Interesting piece at the Boston Review website that raises a basic question: Are we having the wrong argument about the Department of Homeland Security? As Tom Barry makes clear, the answer is yes.
The DHS is the “third largest federal department is hugely wasteful, unaccountable, unmanageable, and emblematic of governmental mission creep,” he writes. And yet,
President Obama has kept increasing the budget and expanding the reach of DHS—his most recent initiative is to increase the department’s role in cybersecurity through $6 billion in contracts with major military and intelligence contractors including Lockheed Martin and Booz Allen Hamilton.
The logic of this is questionable at best, he says, given that there is a “disjuncture between the department’s core mission and its actual operations,” demonstrated by the current debate, which “has largely ignored the DHS counterterrorism mission” and has “revolved around the traditional divides over immigration policy.”
“This is unfortunate,” says Barry, because it has shifted focus away from the proper question, which is whether a Department of Homeland Security, in its current form, even makes sense
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Hank Kalet 