The Sept. 11 terrorist attacks left the U.S. with national trauma, two decades of war, and the biggest shuffle of federal bureaucracy in American history.
The Department of Homeland Security took shape in the wake of the devastation, pulling together safety and security functions from across the government. The goal: to ensure a 9/11-style attack could never happen again. DHS has since grown to the third-largest Cabinet department, juggling cybersecurity, climate change, and other emerging threats while continuing to fight terrorists from within the U.S. and abroad.
“We have more terrorists today than we did on 9/11,” Elizabeth Neumann, DHS’s assistant secretary for counterterrorism during the Trump administration, told a Senate panel in August. “That’s very sobering, as a counterterrorism person.”
