Shut Down Homeland Security

Shut Down Homeland Security
By Daniel G. Jennings
The most logical response Congress could make to the federal government’s catastrophic failure to effectively respond to Hurricane Katrina would be to shut down the Department of Homeland Security.
The chaos in the Gulf and in New Orleans proves that the Department of Homeland Security is a miserable failure. It was unable to cope with the disaster and its effects, and unable to help the people of Gulf. While the Homeland Security bureaucracy failed miserably traditional agencies like the military, churches, private charities and business were able to respond effectively.
The conclusion to be drawn from this is an obvious one: the Department of Homeland Security doesn’t work and actually hinders effective response to emergencies. Instead of providing a central agency to respond to crises, Homeland Security is nothing but another layer of bureaucracy that blocks effective government response. Homeland Security combines dozens of agencies that have little or nothing in common. Many of these agencies have functioned effectively for generations or centuries yet they don’t work under the new system.
The United States survived a Civil War, Two World Wars, a Cold War, a Great Depression and hundreds of other catastrophes without a Department of Homeland Security. Why do we need such an entity now? How come the FBI that effectively protected our national security from the Nazis and the KGB can’t stop terrorism? Why does the military that has won dozens of wars need Homeland Security to fight terrorism?
Okay, maybe we need somebody to function as a central decision maker in times of national emergency to allocate resources and make decisions. Oh but the Constitution already provides a person like that, the office is called President. It’s the job of the White House to respond to national crises and provide leadership, not to delegate responsibility to some new cabinet department. With modern communications technology it should be possible for the President and his advisors to monitor and respond to any situation. I.E. instead of asking for a report from Homeland Security the President could pick up the phone and call the folks in the Gulf States and ask what’s going on, or simply turn on the TV and watch the news. So why do we need a Department of Homeland Security or a Secretary of Homeland Security?
The logical conclusion then would be to abolish Homeland Security and go back to the previous system which worked. Unfortunately we won’t be able to expect logical behavior from Congress, especially when there’s a big new bureaucracy to generate lots of pork barrel spending involved.
Shutting down Homeland Security would also create a precedent Congress doesn’t want set if we can shut down one ineffective federal bureaucracy why not others? Why do we need a Department of Veterans’ Affairs (the number of Veterans is actually decreasing as World War II and Cold War vets die off)? A Department of Education or a Department of Transportation (the one federal transportation system Amtrak is a national disgrace)? Or what about lesser agencies, the Bureau of Indian Affairs (shouldn’t Native Americans be able to take care of themselves, they survived just fine without the great white bureaucrats for thousands of years?) for example?
The truth of course is that logic doesn’t apply in Washington only the desire for bigger and bigger government does. I wonder how much more suffering average Americans like the people of New Orleans will have to endure before the politicians get the message that big government doesn’t work. It never has and it never will.