Has the Creation of DHS Had a Positive Benefit

Homeland Security

It is difficult to assess whether the creation of the Department of Homeland Security has been effective in protection national security. The most obvious issue is that there are a lot of variables at play, and "protecting national security" is a hopelessly vague concept that would have to be operationalized before making such an assessment, in any meaningful empirical way. The DHS was created in 2002 in response to the 9/11 terrorist attacks. The prevailing sentiment at the time was that there were communication failures among different agencies that created gaps in national security, gaps that the terrorists exploited. Agencies that were rolled into DHS included the U.S. Customs Service, INS, the TSA, FEMA, the U.S. Coast Guard and the Secret Service. In that sense, DHS is an amalgam of existing resources, and the main benefit of its creation should have been improved interagency communication (DHS, 2016)

The mission of DHS is "to safeguard the American people, our homeland and our values." This is expressed in three key concepts: security, resilience, customs and exchange (DHS.gov, 2016). There are also five core missions, which are to prevent terrorism, to secure and manage borders, to enforce and administer immigration laws, to safeguard cyberspace, and to ensure resilience to disasters.

Some of these objectives are measurable, some not so much. Preventing terrorism should be measurable, though this would require a specific definition of terrorism. Was the Malheur occupation terrorism? The definition of terrorism is important in determining the success of DHS. There have not been any 9/11s since then, but that was a one-time outlier event, only occurring once. There have been as many events of that scale in the years 2002-2016 as there from 1986-2000, so that is a bad measure. Some sources tabulate close to 100 deaths from terrorist attacks in the U.S. since 9/11 (New America.net, 2016), highlighting that the country is far from safe. Most such attacks, however, were uncoordinated and thus difficult to prevent. There have been over 300 suspects thwarted by domestic security agencies since 9/11, but many were foiled via traditional investigative techniques (New America.net, 2016).

Challenging the ability to measure the effectiveness of DHS is the fact that most of the agencies within DHS were pre-existing. Much of the work DHS does would have been done anyway, in particular with customs and immigration. This makes it challenging to determine what the creation of the agency has actually accomplished. There has been an increase in surveillance from the NSA, and increased security at airports. There have been successes -- incidents like the shoe bomber, for example -- there have been a lot of terrorist attacks as well.

The DHS era has been associated with a decline in civil liberties. Few of the new infringements on liberties actually relate to the DHS, however. The NSA's high level of electronic surveillance has become a concern for those interested in protecting liberties, but they are a different agency altogether. The TSA is part of the DHS, and that is where some liberties have been lost. In particular, privacy at airport screenings has declined, and no-fly lists have infringed on the liberties of those who are suspected but not proven of wrongdoing .