Get Rid of the Department of Homeland Security. DO IT NOW!

In 2002, during the post-9/11 scare, the United States government created the Department of Homeland Security by combining 22 different organizations (such as the Federal Emergency Management Agency [FEMA], Customs and Border Protection [CBP], the Secret Service, Immigration and Customs Enforcement [ICE] and Transport Security Agency [TSA]) across the spectrum of security responsible programs.

When the program was originally announced President Bush promised that the program would improve security but not expand government, however the president's promise for the self-sufficient and lean-costing never came to be and the department's spending went from $27 billion to $54 billion within 10 years.

These kinds of agencies, such as the TSA and FEMA are more known for their outrageous internal scandals than their contributions to the safety of America.

The TSA, in the time it has existed, has never caught a terrorist, even though that was their sole purpose! Terrorist attacks have not stopped, things haven't gotten better for Americans, the TSA just makes travel hell on earth for Americans.

Also, the Department of Homeland Security has stockpiled over 1.6 billion hollow-point bullets, over 7,000 NATO-grade Assault Rifles, and 30-round magazines. These weapons are not the kind of semi-automatic firearms we are allotted as citizens. They are not under the same restrictions.

That kind of stockpile is estimated to be enough to fight a 24 year Iraq War.

Also, only 39% of the Department of Homeland Security's workers say their department's leaders "maintain high standards of honesty and integrity". I may be alone on this, but if there was one characteristic of an internal-security agency's leaders that is reigning over me, it would be just that.

They're also failing to do just the thing that the entire program was designed to do. Chris Edwards put it thusly;

"One might have hoped that putting a layer of expert DHS officials over top of the 22 agencies would improve governance, but it has not. Consider FEMA, which had been a stand-alone agency before 2002. It had already been known for sluggish responses to disasters, but FEMA’s performance during Hurricane Katrina in 2005 was worse than ever."

 As a department, they have also funded many wasteful projects including, but not limited to;

• Radiation Detectors: DHS spent $230 million over five years on radiation detectors for cargo containers before withdrawing the project as a failure in 2011. The GAO and NAS were highly critical of DHS’s handling of the project.

• Full-Body Scanners: TSA spent hundreds of millions of dollars installing and operating Rapiscan scanners at U.S. airports, but research by a team led by Keaton Mowery of University of California, San Diego, found that the scanners were easy for terrorists to foil. The machines were withdrawn in 2013, but a different type of body scanner is now widely used. Mueller and Stewart find that such scanners fail a cost-benefit analysis “quite comprehensively.” As for the TSA, it did not bother to perform a cost-benefit analysis of full-body scanners before rolling them out nationwide.

• SPOT Program: TSA spends about $230 million a year on the Screening of Passengers by Observation Techniques (SPOT) program, which tries to catch terrorists by their suspicious behaviors in airports. In a 2012 report, GAO found that TSA “deployed SPOT nationwide before first determining whether there was a scientifically valid basis” for it. TSA also did not perform a cost-benefit analysis of SPOT. In a 2013 report, GAO found that there is little, if any, evidence that SPOT works, and recommended that the program be cancelled.

• High-Tech Border Control: CBP spent $1 billion on the SBInet virtual fence project for a 53-mile portion of the Arizona-Mexico border. The project, which involved video cameras, radar, sensors, and other technologies, was begun in 2006 and cancelled in 2011 as a failure. Another high-tech system for the Arizona border is now moving ahead, but its effectiveness is in doubt.

Whenever you have a government agency or program that grows large, which seems to happen far too often, there is a notable record of the department becoming corrupted, aggressive, and power-hungry. (Just look at the FBI and NSA.) So, if I may, does it seem aggressive, corrupted, or power hungry to 

• TSA is teaming with state governments to put checkpoints on highways to perform searches of trucks for drugs and other items.

• DHS provides grants to towns and cities for license plate readers and video surveillance systems. DHS is working to gain nationwide access to license plate databases based on the local reader systems.

• DHS provides grants to towns and cities to purchase military-style equipment for their police forces, such as heavily fortified vehicles and sound cannons. Just a comment, if the union is suppose to run on the civil disobedience and protest of its citizens, why use these kinds of things? The answer is that the leaders don't want change, and they shouldn't. However, we should.

• DHS provides grants to towns and cities to purchase aerial drones, and it uses a growing number of drones itself. Why does an internal security agency need drones?

• DHS gave a grant to Tacoma, Washington, to buy a Stingray device that “sweeps up records of every mobile telephone call, text message, and data transfer up to a half-mile from the device,” said one Bloomberg Businessweek story. This type of equipment is becoming widely used by police across the nation, which I am not comfortable with.

 So now, Americans have a program that's suppose to protect them form terrorism, but is instead interrogating suspected movie pirates, seizing NBA counterfeit merchandise, and working Albuquerque pickpocket cases.

On top of which, they are being abusive and aggressive to the citizens of America.

So how do we solve problems like this?

FEMA as a whole is corrupted, slow, and bureaucratic and, although is a nice idea, has failed to work as a federal system. I believe that the best way to handle this would be to completely abolish the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Then, leave disaster relief to the private sector in partnership with state and local governments. Also, we must learn to band together as individual communities during times of need, instead of relying on a shaky government.

If you're worried about travel security, then there can still be travel security, but make that a privatized system as well, which has shown success in Europe and Canada.

We should abolish the coalition of security agencies that we currently have and let them tend to their own personal areas. Destroy the bureaucracy and, for now, move to reform each area individually based on the current situation of their program.

So I am officially casting my own, small but existent, hat into the ring as many Americans have done, to once and for all abolish the DHS.

That's all for today, I'll be back tomorrow with another post.

"I'm not too sure what 'I love you' means. I think it means 'Don't leave me here alone'." -Neil Gaiman