Redundant Department - We already have a department of homeland security

George W. Bush should rethink his proposal to create a new "Homeland Security" Cabinet department. Once upon a time — as recently as 1995 — Republicans wanted to reduce the size of the Cabinet, not add to it. If a Homeland Security Agency is truly necessary, the Commerce Department or HUD must be closed down to make room for it. If the Republicans won't shut down agencies that long ago outlived their usefulness, they should at least adopt a policy of no net increase in Cabinet departments.

Creating this new department is likely to be highly expensive (at least $4 billion for just reorganization costs), and it may very well create more, not less bureaucratic overlap and redundancy in Washington. Before Congress signs off on President Bush's proposal to create another new agency, we should consider the inglorious history of new Cabinet departments.

Let's start from the beginning. When the United States government was first founded there were just three Cabinet agencies: a Department of War, a State Department, and a Department of the Treasury. In those founding years of our nation, all domestic government activities, outside of delivering letters, were handled by the Treasury Department. The Treasury Department's first entire budget to deal with all civilian concerns was less than $1 million. Congress now spends that roughly every five seconds.

Today, we have 15 Cabinet agencies — and 13 of them deal with domestic social-welfare issues. Jimmy Carter created two Cabinet agencies: Energy and Education. The education and energy crises deepened after their creation. Both should be terminated. In 1995 the newly elected Republican Congress was going to get rid of three Cabinet departments, Energy, Education, and Commerce, but all of them still remain. The point, of course, is that it would be hard to argue that creating Cabinet agencies solves national problems and in most cases, as with energy and education policy and hundreds of billions of dollars spent, they have made matters worse.

Now, there are strong arguments for creating a Department of Homeland Security. Not the least among these is that by consolidating all border enforcement, intelligence gathering, and national-security concerns under one roof, there should be a lot less duplication of effort and a lot less of the bureaucracy working at cross purposes — which happens a lot in our $2.2 trillion government. Washington has more than 50 job-training programs, more than 60 low-income housing-assistance programs, and some 25 programs for vocational training. Washington invented the Department of Redundancy Department. So there is value in letting Governor Ridge house all these functions under his direct control.

There are a number of problems with the proposal, however. First, and most importantly, we already have a Department of Homeland Security, and it is called the Defense Department. After all, if the Defense Department, which spends some $350 billion a year — or more than twice what any other nation spends on military concerns — isn't spending that money on protecting the homeland, what is it spending these funds on? The very reason we had a 9/11 attack was that our $2.2 trillion government wasn't doing the one thing it is supposed to do, which is to keep us safe from foreign harm. Our Defense Department spends tens of billions of dollars on troops in Korea, troops in the Middle East, troops in Europe, and even Africa. The fact that the Pentagon doesn't have the money or resources to keep our borders secure and to do the intelligence gathering to keep us safe is lunacy. Foreign entanglements have gotten us so unfocused on the real priorities of national security that life-and-death issues like protection from terrorists on the home soil is an afterthought for the Pentagon. Meanwhile, we do have money for "peacekeeping operations" in Somalia, IMF funding for Argentina, and AIDS funding for Africa.

A better solution than creating a new Department of Homeland Security would be to rename the Defense Department the Department of Homeland Security. That will get our priorities realigned with the new realities of the national security crises of this post Cold War world. All expenditures by this new Department should be judged on the basis of whether they enhance our security here at home. Under this plan, we save tens of billions of dollars, rather than spend another $4 to $5 billion.

There is also reason to suspect the size of the bureaucracy will increase, not decrease, under the White House plan. Historically, new Cabinet agencies have not lead to a reduction in bureaucrats in old agencies, but just thousands of new government hires in the new agency. This was true when the Education Department was broken off from the old Health, Education, and Welfare Department, for example.

Finally, the president needs to move away from bureaucratic solutions to the terrorism crisis and take concrete steps to reduce the real and perceived threats of further violence, for example, by tracking down the thousands of known visa abusers who have connections with terrorist cells. Shuffling around chairs in Washington will do little to make Americans safer.

President Bush must recognize that the proliferation of Cabinet agencies over the last 50 years has not solved a single problem in America. And it certainly not helped in any way to increase homeland security. Just the opposite is true. The bureaucratization of government in Washington has weakened and strained the federal government's ability to use its resources at all effectively. As Texas Senator Phil Gramm has said many times before: "A government that tries to do everything, ends up doing nothing well." That is the very essence of our current crisis in national security. When our Defense Department is spending money on breast-cancer research, fruit and vegetable stands, and day-care-center construction projects, priorities in Washington are out of whack.

How ironic that President Bush is now forced to create a new Cabinet department in Washington to do the one thing that government is expected to do above all else: Provide safety here at home.

John,

I agree with your comment to a large extent, though again, I took the gist of the article to be addressing the matters of how wasteful and mindless is the federal government at this time, about which topic you and I have pointed out that, if I may say, we need both guns and butter but not the federal endowments of the lesser performing arts.

The military should not have free reign to act as federal police, but the military ought to be assigned --- actually the states' respective National Guard and Militia units --- as combat units available to function within the states, at the exercising of martial power against the sub-class "terrorist" of the general classification of bad guy known as a pirate, who is otherwise sometimes called an enemy combatant.

An example of the practice of fighting such pirate/enemy combatants, in order to illustrate what I think we should be doing:

At a port (meaning any gateway of travel) a few North Carolinian National Guardsmen should accompany the L.E.O.'s of that port; and whereupon a terrorist is encountered, the area immediately is accepted (under our laws) into being a combat zone ... and our troops can "blow the bad guys away" in the event they "resist." Meaning that the bad guys have the option to surrender immediately and unconditionally, or else, just stated.

The secondary problem for the politico-lawyer / policy-maker class, is that they cannot relieve themselves of their golf-outing - on their mind ... long enough to address the fact that when an pirate attacks, you are at war and the area is a combat zone. It's a difficult concept for the comfortable lawyers to apprehend, this idea that suddenly on an otherwise peaceful landscape, this acerage is now a combat zone, a war zone, subject to the full exercise of martial power which the state and / or federal government may bring to bear in order to subdue the enemy.

That suddenly such politico-lawyer / policy-maker 's incomes are threatened by their not being needed in the matter of what they have traditionally lorded over as criminal acts, as well as the fact that the parsing that is going on, is not by their love of it, but by the exigencies of the sudden requirement that we defend ourselves from enemy combatants, by summarily recognizing the existance of a combat zone in front of our very eyes ... something which is foreign as a concept, to folks who think of warfare as it has been presented in the European fashion, vis a vis, warring nations.

Who wants to think that their neighborhood bus station might all of a sudden be termed a war zone? Well, that possibility always has existed; it's now, this time, has come; it did to New Yorkers, to Pennsylvanians, and Washingtonians --- suddenly, their worlds became war zones.

However, continuing to the primary problem for the politico-lawyer / policy-maker class, and that has been their inclination to agonize in their own waffles with regard to any elevation (in their minds) which makes a terrorist to be a warrior subject to prisoner of war status, which status conveys some honor about which the "common criminality" of a "terrorist" ought not to enjoy the "protection."

But there is no requirement that these "terrorists" be treated as P.O.W.'s; there is no reason to even suffer debate about it.

We have in our history, and the history of warfare and piracy, the solution to the problem, if only we would employ it:

An incident affects who is first in command; basically, either initially the L.E.O.'s recognize combat status or the troops initially do; in either case of which, the other party becomes the accompaniment; effectively, they compliment each other on a first to observe, first in charge course of action.
If by chance, the L.E.O.'s affect an arrest, then the bad guys are subject to our criminal statutes and pertinent due process --- unless the L.E.O.'s hand the bad guys off to the troops, in which case, the enemy has no rights under civil jurisdiction.
Should such on scene commanders, the L.E.O.'s, believe they cannot affect an arrest, then the troops have command, period, and the troops may summarily dispose of the bad guy(s), or affect a martial arrest, in which case the prisoner is to enjoy the due process accorded a pirate.
That is, the bad guy is an enemy combatant subject to the jurisdiction of military courts; and such prisoner(s) do not enjoy P.O.W. status. (For some odd reason, probably the misleadings by film and the failure to read up on authority, the people's, government's, the military, etc., way too many people have the wrong idea that only people in uniform can be tried in a military court ... )
In the event that the troops are the first to recognize, than there is no alternative but their being in charge; the accompanying L.E.O.'s are then effectively active members of the Militia under the command of the on scene military.

The treatment of "terrorists," who are, as a matter of our laws, really pirates (we have traditionally treated them as enemy combatants) is really not all that difficult a problem, if even "difficult" is the word to use, here.

During wartime between warring nations, prisoners of war who are captured out of uniform have been treated just exactly as discussed --- they do not enjoy the protection of P.O.W. status, even though they be members of a foreign power's military.

We try to funnel people through the civilian courts, in order to afford a person the justice system that is a jury of their peers, but that is not an absolute requirement when reviewing the actions of an enemy combatant, a pirate, the group known as "terrorists."

They have been, and are again, and will again be at war with us, and if we are smart about it, we will be at war with them.

If a river barge loaded with terrorist, makes its way to Minneapolis / St. Paul, Minnesota, and they launch a commando raid, that is an act of war and the area is a war zone; the captured (if any) should be treated as enemy combatants, the terrorists they are,that is: pirates. The treatment is summary unless they surrender unconditionally, whence their route to justice under our laws should be by military court; all the while, they do not, ever, enjoy P.O.W. status.

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