It is time to break the Department of Homeland Security.

Many lessons and warnings can be drawn from President Trump’s dispatch of heavily armed federal agents to quell protesters in Portland, Oregon, but one of them is that it is time to destroy the Department of Homeland Security.

DHS was a sham from the get-go. It was created by Democratic Senator Joseph Lieberman, who proposed the new department in late 2001, just after the September 11 attacks, as a way to demonstrate that Republicans in the White House were not the only ones trying to fight terrorism. . . President George W. Bush opposed the idea as he believes he is burdening the government with another bureaucratic layer. But later, the September 11 Commission hearings revealed that Al Qaeda managed to topple the World Trade Center in part because the FBI, CIA, and other agencies had shared no information about the kidnappers’ movements prior to the attack. Coordination and consolidation were suddenly seen as nostrils to our problems.

Then, under pressure, in late 2002, Bush signed Lieberman’s idea. DHS ended up adding 22 agencies from eight federal departments, with a combined budget of $ 40 billion and a payroll of 183,000 employees, in a hydra-headed giant.

Ironically, agencies that had mishandled intelligence before 9/11 were not included in this summary. The CIA and FBI were powerful enough to maintain their independence, although they strengthened or created counterterrorism offices and narrowed the lines of communication. Instead, components of DHS – FEMA, the Secret Service, the Coast Guard, various immigration and customs offices, and a Pentagon agency dedicated to cyber security, among others – had performed different functions. Grouping them together as one entity did not make the fight against terrorism or the performance of any other mission more efficient.

In fact, it made government less efficient. For example, prior to consolidation, the head of FEMA had been a cabinet-level official, a member of the National Security Council who attended inter-agency meetings and had direct access to the president. This official is now DHS Under Secretary. The DHS clerk can closely follow just a few of the dozens of issues the department covers. If emergency management is a top priority, then that undersecretary particularly at least has indirect access to the top; If not, the mission is largely ignored. This may have been one of the reasons why the Bush administration responded so slowly to the great natural disaster of 2005, Hurricane Katrina.

Before DHS, the U.S. Customs and Border Protection, which supplies most men brandishing heavy weapons and firing tear gas at protesters in Portland, was handled by two separate agencies: the Customs Service. From the US and the US Immigration and Naturalization Services These were independent, fairly professional agencies with clear authority over limited jurisdictions. Now merged with Customs and Border Protection and derived from DHS, it is a large law enforcement agency with a mandate as narrow or as broad as the Secretary of Homeland Security decides. And as the current secretary, Chad Wolf, is a interim Secretary, whose nomination has not been submitted to the Senate and who therefore does not have to be accountable to Congress or the public, CBP armed agents can behave like Trump’s bully squad.

Is what they are doing in Portland illegal? Probably. Who will order them to cease and desist, or block Trump from sending similar troops to cities across the United States, as he has threatened? We will see.

In any case, Trump would have had a hard time doing this if DHS didn’t exist. The CBP chief, or the chiefs of customs and INS, if they were still independent agencies, would not have been as open to political pressure from the White House and could have withstood such pressure on the basis of suffocating disorder in American cities (if there is disorder) does not fall within the reach of those agencies.

There are already federal agencies, outside of DHS, that have the mandate and training to help control urban crime, if asked to do so. The FBI can intervene to investigate or stop violations of federal law. The Justice Department’s Office of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives can stop the illegal sale of weapons. * But that’s not what Trump is doing in Portland. He says he has unleashed DHS troops to prevent protesters from destroying federal buildings and statues, acts that hardly warrant a quasi-military response in any case.

Defense Secretary Mark Esper has expressed concern about this response. “There are some law enforcement officers who wear uniforms that make them appear military,” Pentagon spokesman Jonathan Hoffman said Tuesday. “The secretary has expressed concern about this, within the administration, that we want a system where people can tell the difference.”

Esper has dissociated himself from some of Trump’s actions since the protests began two months ago over the police murder of George Floyd. He ordered the active-duty armed forces, which had been deployed near Washington, to return to their home bases. More recently, he banned the display of Confederate flags at U.S. military installations, and has said he would be willing to rename the 10 Army bases that currently bear the name of the Confederate generals, a now-popular lawsuit that Trump has embraced. Fervently opposes. (Trump has said he would veto this year’s defense authorization bill if he orders a name change. The House has passed a bill that does; the Senate bill, to be voted on soon, contains a similar measure).

A more explicit establishment criticism of Trump’s actions in Portland comes from Tom Ridge, the former Republican governor of Pennsylvania and, more pertinently, Bush’s first secretary of national security. In a radio interview Tuesday, Ridge said DHS “was established to protect the United States from the ever-present threat of global terrorism. It was not established to be the President’s personal militia.”

The department was never well designed to carry out the first mission, and it’s easy enough for an autocratic president, like Trump, to use it as the last. Time to tear it apart.

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