 It's now my privilege to sign the Homeland Security Act. The Department of Homeland Security will have nearly 170,000 employees. The threat of mass murder on our own soil will be met with a unified, effective response. So the Department of Homeland Security, DHS, is celebrating its 20th birthday, which is a perfect opportunity to rethink the whole concept of Homeland Security and how to best provide it. DHS has grown into a monster child that is massively expensive, incredibly ineffective, and reliably destructive of basic civil liberties. It's time to abolish it and replace it with fewer, smaller, and more accountable agencies. In the wake of the 9-11 attacks, President George W. Bush called for the creation of a new cabinet-level department whose primary mission is to protect the American homeland. By pulling border security, emergency services, and immigration into a single streamlined bureaucracy, Bush promised that the new department would improve efficiency without growing government. Instead, we got politically manipulated color-coded terror alerts that only made it easier for late-night comedians. The threat level is now magenta. The DHS budget now stands at $82 billion, or almost double its original cost and inflation adjusted dollars. Are there really twice as many threats to the homeland as there were when the embers at Ground Zero were still smoldering and the global war on terror was just ramping up? In the early days of the war on terror, Washington was obsessed with the idea that the 9-11 attacks happened because different agencies, notably the CIA, FBI, and NSA, didn't communicate with each other. Hence the idea of a unified Homeland Security structure. The critics of DHS noted from the start that it didn't actually reduce bureaucracy or streamline much of anything. It just added a new layer of red tape on top of existing agencies while creating new ones, such as the Customs and Border Patrol and Immigration and Customs Enforcement, both of which have become legendary for callousness and root-level failures. Similarly, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, FEMA, has gone from catastrophic failure in New Orleans all the way to catastrophic failure in Puerto Rico, updating its long-standing stumble-bum reputation for the 21st century. In a new report, FEMA admits failures occurred in its disaster response to Hurricane Maria. The 2019 Inspector General report called out DHS for failing to rein in bad behavior, ranging from padding expense accounts to drinking on the job to illegal reprisals against sexual harassment whistleblowers. The report concluded no one was really in charge of organizing and inspecting reports of employee misbehavior. President Biden has boasted that DHS has almost 260,000 employees, yet its HR department told the Inspector General it had limited staffing to perform these functions, and staff do not believe they are responsible for managing the allegation process. Perhaps worst of all, DHS is a determined foe of civil liberties. As the ACLU documents in a new study of the department, DHS routinely undermines our ability to speak and move freely about the very country it's supposed to be protecting. For instance, since immigration enforcement became part of a national security agenda, ICE agents encourage local police to stop arrest and bring low-level charges against people who look like immigrants, with the actual aim of helping ICE deport them. Something like an immigrant isn't against the law, and it shouldn't be a pretext for a police stop. And when we talk about DHS, of course we have to talk about the Transportation Security Administration, TSA. Oh, of course the brilliant TSA! Which you might refer to as thousands standing around the testicle-squeezing agency or any number of different euphemisms. Despite very occasional positive headlines, the TSA rightly looms large in the public imagination as a make-work program gone horribly wrong. Famous for forcing mothers to drink their own breast milk, scaring children, and pantsing the elderly, the TSA reportedly spends as much as $667 billion per life saved. On its 10th anniversary, two conservative Republican members of Congress even denounced the TSA, saying the degraded security theater it imposed on travelers did not improve on the safety protocols that were in place before 9-11. DHS's mission is simply too vast to accomplish. Having been tasked to do so many different things, from processing immigration checks to responding to natural disasters to checking passengers on every flight in America to stopping terrorism, it ends up doing all of them poorly. It would be better to break those functions up into smaller agencies that are directly accountable to departments that existed prior to 9-11. As Richard A. Clarke, a 30-year veteran of security positions in the Defense Department, State Department, and White House has suggested, it makes sense to create a smaller group tightly focused on terroristic threats that would work directly with the FBI in the Office of National Intelligence. Preserving the status quo, he writes, will only perpetuate the mistakes made in the panic trauma that followed 9-11 and doomed these important missions to continued mishandling and lack of success. As it celebrates its 20th birthday, it's time to blow out the candles on DHS.