In the Washington Examiner, Gene Healy
suggests that “if we’re going to start downsizing the
Cabinet, there’s a lot to be said for starting with the most recent
addition,” the Department of Homeland Security.
The talismanic properties of the phrase “homeland security”
enable politicians “to wrap pork in red, white and blue in a way
not possible with defense spending,” [David] Rittgers argues. “Not
every town can host a military installation or build warships, but
every town has a police force that can use counterterrorism funds.”
As a result of the “gold-rush pathology” encouraged by the grants
— to offer just one example — the midsize town of Grand Forks,
N.D., now “has more biochemical suits and gas masks than police
officers to wear them.”
The issue isn’t simply waste. DHS largess often threatens civil
liberties and privacy in ways that garden-variety pork does
not.
Over the past decade, homeland security grants have been used in
an apparent attempt to turn Main Street America into a London-style
Panopticon, funding security cameras in sleepy hamlets nationwide.
And, as investigative journalist Radley Balko notes, DHS handouts
also further a burgeoning culture of police paramilitarization,
funding armored personnel carriers for such “unlikely terrorist
targets” as the towns of Adrian, Mich., and Germantown, Tenn.
All this has done very little to enhance public safety — not
that you’d learn that from the agency itself, which is especially
resistant to using cost-benefit analysis. In 2006, a senior
economist at DHS admitted, “We really don’t know a whole lot about
the overall costs and benefits of homeland security.”
As Healy notes, the Republican-majority House recently cut funds
for a new DHS headquarters, and have pledged to make other sizable
cuts in the program, reflecting, perhaps, the influence of the Tea
Party.
