WASHINGTON — In the 10 years since the creation of the Department of Homeland Security, the United States has not suffered a major terrorist attack. That’s one measure of the sprawling department’s success, but observers said the agency has a lot of room for improvement.
“I believe, without a doubt, the evidence is we are safer from the threat of terrorism because we created the Department of Homeland Security,” said Asa Hutchinson, a former Republican congressman from Arkansas who served on the transition committee that helped create the agency and was the department’s first undersecretary for border and transportation security.
But success has come at a price - the agency has spent a half-trillion dollars over the past decade.
“Is it more efficient and effective - that’s a debatable topic,” he said. “You’re achieving more efficiencies, but you’re spending more money overall, so where are the cost savings?”
Just more than a year after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, President George W. Bush signed legislation creating the department on Nov. 25, 2002. Called the largest reorganization of the federal government since creation of the Pentagon in 1945, the department pulled together 22 federal agencies.
In its first year, the agency had 180,000 employees and a $31.9 billion budget. This year, its budget surpassed $55 billion and the number of employees in its ranks swelled to more than 225,000. In the 10 years since its creation, the agency has spent more than $500 billion in taxpayer money.
The agency has many critics, including some small-government conservatives, such as Meredith Bragg and Nick Gillespie of the Reason Foundation. The two, who work for the nonprofit libertarian think tank, argued in a recent column that despite all that spending, the agency “is never really on top of its game.”
Others, such as the American Civil Liberties Union’s Michael German, argue that the agency is a threat to privacy.
Starting out, German said, “their imperative seemed to be ‘do something,’ rather than ‘do something effective.’ They’ve struggled to carve out an area where they can be helpful.”
German, a former FBI agent who serves as the ACLU’s senior policy counsel, said the fact that there hasn’t been a successful terrorist attack since its creation doesn’t mean the agency has a spotless record.
“You could have made that same argument on Sept. 10,” 2001, before the al-Qaida attacks, said German, who called for a thorough review of the agency’s performance.
Particularly disturbing to German and others is a bipartisan report published in October by the U.S. Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs’ investigation committee that slammed the department’s operation of “fusion centers.” Those centers are stations that house federal, state and local law enforcement officers to share information across jurisdictional lines.
The department could not provide an accurate tally of how much it had spent on the centers. Internal department estimates ranged from $289 million to $1.4 billion between 2003 and 2011.
The report said Department of Homeland Security workers in the centers “forwarded ‘intelligence’ of uneven quality - oftentimes shoddy, rarely timely, sometimes endangering citizens’ civil liberties and Privacy Act protections, occasionally taken from already-published sources, and more often than not unrelated to terrorism.”
The report’s findings were not supported by the committee chairman, Sen. Joe Lieberman of Connecticut, an independent, or Arkansas’ U.S. Sen. Mark Pryor, a Democrat.
Another study of fusion centers, published in September by the George Washington University Homeland Security Policy Institute, said the focus on data collection by the Department of Homeland Security at the fusion centers amounted to “white noise” that did not yield enough concrete law-enforcement leads.
Hutchinson, now a lawyer in private practice in Arkansas, said the nation’s borders are “absolutely” more secure now than they were before the agency was created. As the undersecretary in charge of the borders, he made all incoming visitors to the country pass by “one face” of law enforcement, under the department - instead of a hodgepodge of agencies.
Previously, he said, people crossing the border were inspected by representatives of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Immigration and Naturalization Service and U.S. Border Patrol.
“That was a recipe for disaster,” he said. “There was no clear chain of command.”
While, he said, the border is more secure, he was critical of the elimination of his former post, which he said resulted in a bureaucratic “bottleneck” of cases that needed to be dealt with by the Department of Homeland Security leadership.
And, he said, the Obama administration has failed to execute the “exit” portion of the U.S. Visitor and Immigrant Status Indicator program. Under that program, people entering the country must supply biometric data, such as fingerprints, which are then entered into a database.
Because the system doesn’t track people when they leave the country, Hutchinson said, many people - perhaps as many as one-third of the estimated illegal aliens - are in the country because they overstayed their visas.
The agency is making “accelerated efforts” to complete the system, said Matt Chandler, a Department of Homeland Security spokesman.
In May 2011, the Department of Homeland Security reviewed a backlog of 1.6 million potential “overstay” records, he said, and referred leads to the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency for further review.
Hutchinson said critics of the agency need to take into account that the department was created from scratch.
The first months of the department’s existence were chaotic, he said. Employees arrived at the agency’s temporary offices - a mothballed U.S. Navy facility in Washington far from Congress and other executive agency offices - with their own typing paper, because they were told that the agency had none. Because of the agency’s location, meetings were hard to arrange, and employees spent much of the day traveling throughout the city.
“The logistical problems were massive,” he said.
Creation of the department has allowed the United States to take a more “robust and coordinated” approach to national security, said Seth Grossman, the agency’s deputy general counsel. Though the Department of Homeland Security has matured since the hectic early days, Grossman said there is plenty of room for improvement.
“There’s obviously more work to do in an organization as large and as new as the Department of Homeland Security,” he said.
Front Section, Pages 1 on 12/02/2012