DHS is a big, unnecessary mess.

On May 9, I posted some excerpts from previous posts and comments addressing my views on the Department of Homeland Security. I asked readers to remember the basic themes presented therein. For the purposes of this post, here are some of those themes:

• DHS is ill defined and no one knows what it does.
• The Homeland Security Act’s main feature was NOT the creation of DHS but a massive reorganization of the federal bureacracy.
• As a result of the Homeland Security Act and creation of DHS, the federal bureaucracy is a big mess which has yet to be sorted out.
• This creation/reorganization resulted in further confusion and red tape and inefficiency and thus hurt efforts in the war on terror.

Affirmation of these themes has come from Clark Kent Ervin, who was the first Inspector General of DHS. According to the DHS website,

Congress enacted the Inspector General Act of 1978, as amended, to ensure integrity and efficiency in government. The Homeland Security Act of 2002, as amended, established an Office of Inspector General in the Department of Homeland Security (Department). The Inspector General is appointed by the President and subject to Senate confirmation.

The Inspector General is responsible for conducting and supervising audits, investigations, and inspections relating to the programs and operations of the Department. The OIG is to examine, evaluate and, where necessary, critique these operations and activities, recommending ways for the Department to carry out its responsibilities in the most effective, efficient, and economical manner possible.

Ervin served in this post from January 2003 through early December 2004. Ervin had strong ties to Bush going back to Bush's days as Texas Governor, when Ervin served as Assistant Secretary of State of Texas and Deputy Attorney General.

During his tenure as DHS Inspector General, Ervin issuing highly critical reports. Gee, I wonder if those had anything to do with his losing the job? When Ervin left office, he was speaking out about the problems at DHS, and now he has published a book, Open Target: Where America is Vulnerable to Attack, which details what he saw as the problems at DHS.

Ervin has been making lots of media appearances lately, and I am going to cite comments from two interviews. On May 2, 2006, Ervin appeared on "Fresh Air," and on May 9, 2006, he was the guest on KERA's "The Talk Show."

Ervin--who, as Inspector General, was in the best position to know--made statements that confirm my opinions. Here are some highlights from "The Talk Show":

[P]art of the problem here is that in our country, rather than solving problems, we have a tendency to create new organizations, to reorganize government in some way, or to slap a new name and logo on existing organizations. That’s exactly what happened with the Department of Homeland Security. That’s exactly what’s happened with the intelligence community, and I’m afraid to say that the Homeland is not secure as a result of either of these reorganizations.

*******

The point I was making is that as you know, in the Homeland Security law, the Department of Homeland Security was supposed to be the central repository for all information from across the intelligence community concerning threats against the homeland. It was also supposed to take the lead on consolidating the dozen different terrorist watch lists before 9-11. The former job, though, was given to the CIA-led National Counterterrorism Center shortly after the Department of Homeland Security was created, and the latter task was given to the FBI, so the two agencies who were responsible for countering 9-11 beforehand, the FBI and the CIA, remain in charge of these critical homeland security tasks all these many years later, and the Homeland Security Department is on the outside looking in. So, as I say, the next time there are indications of a terrorist attack, chances are the department of Homeland Security will be the last agency in government to know about it.

*******

I agree that creating the Department was bungled from the beginning, and that it is clear in retrospect now that creating the Department did not make the homeland safer and, as you say, Katrina was the proof of that. If we were not prepared for something like that, a natural disaster which was not just foreseeable but foreseen, then how prepared could we possibly be for a terror attack when of course there’s almost never any warning or any specific warning of a terror attack before it actually happens?

On "Fresh Air" Ervin was asked about the Senate proposal to dissolve FEMA (which is part of DHS) and create a new agency in its place, and his answer revealed other problems with DHS:

Well, I think it’s another example of what Washington always does when there is a significant political problem, and that is it proposes changes to the organization chart as opposed to actually solving the underlying problem. I don’t think that creating a new agency with a new name will in and of itself make the problems of FEMA go away. The problem of FEMA, in a nutshell, is that it has been underfunded, like the rest of the Department, it has lacked expert leadership, like the rest of the Department, and it has a culture that has not welcomed outside scrutiny and criticism such that there would be concentration on solving the problems that there are. And if there were a new organization, with a new name, and, again, the same budget and the same leadership and the same culture you’d have exactly the same result the next time there’s a catastrophe, whether it’s a man-made catastrophe or a natural one.

(emphasis added). Ervin also gave some specific explanations of why DHS has not made us safer. He told of a test conducted by DHS at airports which resulted in weapons been smuggling on airplanes--after the screening process--40% of the time. He also exposed the truth about a program DHS claims has been a success:

In the port security area–and this is important because every expert agrees that the likeliest way for a terrorist to sneak a weapon of mass destruction into this country would be through our seaports–we are inspecting only about 6% of the thousands of cargo ships that come into our ports every day, and to answer the charge that we’re not doing enough, the Department points to a program called the Container Security Initiative. Basically, the Department has an agreement with about 40 ports around the world now, representing about 70% of the cargo that comes from abroad to the United States, whereby we station our inspectors abroad and they work with foreign inspectors to ensure that those foreign inspectors inspect cargo that we deem to be high risk. The problems is that recent reports–one as recently as just a few weeks ago–point out that only about 17.5 % of the time, less than a fifth of the time, do these foreign countries with which we have these agreements actually inspect cargo that we have intelligence that leads us to believe may be high risk, may contain a weapon of mass destruction. And yet, the Department touts the Container Security Initiative as the antidote to the problem of a smuggled weapon of mass destruction.

As I will discuss in a subsequent post, Ervin saw that time and again, his efforts to improve performance at DHS--which was his job--were met with resistance and questions as to why he was being such a hard ass. On "Fresh Air," Ervin said that DHS was deceiving itself and the public into thinking that we are safer now. When asked why he thought that was being done, Ervin answered,

the people at the Department to this day and during the Ridge years were deceiving ourselves because I think they’re concerned about the political implications for the Department, for the administration, if the average American were to know just how vulnerable we remain.

(emphasis added). And that, folks describes almost everything the Bush administration has done and continues to do.