The Department of Homeland Security - What's It Good for?

Tonight's vote in the House to extend full DHS funding for another three weeks failed, and failed by a good margin - 224 to 203. There is time for another vote before DHS funding runs out at midnight, but I would not bet that Speaker Boehner can turn enough of his rebellious members to pass an unamended bill tonight.

Would it really be such a great big deal if DHS went into a 'shutdown' mode while Congress, the courts, and the President duke it out over the latter's refusal to deport millions of illegal aliens?

Maybe DHS is the only thing that stands between us and a terrorist invasion of the Mall of America, like Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson says. Or, maybe we wouldn't miss it much if it were gone for a while.

As Foreign Policy magazine asks, Who Needs the Department of Homeland Security Anyway?

With two days left until funding for the Department of Homeland Security dries up, Jeh Johnson has been pleading with Republicans to save his department from a partial shutdown.

That job might be easier if the 12-year-old department weren’t so widely derided on Capitol Hill and beyond for its size and clumsiness.

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[E]ven the entreaties of the two Republican heavyweights weren’t enough to stop a letter campaign by 30 House conservatives urging House Speaker John Boehner to “stand firm against these unlawful executive actions” and reject an emerging funding deal brokered by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell.

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[That deal] may be a tough sell, in large part because Johnson’s dire warnings about the impact of a budget cutoff ring hollow. One reason is practical: 80 percent of DHS employees are deemed “essential” to national security and would still show up to work in a shutdown — albeit without pay. All core functions of agencies such as Customs and Border Protection, the Transportation Security Administration, and the Secret Service would remain intact; the only people from the department’s 240,000-person workforce who would be furloughed would be 30,000 nonessential employees, mostly office workers.

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But another reason for the lack of urgency boils down to one word: respect.

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The fact that the FBI, the agency tasked to “protect and defend” against “terrorist and foreign intelligence threats” is housed outside DHS indicates the department’s awkward and uncertain place in America’s national security bureaucracy.

“DHS’s biggest problem is that it is still less than the sum of its parts,” said Daniel Byman, a professor of security studies at Georgetown University and a contributor to Foreign Policy. “The whole point of it was integration of homeland security functions, but it is still a divided organization with few synergies — so it has the problems of a big organization without the benefits.”

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“The irony in that complaint [referring to blame-shifting by DHS's defenders] is that the very reason DHS was founded was to deal with the problem of insufficient coordination within the government,” said Jeremy Shapiro, a fellow at the Brookings Institution. “If DHS failed to solve that problem, it’s unclear why it exists.”

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Another concern is that the department, forged in a fearful post-9/11 environment, owes its existence to a wildly exaggerated understanding of the terrorist threat to the United States. As Charles Kenny, a senior fellow at the Center for Global Development, has pointed out, Americans are substantially more endangered by threats such as infectious disease, gun violence, and drunk driving than terrorism. In fact, the odds of being killed in a terrorist attack in the United States or abroad are 1 in 20 million.

“This low risk isn’t evidence that homeland security spending has worked: It’s evidence that the terror threat was never as great as we thought,” wrote Kenny.

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Although a shutdown still looms, most observers expect House Republicans to cave in to political pressure and pass a “clean” funding bill by the end of the week. Either way, at a time when U.S. media attention on terrorist threats is at an all-time high, it’s ironic that a department dedicated to homeland security has such a hard time justifying its existence. And until it finds more solid footing within the national security bureaucracy, that problem isn’t likely to go away soon.

It turns out that "most observers" were wrong about the House Republicans caving by the end of the week. What happens next is anybody's guess, but, regardless of whether DHS get full or only partial funding, it would be nice if we finally figured out why it exists at all.