between an astonishing 108 committees. Coherent oversight for DHS is the only recommendation of the bipartisan 9/11 Commission Report that has never been implemented.
And then came President Trump.
In the past, appointees to security-related Cabinet departments, while political, took pains not to appear too partisan. The military nearly forgot this during its show of force in Lafayette Square in June and then reacted as if it touched a hot stove. But DHS, which is ironically in the process of physically relocating to Washington’s former mental hospital at Saint Elizabeth’s, has doubled down on the crazy. It is morphing into an intensely ideological law enforcement department, operating at best on the ragged edge of the law.
In the Trump administration, DHS went from the debacle of enforcing Trump’s initial travel ban to separating migrant children from their mothers and housing them in more than questionable conditions (before actually losing some of the poor kids). In both cases, objectionable policies were sprung on DHS by the White House and Justice with little or no warning, leaving DHS holding the bag.
But more recently, DHS on its own steam deployed Customs and Border Protection officers, with little relevant training and less legal authority, heavily armed and in military uniforms without identifying name tapes or patches, to street-fight with protesters and rioters in Portland. The U.S. attorney in Oregon demanded an investigation of the DHS deployment, and in any case, courthouse security is a matter for the Justice Department’s Marshals Service.
Most recently, DHS’s analysis section was illegally collecting intelligence on journalists. These reports were, ominously, disseminated in baseball card format, as our military does for high-value targets captured or killed as actual, not rhetorical, “enemies of the state.” The acting undersecretary responsible was merely transferred within DHS.
Between now and Inauguration Day, the state of DHS might deteriorate further to the point that it cannot be put back together again as a nonpartisan law enforcement entity. DHS also cannot be wound down in a day, and its leading career professionals should receive good posts elsewhere in government. But by the 20th anniversary of its founding in 2022, DHS’s components should be returned to whence they came.
Kevin Carroll served as senior counselor to the secretary of homeland security and chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, law clerk to a US district judge, and a CIA and Army officer. Kevin is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog.
