Department of Homeland Security officials will spend nearly $61 billion in 2015 and provide jobs for more than 240,000 people, but odds are it won’t fulfill any of the missions it was given when Congress created it in 2003, according to the Senate’s most ardent foe of government waste, fraud and abuse.
“Based upon the available evidence, DHS is not successfully executing any of its five main missions. Many of DHS’s programs, in fact, are ineffective and should be reconsidered,” said Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., in his final report as ranking minority member of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Government Affairs.
Coburn announced his retirement at the end of the 113th Congress in 2014 due to health issues. He was first elected to the Senate in 2004 and would have been heavily favored to win a third term in 2016 had he sought re-election.
The DHS was created in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks in 2001 and combined operations of 22 federal agencies, including Customs and Border Protection, the Secret Service, Federal Emergency Management Agency, Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the U.S. Coast Guard.
Among the department’s biggest missions are terrorism prevention and protective security, transportation security, border security, immigration enforcement, cybersecurity and disaster recovery.
Despite its huge budget and workforce, though, the Oklahoma senator said DHS is “yielding little value for the nation’s counterterrorism efforts. Independent reviews — including audits and investigations by watchdogs — show that DHS’s intelligence and analysis programs, including its state and local fusion centers and other information sharing programs, are ineffective or providing little value.
“Similarly, oversight of the more than $38 billion that FEMA has spent on homeland security grants — which were originally intended to improve our ability to prevent terrorist attacks—reveals that DHS has not effectively tracked how these funds are spent and federal dollars often subsidizes routine (and in some cases questionable) expenditures by states, localities, and other groups.”
The department’s programs “to prevent chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear attacks have been ineffective and are yielding little value, despite significant expenditures,” Coburn said.
Even though DHS is responsible for protecting chemical facilities against terrorist attacks, the program has experienced significant problems, and 99 percent of all the chemical facilities that were supposed to be overseen by the program had not been inspected as of June 2014. Oversight also reveals problems with DHS’s initiatives to share information with critical infrastructure owners and operators,” he said.
The department is responsible for protecting the country’s borders, but Coburn said years of oversight by government and independent outside groups leaves no doubt that “vast spans of the southern and northern borders remain uncontrolled and are vulnerable to illegal entry.
“In 2014, 700 hundreds of miles of the Southern border were not secure, since DHS and its component … CPB, had not deployed assets to control these areas. DHS has little control at the Northern border with Canada with very few resources deployed and thousands of miles uncontrolled.”
Other problems Coburn identified include:
* The department “is not effectively administering or enforcing the nation’s immigration laws, and only three in 100 illegal immigrants will ever face deportation.”
* The department “spends more than $700 million annually to lead the federal government’s efforts on cybersecurity, but struggles to protect itself and cannot protect federal and civilian networks from the most serious cyber attacks.”
* The department “has spent $170 billion for natural disasters since 2002, in part because of an increased federal role in which the costs of small storms are declared ‘major disasters.’”
* The department has spent $170 billion on FEMA but “oversight of FEMA’s programs shows increasing expenditures with little evidence of value, raising serious questions about the extent to which FEMA’s initiatives are making our nation better prepared for or more resilient to natural disasters.”
* The department’s mismanagement of the EB-5 visa program that allows immigrants to enter the U.S. if they invest between $500,000 and $1 million here has left it extremely vulnerable “to be exploited by criminals, terrorists, foreign government agencies and intelligence operatives, and other adversaries.”
Despite the report’s lengthy recitation of mismanagement, fraud and waste, Coburn expressed confidence in DHS Secretary Jeh Johnson, describing him as “a capable leader, a transparent partner with Congress and committed to making tough decisions and improving the department.”
Go here to read the full report, which was released late Friday.
Mark Tapscott is executive editor of the Washington Examiner.
