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Rep. Dan Goldman, a New York Democrat, proposed this week to cut off all funding for the Department of Homeland Security until it “reins in the authoritarian ICE secret police.” It’s a good idea but far too modest. A better proposal would be to dismantle the Department of Homeland Security altogether.
Its creation, back in 2002, was seen by many as a mistake at the same time, and that apprehension has only been deepened. In fact, the problems with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, painfully obvious to nearly everyone, are in many ways a product of the issues with DHS from its outset.
DHS began as a bill by Sen. Joe Lieberman, not long after the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, to show that Democrats could be as hard-nosed as Republicans about fighting terrorism. The idea was to take every federal agency even remotely involved in counterterrorism and combine them into one super-department.
Then-President George W. Bush initially opposed the legislation, saying it would just pile on another layer of bureaucracy. But the 9/11 Commission, a much-respected independent board of inquiry into the catastrophe, concluded that al-Qaida had succeeded in mounting the attacks in part because the FBI and CIA hadn’t shared intelligence about the hijackers’ prior movements. The commissioners overstated the case, but consolidation took hold as a popular nostrum, and Bush gave in, signing Lieberman’s bill into law.
Ironically, the agencies most culpable for failing to coordinate their intelligence—the FBI and CIA—were left out of the new department (largely at their adamant insistence) and responded to the crisis instead by beefing up their counterterrorism units and tightening their lines of communication. Meanwhile, the new DHS subsumed 22 agencies from eight other departments, holding a combined budget (back then) of $40 billion and a payroll of 183,000 employees. (DHS’s total budget for last year amounted to $178 billion—$74 billion of it added in President Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act—making it the third-largest federal department, trailing only the Departments of Defense and Veterans Affairs.)
Before DHS, those 22 agencies had been performing distinct functions. There was no guarantee that smooshing them together would make them more efficient; rather, it has made each of them less effective.
Several of the agencies had been headed by officials with the standing of Cabinet secretaries, who, as a result, could focus on their missions and make their arguments for certain programs or more money directly to the president and congressional committees. This is no longer the case. The secretary of homeland security, even a good one, couldn’t possibly have the time or energy to focus on more than two or three departmental missions. The neglected domains are left to assistant (or deputy assistant) secretaries, who have little clout or access to push their case or propose changes or improvements.
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This has had several consequences. First, nobody of any real talent wants the job of secretary. (The current occupant, Kristi Noem, is less talented than most, but none of her predecessors made a name for themselves at the job.) Second, the underlings—which in pre-DHS days used to be their agencies’ top dogs—are even weaker magnets for talent; the whole enterprise is a breeding ground for drudgery and politicization.
Which brings us to ICE. Before 9/11, issues surrounding border security were handled by the Immigration and Naturalization Service and the U.S. Customs Service. Lieberman’s bill fused those two into a new agency, Customs and Border Protection—with Immigration and Customs Enforcement created as an initially small internal police force—then jammed them all into the hydra-headed monstrosity that is DHS.
In the old days, INS and Customs were independent law-enforcement agencies, run for the most part by professionals. Now they’ve been corralled into a political department, with its secretary overburdened for the job and its second- and third-layer directors utterly bereft of independence, power, or regulated links to overseers in Congress or elsewhere in the bureaucracy. It’s no surprise that it has morphed into a goon squad for Trump’s anti-immigrant, anti–blue state agenda.
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Back in 2019, during his first term, when Trump began to unshackle the agency’s reins to run rampage on migrants and herd their children into cages, Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez argued that DHS should be abolished. Republicans scoffed, as they tended to do with anything the newly elected, self-declared democratic socialist had to say. Strategist Karl Rove called the idea “moronic, stupid, naïve, and dumb.” Liz Cheney, still a Republican leader in the House, before her post–Jan. 6 awakening (and subsequent expulsion from the Grand Old Party), deemed it “absolute irresponsibility.”
The reaction was knee-jerk. They had forgotten, or perhaps just chosen not to remember, the department’s crossbred beginnings, which many of their own party-mates, including the reigning Republican president, denounced as a jury-rigged contraption ill suited to meet the crisis of its time.
Ocasio-Cortez stood her ground, tweeting amid the controversy:
It’s really not that radical. When DHS was 1st formed … many members of Congress were concerned—incl GOP—that we were setting up a ticking time bomb for civil liberties erosion & abuse of power. Discussing reorganization shouldn’t be out of the question.
She was right then; she’s more clearly right now. This is not, or anyway should not be, a partisan issue.
