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Homeland Security More Problem than Solution?

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WASHINGTON -- The catastrophic terror attacks of September 11, 2001, called for massive, sweeping changes in the bureaucracies that failed to stop al Qaeda jihadists on that darkest of days. So the government went to work to find solutions to prevent a major terrorist attack from happening again.

But some critics feel that when President George W. Bush and Congress created the Department of Homeland Security, they simply came up with an overarching, monstrously unwieldy super-bureaucracy that may have been exactly the wrong solution.

CIA-trained Lt. Col. (ret.) Tony Shaffer, with the London Center for Policy Research, works in the nuts and bolts of intelligence and analysis. He said the new department wasn't necessary.

"All those organizations were functioning very well where they were set," he said. "This is one of those situations where the government fixed something that was not broken."

Concern that many of the departments and agencies guarding the nation weren't working together enough, the Bush administration decided to merge 22 agencies into one giant department called Homeland Security.

Steve Bucci, now with the Heritage Foundation, worked for years as the Pentagon's representative with Homeland Security. He said the changes happened too fast.

"Frankly, it was slapped together quickly -- a ton of different organizations," he said.

According to Bucci, often a high-level official at Homeland Security doesn't really have the power he or she needs to issue orders to these agencies.

"He has to sort of cajole them into doing things rather than direct them," he told CBN News. "That's really a difficult way to get anybody organized."

Shaffer used to run successful black ops that wreaked havoc on the Colombian drug cartels. He said because so many agencies dumped their most unqualified or troubled people into Homeland Security at the start, he's not sure DHS could pull off those kinds of missions.

"Many of the organizations that donated people to DHS wanted to basically use it as a dumping ground to get rid of people who they thought were not the best performers. So when you take that as the baseline, it all goes downhill from there," he said.

Both Shaffer and Bucci worry the DHS is way too big and made up of parts that will never fit together well.

Imagine one department trying to oversee so many different agencies staffed by nearly a quarter-million employees.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection alone has a staff of more than 60,000, and the U.S. Coast Guard has nearly that many. Immigration services and FEMA add another 60,000 or so. The Secret Service's 6,000 get shoehorned in there.

Finally, there's the agency so many Americans love to hate: the Transportation Security Agency with more than 55,000 workers.

"Just the size of it and the way it was put together from so many different parts have left a lot of overlap in some areas and gaps in others," Bucci explained. "They're still sorting that out, which at this point so many years later, you would think they'd have that worked out, but they don't."

Shaffer said Homeland Security has so many functions, it's difficult to figure out its actual mission.

"Yogi Berra once said, 'If you don't know where you're going, it's going to be hard to get there.' And so, this is very much the case for DHS," he said.

The primary problem it was supposed to address remains unsolved: agencies not sharing intelligence.

"Some of it is the old 'information is power, and if we have it and we're working this issue, we don't necessarily want to share it with those other guys because then they might get the credit,'" Shaffer explained.

He says insiders tell him "sharing of information and data today is worse than before 9/11."

Making it even harder is the crushing amount of congressional oversight.

"Those 22 agencies that were put into one now still have to report to over a hundred different congressional committees for their oversight," Bucci explained. "It's really hard to get good when you have that many people looking over your shoulder and telling you what to do."

Bucci said that inside there's a toxic culture among employees who know that Homeland Security is rated the worst place in the government to work.

"They're told DHS is the biggest, most bureaucratic organization ever," he continued. "They're told DHS is so inefficient. It's really hard to keep your morale up when you hear that and when you're trying to do a good job, but you keep bouncing off this wall of bureaucracy."

So should Homeland Security simply be dismantled? Bucci votes no.

"It may not be perfect. Backing up now and starting over again I think would probably leave us less safe than what we have now," he said.

Shaffer disagrees. He said the department should be done away with because it's not only dysfunctional, it's actually harmful to its primary mission: the security of America.

"You see an organization which actually is counterproductive to a point I think where it gets in the way of other organizations trying to get their job done," Shaffer said.

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About The Author

Paul
Strand

As senior correspondent in CBN's Washington bureau, Paul Strand has covered a variety of political and social issues, with an emphasis on defense, justice, and Congress. Strand began his tenure at CBN News in 1985 as an evening assignment editor in Washington, D.C. After a year, he worked with CBN Radio News for three years, returning to the television newsroom to accept a position as editor in 1990. After five years in Virginia Beach, Strand moved back to the nation's capital, where he has been a correspondent since 1995. Before joining CBN News, Strand served as the newspaper editor for