The Department of Homeland Security adds next to nothing of value that the government would not already be doing. It needs a manager, not a security theorist.
On Kristi Noem, I don’t have much to add to our editorial and to the observations by Rich and Jim — and Jeff, who was right on this over a month ago — other than to congratulate Audrey for her great scoop (make that scoops) regarding the miasma wafting over the Department of Homeland Security during the now former secretary’s grift duet with “Chief” Corey Lewandowski.
I would just throw into the mix my oft-repeated curmudgeonly point that the job from which Noem’s ouster was overdue should not exist. Her department should not exist.
DHS is a vestige of Congress’s reaction to 9/11: Let’s look like we’re doing something by creating a new bureaucracy. In this instance, it created two: DHS and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.
This was so Beltway: The dominant upshot of investigations into the suicide hijackings of September 11, 2001 — when al-Qaeda jihadists killed nearly 3,000 Americans while demolishing the World Trade Center and striking the Pentagon on — was the uncovering of an intelligence failure. The conclusion was that vital information was “stovepiped,” officials failed to share it across agencies, and therefore the left hand hadn’t known what the right was doing while the jihadists planned for nearly two years, right under our noses.
Much of this was attributable to two self-inflicted wounds. First, the Justice Department’s “wall” which made it difficult if not impossible for intelligence agents (particularly, the FBI’s foreign counterintelligence division) to share information with law enforcement investigators (who, at the time, were principally responsible for counterterrorism). Second, immigration enforcement needed to be tightened: Most of the 19 suicide hijackers (including such notorious jihadists as “The Blind Sheikh,” Omar Abdel-Rahman, whom I had prosecuted in the early-to-mid-Nineties) had entered the United States legally even though their backgrounds, rationales for coming, and activities once here should have raised alarms. If Congress had merely fixed these two things, national security would have been significantly enhanced.
Instead, Washington reacted to the bloated bureaucracy’s failure to share intelligence by creating two new bureaucracies. DHS was going to make sure that intelligence was properly shared in the domestic domain, which is generally a law enforcement thicket; and ODNI was going to ensure that the existing intelligence agencies — more than a dozen of them — communicated effectively.
Since the topic du jour is DHS, I won’t belabor the record with more on what a politicized waste ODNI is.
Politics made DHS a failed experiment from the start. To do what its sponsors conceived it would do, DHS would have to have seized much of the FBI’s turf. Beyond its law enforcement mission, the bureau had long been the nation’s domestic security service countering foreign threats; it was never going to give up that preeminent role without a fight. In the event, the FBI had plenty of allies on Capitol Hill and in the executive branch to ensure that it won.
Hence, DHS was created absent the mission that was the rationale for its creation. It became, instead, the executive org-chart version of the Island of Misfit Toys.
DHS became the catch-all for nearly two dozen agencies, including a number whose original departments were not altogether unhappy about shedding them (e.g., the Immigration and Naturalization Service — which was overhauled — from the Justice Department, and U.S. Customs and the Secret Service from the Treasury Department), plus such other outliers as the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which had been independent, and the Coast Guard, which had been part of the Transportation Department.
In a classic example of planning for the last war instead of the next one, the Transportation Safety Administration was also established and stuck in DHS. And what would yet another security bureaucracy be without yet more superfluous intelligence components? DHS of course created one, and, for good measure, also added an Office of Strategy, Policy, and Plans.
After nearly a quarter of a century, it’s probably too late to put this genie back in the bottle. And it’s not like we don’t need many of the missions that DHS now oversees. The question is whether we need DHS, specifically, overseeing them. Obviously, immigration laws have to be enforced (benefits for lawful aliens, prosecution and removal of illegal aliens). While that could be done by the DOJ (which still handles immigration adjudication matters anyway), immigration is significant, esoteric, and multifaceted enough that it may warrant a stand-alone department. The Coast Guard is a hybrid in that it does some civil law enforcement and some search and rescue, but also some security operations that are military in nature; in fact, the Coast Guard often operates as a service of the Navy in wartime, but its peacetime missions still need a bureaucratic home.
Other duties that DHS has assumed need doing, such as emergency response, fire protection, countering weapons of mass destruction, cybersecurity, and infrastructure protection. That said, much of what DHS does on domestic security is duplicative of the FBI’s responsibilities in the DOJ, and most of its other missions would make sense under DOJ auspices.
And then there’s history: For the most part, DHS has been counterproductive. Illegal immigration exploded and border security collapsed in the years after 9/11. The intelligence and strategic-planning components were instrumental in blinding our national security personnel. DHS downplayed the terrorist threat and our understanding of it by recommending that words like jihad be avoided. It saw Muslim Brotherhood–rooted Islamist organizations as community partners rather than community problems, which led to the shift in enforcement philosophy from counterterrorism to “countering violent extremism” (a shift that downplays the sharia supremacist ideology that drives terrorism by rationalizing that any ideology, taken to an extreme, can lead to violence). And it suggested that there was a major domestic terrorism threat fueled by Christians, conservative proponents of limited government, parents concerned about woke indoctrination in the schools, and soldiers returning from battle.
If I had my druthers, I’d eliminate DHS and assign its necessary responsibilities to other departments. If I had to keep it, I’d have it specialize in border security and immigration enforcement, while paring down its enforcement and counterterrorism operations and eliminating its duplicative, oft-politicized intelligence function. Of course, none of that is going to happen. Indeed, the so-called One Big Beautiful Bill Act added a staggering $190 billion in funding for DHS (through 2029), mostly for its core border and immigration missions.
But here’s the major point: The importance of the Department of Homeland Security is exaggerated because it has the term “homeland security” in it. In reality, homeland security is chiefly the responsibility of the military and intelligence services on the foreign front, and of the FBI and Justice Department (along with state and municipal law enforcement agencies) domestically. DHS does not add much of value that couldn’t be had by these other arms of government were there no DHS.
Nevertheless, DHS has inherited many government agencies and, as Audrey’s latest bombshell illustrates, doles out millions upon millions of dollars in government contracts. The upshot is that what it most desperately needs in a secretary is an expert in government management — a technocrat familiar with the labyrinth that is federal procurement and contracting, along with a depth of knowledge in federal immigration law and experience dealing with state law enforcement and security agencies.
I don’t have an informed view of whether Senator Markwayne Mullin (R., Okla.) fits that bill. His lack of experience with federal bureaucracy would worry me far more than his lack of a bachelor’s degree. But he seems to have been informed, savvy, and hardworking enough to build a successful business nearly from scratch. That suggests that he is detail-oriented — something he’ll need.
Like my NR colleagues on The Editors podcast, I’m surprised that a senator would want the job, but that status probably makes him a relatively easy confirmation, which the president needs. And being from Oklahoma means he’ll be replaced in the Senate by another Republican, which the president also needs. There have been some ethical questions raised about Mullin regarding outside income during his time in the House. On first blush, they strike me as stale and not particularly notable in the scheme of things, but I confess I haven’t delved into them. Clearly, though, given that a major self-dealing scandal seems to be brewing at DHS thanks to the Noem–Lewandowski tenure, Senator Mullin will need to show that he’s a break with the past, not more of the same.
In any event, don’t be taken in by the “homeland security” title. The job needs a good manager, not a cutting-edge national defense thinker.