Homeland Security - Government Out Of Control

Just when you think that you have seen it all from a government waste and inefficiency perspective, you get blown away by more waste and more inefficiency. Today's blog is based on a recent Washington Post investigation by Dana Priest and William Arkin entitled "Top Secret America - A Hidden World Growing Beyond Control." They took a long, hard look at the homeland security, counter terrorism, and intelligence gathering function of the U.S. government. What they found is quite startling:

• 1,271 government organizations and 1,931 private companies work on the nation's safety.
• About 854,000 people work on the the safety of America, 50% more than the population of Washington D.C.
• 33 building complexes (not buildings, complexes) have been built or will have been built since September, 2001 just in the Washington D.C. metro area.
• Redundancy is rampant with the article giving the example of 51 Federal organizations and military commands, across 15 U.S. cities, just trying to track the flow of money among terror networks. Unknown is whether these 51 entities do anything about the flow, or they just track it as stated in the Post article.
• The public budget part of all this effort is estimated at about $75 billion a year, two and half times what it was prior to the 9-11 attacks. The total budget is probably more but classified.
• Soon after the 9-11 attacks, the Defense Intelligence Agency's staff rose from about 7,500 employees to 16,500 people today, the National Security Agency budget doubled, and 35 FBI Joint Terrorism Task forces became 106.
• Over two hundred new Federal agencies, all somehow related to counter terrorism, intelligence, or homeland security were created since the attacks on 9-11.
• Every day the National Security Agency intercepts and stores 1.7 BILLION emails, phone calls, and other types of communications, most of which are never viewed much less analyzed.
• Intelligence analysts publish over 50,000 intelligence reports a year, a volume so large that many are just ignored.
• While Congress created the Office Of The Director Of National Intelligence (ODNI) to bring the whole intelligence effort together after 9-11, it did not give the office any legal or budgetary power which meant that all of the independent intelligence agencies more or less continued to do their own thing and to defend their turf (e.g., the Defense department moved budget around to get it out of the reach of ODNI, the CIA reclassified some of its information to keep the information away from ODNI, etc.)

You get the idea, immediately after 9-11, with Congress randomly throwing over a $100 billion at the problem in a very short time frame, things got out of control very fast since 1) there does not seem to have been any overall plan and 2) there was enough money to go around to do anything you wanted in the absence of an overall plan. Where did this chaotic political class and government approach get for us? Consider some direct quotes from the article:

• "I'm not aware of any agency with the authority, responsibility, or a process in place to coordinate all these interagency and commercial activities."
• "It's impossible to tell whether the country is safer because of all this spending and these activities. It lacks a synchronizing process, it inevitably results in message dissonance, reduced effectiveness, and waste.
• "We consequently can't effectively assess whether it is making us more safe."
• "CIA Director Leon Panetta said he's begun mapping out a five year plan for his agency (CIA) because the spending levels are not sustainable."
• "The ODNI doesn't know exactly how many reports are issued each year, but in the process of tyring to find out, the chief of analysis discovered 60 classified analytic Web sites still in operation that were supposed to have been closed down because of lack of usefulness."
• "Who has the mission of reducing redundancy and ensuring everybody doesn't gravitate to the lowest hanging fruit? Who orchestrates what is produced so that everybody doesn't produce the same thing?"
• "The data flow is enormous, with dozens of databases feeding separate computer networks that cannot interact with on another."
• "The problem with many intelligence reports, say officers who read them, is that they simply re-slice the same facts already in circulation."

You get the idea. Mountains of data (one person interviewed for the article said God is the only one who knows everything about our intelligence apparatus) and very little actionable information. Data systems that do not talk to each other. Redundancy everywhere. Turf battles around every corner. Years to just fix one agency (CIA), assuming everything goes right. Totally unknown which parts of the whole security apparatus is effective and which parts are just wasting taxpayer money or actually gumming up the flow of information. In other words, another grandiose political class effort that started off with high hopes and very quickly sank into the abyss of failure and waste.

Speaking of failure, what do we get for all of this money? Last fall, a U.S. Army major went off at Fort Hood, indiscriminately opening fire and killed 13 people while wounding 30. The sad part of this tradegy, according to the article, was that an agency within our security apparatus was supposed to be looking at terrorism threats within the ranks of the armed forces. Data actually existed on this major, indicating that he might be a threat. However, this agency decided to do something else outside of its charter, even though other parts of the security network were already doing this outside work. As a result, the data on the major was never turned into information and 13 people are dead as a result.

Last Christmas, the so-called underwear bomber almost blew up an airliner over Detroit and failed only because of a faulty bomb and the quick actions of another passenger. The $75 billion security apparatus did not stop the bombing. However, the $75 billion security apparatus in this country actually had all of the facts/data about the bombing scheme at its disposal but again, never turned it into actionable information. But, according to the article, "nobody put them (the data points) together because, as officials would testify later, the system had gotten so big that the lines of responsibility had become hopelessly blurred."

There really are a number issues at work here.

1. First, much like the rest of what the political class touches, nothing works in this country and it does not work at great expense.
2. Second, we have no way of knowing how effective each dollar spent is in order to start making our dollars work harder in order to stop allowing shootings at Army bases, underwear bombers, etc.
3. Third, it appears we have been just plain lucky so far. The underwear bomber and the Times Square bomber failed because of their incompetence, not because of our intelligence efforts and counter terrorism effort.
4. Fourth, with our wide open borders, would not some of those 845,000 people be better used to control the flow of potential terrorists into our country rather than having them rework the same facts over and over in their offices in D.C.? Just as a fantasy, assume that you could do the whole U.S. security process with half of the people we currently use. You could then take the other 427,000 people, divide them into three eight hour shifts and would be able to place one person every 70 feet along the U.S./Mexican border 24 hours a day. I would wager that this deployment would have more anti-terrorism value than what these 427,000 people are doing today in their cubicles.
5. Finally, there is a truly George Orwell/"1984" type danger lurking below the surface. With 854,000 people looking outward for terrorists, how long will it be before some unscrupulous politicians decide to use this security apparatus to start looking inward at American citizens? If what the article claims is true, that this is a process that is too big, too cumbersome, too inefficient to be tracked today, who is to say that some George Orwell shenanigans are not already going on, infringing on the rights of innocent Americans? The potential loss of freedom and privacy with such a bad operation is very high indeed.

This is why several steps from "Love My Country, Loathe My Government" need to be implemented as soon as possible. Step 1 would start reducing the Federal budget 10% every year for five years, including the intelligence budget. This is the only way to drive out redundancy and useless work, via the budgeting process. The trick is to make sure that the budgets dried up result in leaner and better remaining functions. Second, Step 34 would remove all members of any Congressional committee responsible for our intelligence community for having allowed this travesty of waste to take root and grow out of control. Steps 20 - 22 would relook at the Patriot Act and its related tentacles and hopefully, put in place the right safeguards and criminal penalties so that turning this massive security apparatus onto an innocent American citizen would likely not happen. Remember, out of control government is never a good thing for freedom and liberty.

Our new book, "Love My Country, Loathe My Government - Fifty First Steps To Restoring Our Freedom And Destroying The American Political Class" is now available at www.loathemygovernment.com. It is also available online at Amazon and Barnes and Noble. Please pass our message of freedom onward. Let your friends and family know about our websites and blogs, ask your library to carry the book, and respect freedom for both yourselves and others everyday.

Also visit the following sites for freedom:

http://www.cato.org/
http://www.reason.com/
http://www.robertringer.com/
http://www.realpolichick.blogspot.com/
http://www.flipcongress2010.com/