Abolish the Department of Homeland Security

The Trump transition team on Wednesday announced that he is nominating South Dakota governor Kristi Noem as the next head of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). In the coming weeks, we’ll hear a lot about Noem’s personal politics and origins. We’ll also hear about how the DHS is, as the AP puts it, “one of the biggest government agencies that will be integral to his vow to secure the border and carry out a massive deportation operation.”

Unfortunately, all this misses the most important point about the DHS which is that the DHS was invented in 2002 to justify more government spending, to reward political allies, and to influence local governments with federal grants.

For voters who supported Trump because they thought a Trump presidency might actually reduce government waste, they should now be asking why Trump is appointing any new DHS head at all. The only thing Trump should do with the DHS is abolish it.

For younger readers, or people with terrible memories, this might sound radical or extreme. But, I can assure you, dear reader, that the United States somehow managed to get along for more than 225 years before this department was created twenty-two years ago by Congress and the Bush Administration.

Much of what the Department does today was not new in 2002, of course. The federal government already had a border patrol, and it already collected tariffs on imports. The Coast Guard was alive and well. The Secret Service already existed, as did various agencies related to nuclear energy and the inspection of agricultural projects.

But, the DHS has always been more than just a reorganization of existing agencies. The DHS has overseen new slush funds for domestic police departments. It is the DHS that has largely facilitated the militarization of local police forces. As Wired put it in 2020, “the Homeland Security Grant Program has funneled billions of dollars to law enforcement agencies to acquire military-grade equipment.”

Nonetheless, the creation of the DHS has done nothing to make the border more secure, or to facilitate the enforcement of tariffs. The DHS has never been necessary to patrol US coastal waters. Rather, federal bureaucrats and elected officials pursued the creation of this new enormous government department for political reasons.

The DHS was created to be a cabinet-level agency, and the thing about cabinet-level status is that the move makes it easier for the bureaucrats in charge of the agencies to politically agitate for more government spending in their favor, and to push bigger government in general. It’s no coincidence that as the US government has grown ever larger and more intrusive, so has the number of cabinet-level agencies. So, now we have the EPA, the SBA, and the departments of HUD, Energy, and Education all provided with more direct access to the president and the media. Everything they do is deemed “essential.” Everything they do, we’re told, is a matter of national importance.

DHS is no different. When the 9/11 attacks occurred, they exposed the sheer incompetence, laziness, and inefficiency of government security and defense organizations. Year after year, hundreds of billions of dollars were poured into these organizations — in addition to the countless billions spent on the Pentagon. But when they were shown to be asleep at the switch, what happened? Rather than have their budgets cut, and senior officials fired in droves — as should have happened — George W. Bush and his cronies decided that what the federal government really needed was a new department into which billions more in taxpayer money could be poured.

The was politically important in the sense that making DHS a department made it easier to call for every more funding for its constituent agencies.

It has certainly worked.

Prior to the creation of the DHS, “homeland security” functions were rarely funded at levels exceeding $20 billion per year. Since 2002, though, federal spending on these functions—now consolidated into the DHS—has soared. Since 2001, the total budget for these activities has nearly tripled, rising from $28 billion in 2001 to $112 billion in 2024. (That’s in inflation-adjusted 2023 dollars.) Since the Cold War ended, by the way, spending on so-called homeland security has increased by more than six-fold.

Since 2001, has it really become almost three times more expensive—in inflation adjusted terms, mind you—to patrol the border, to collect tariffs, and to check luggage for guns at the airport? It is difficult to see how.

What we do know is that the DHS has become an important pass-through for government largesse. Some of this goes to local governments, and these dollars give the federal government more power by providing yet another carrot the feds can hold out to local politicians. Billions more goes into the FEMA black hole which spends prodigiously on federal agents who use DHS dollars as a means of punishing their political opponents.

While the Department was created in response to the 9/11 attacks, the Department does nothing to address anything like a 9/11-style attack. All the agencies that were supposed to provide intelligence on such attacks — the FBI for instance, which failed miserably on 9/11 — already exist in other departments and continue to enjoy huge budgets. Meanwhile, the Transportation Security Administration — an agency that has never caught a single terrorist—has managed to smuggle at least $100 million worth of cocaine.

Once upon a time, “homeland security” was supposed to be the job of the Department of Defense. but, it seems the Pentagon has been too busy in Ukraine or Iraq to trouble itself with the defense of the borders and airspace of the United States. In spite of having been freed of its responsibility for “the homeland,” however, the Pentagon’s budget just keeps getting bigger. In 2024, it was at a thirteen-year high and remains—in inflation adjusted terms—above the levels of Reagan’s Cold War spending spree. Pentagon spending is up by 57 percent, inflation-adjusted, since 2001.

There is no doubt, however, that heading the Department in Washington will be great for the career of Kristy Noem. She’ll get invited to cabinet meetings, go on national TV, and generally enjoy the pampered life of a high-ranking bureaucrat. Meanwhile, American taxpayers will pay more and more, in depreciating dollars, for yet another federal department.

Originally Posted at https://mises.org/

zerohedge
Economics , News , Politics , Science
December 7, 2024
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The Miserable Cost Of An Open Border

Authored by Seth Barron via RealClearPolitics,

The Biden-Harris experiment in dissolving the U.S. border has wrought massive changes to American society, most of which will not be understood for years, if not decades. Since 2021, U.S. border officials have had at least 10 million “encounters” with migrants, many of whom were allowed to enter the country. There is no telling how many more aliens entered the country without encountering enforcement agents. The population of the United States may have increased by as much as 15 million people in just a few years.

This massive flow of humanity crosses multiple national borders, involves every mode of transportation, accounts for billions of dollars paid in fees to smugglers, and describes a fantastically complex economy of suffering and hope. In an effort to get a handle on this human tide, noted muckraker James O’Keefe – known for his hidden camera “gotcha” interviews with abortionists, media executives, progressive nonprofit executives, and other degenerate types – traces the migrant onrush from its source, and seeks to trace the machinery of profit and influence that is conducting it from great removes.

“Line In The Sand,” the resulting documentary, is a remarkable and humane exposition, revealing perspectives and images American audiences have mostly been prevented from seeing. O’Keefe and his intrepid team begin on the U.S. side of the Mexican border, where we witness migrants crossing the border through holes that their guides have cut in a fence that serves as a target as much as a barrier. Infrared cameras show dozens of illegal aliens streaming toward “pick-up” vehicles on the U.S. side while smugglers – presumably cartel members – a few feet away taunt O’Keefe and his group. “What if I were to run up to them right now, what would happen?” O’Keefe asks his guide. “I would highly advise you against that,” he is told, in a classic understatement.

The fact that coyotes and other human traffickers are paid to assist northbound migrants with their passage is no scandal; we all know what their motivations are and why they are doing what they do. But O’Keefe documents multiple examples of U.S. Border Patrol agents standing idly by while illegal aliens cross, virtually under their noses. “Why aren’t you doing anything?” he asks. “Have a good day, guys,” a border agent desultorily responds before driving off in the general direction of the episode. Later, a migrant stands in front of a Border Patrol truck, clearly trying to alert the agents of his intention to surrender, but is studiously ignored until O’Keefe and his team call their attention to him.

There is a kind of sad comedy in the operations of U.S. border security, and O’Keefe is not unsympathetic to the absurd position that border agents have been put in. Trained to defend the national border and to serve as the first line of defense of American soil, these agents have been recommissioned as a perverse Welcome Wagon for illegal aliens, charged with making their undocumented and uninvited entrance to the United States as commodious as possible.

Looking to get deeper into the heart of this migratory avalanche, O’Keefe went deep into Mexico, to the city of Irapuato, about 150 miles northwest of Mexico City. Irapuato is a popular railway junction where thousands of migrants climb aboard “La Bestia,” or “The Beast,” a cargo train that chugs northward toward the United States. In the film’s most remarkable footage, O’Keefe and his team join with migrants, mostly from South and Central America, to ride The Beast, also known as “el Tren del Muerto,” or the Train of Death. O’Keefe talks to the migrants without condescension, asking them their destinations and what they plan to do when they get there, and their concerns about the perilous nature of the journey. We see the film crew race to jump on a moving train and clamber on top to sit in a pile of coal; O’Keefe is shocked at how truly dangerous this small element of the trip is and sympathizes with the migrants’ difficult choices. These scenes are among the film’s most affecting, along with the crew’s random encounter with a little girl who had just crossed the border after journeying from Guatemala by herself. There is a human dimension to illegal immigration, and O’Keefe does not ignore it.

However, there is also an impersonal dimension to this massive population transfer, and O’Keefe determinedly aims to uncover it – to put a face to the institutions and administrators that benefit from the rough injection of millions of people into American society. From government agents to bus companies to nonprofit resettlement groups to private contractors running huge, walled compounds housing thousands of children, O’Keefe doggedly tries to penetrate the mechanics of a system that resolutely hides itself behind a screen of silence, usually in the name of “safety” and “privacy.”

Some of the film’s more comical moments pertain to these segments, such as when the team follows some just-arrived Chinese migrants in San Diego to an employment agency, where other Chinese aliens, already in the country for several months, complain that it’s much harder to live in the United States than they had imagined. O’Keefe tries to sniff out a connection between the owner of the agency and more powerful actors, but it emerges that there really isn’t much going on; in fact, the owner asks O’Keefe if he knows of a way to apply for government grants.

Elsewhere, O’Keefe tries to get information about the operations of several huge residential centers for unaccompanied minors and tries to spin their refusal to give him access to the centers or submit to interviews as evidence of the existence of vast, government-funded child sex trafficking networks. But it seems more likely, though no less troubling, that the open borders policy of the last four years has created a tremendous humanitarian crisis of alien children roaming the continent by themselves, and the government is probably trying to keep them from becoming prey to sex traffickers while they sort out where to send them. Though O’Keefe does not uncover a salacious network of child predators, his vigorous pursuit of the truth does reveal the existence of a large, shadowy, government-funded, and lucrative system of child “welfare.”

So, “Line In The Sand” is correct in the larger sense that billions of dollars are being spent managing this human flow, and many people are getting rich off of it. The last thing these parasitical administrators of the nonprofit industrial complex want is for the border to close. O’Keefe does a great job of capturing in real time the corruption of a local New York City nonprofit called La Jornada, whose leader, Pedro Rodriguez, evidently perpetrates fraud, demanding fees for services that the city provides for free. O’Keefe also sends a Spanish-speaking reporter undercover into the Roosevelt Hotel, New York City’s main processing center for newly-arrived migrants, which offers him free housing, medical care, and even airplane tickets, even though the reporter explains that he has no identification of any sort. How, O’Keefe asks, in our post 9/11 security-obsessed era, are we to make sense of a system that admits millions of unvetted foreigners into the country, and then offers to fly them anywhere they care to go?

“Line In The Sand” is rough in parts, but intentionally so. Its subject is so sprawling and tangled that a neat and clean representation would be a lie. Even with a nine-figure budget – which this film assuredly did not have – a documentary about the border and the 30 million-footed human swarm that has crossed it would be messy and incomplete. But James O’Keefe and his small team have done something remarkable. They have taken on the decade’s biggest story, given it form, and preserved the humanity of its subjects. It is worth watching.

Seth Barron is a writer in New York and author of the forthcoming “Weaponized from Humanix.”

Tyler Durden
Sat, 12/07/2024 – 17:30