One of the lasting legacies of 9/11 that continues to affect the daily life of every American is the Department of Homeland Security. It sounds like something out of a bad dystopian novel, and it is: given its sheer size -- over 225,000 employees -- massive expense (estimated at $55 billion in 2010), and vast political reach, its very existence has fueled endless X-Files conspiracy theories. It is the perfect foil for every argument that all the U.S. government needed to cement its control over the population is a major attack that would scare Americans so witless they would sign their lives over to the gray men of the national security bureaucracy.
If only the government were that efficient or far-sighted. Alas, the truth is more mundane: the reality is that DHS is a colossal and inefficient boondoggle, an institutional over-reaction similar to Jimmy Carter's panicky creation of the Department of Energy in response to an energy crisis that came and went in the 1970s. Enough time has passed that other ill-advised policies that were adopted in the heat of the post-9/11 moment have been discarded or scaled down: the Patriot Act, for example, was renewed only in parts (although still too many), rather than in toto, by the Obama administration. It is time to reconsider the role and expense of Homeland Security -- or whether it should even exist.
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