Things I Would LIke To See In 2009: Funding Reduced For the Dept Of Homeland Security

TW: This article summarizes well my feelings on the Dept of Homeland Security. Starting with the term Homeland which has always had an Orwellian stench to me, the DHS has been a bi-partisan sinkhole for money providing minimal actual security. Yet I am highly confident the department will only grow not shrink regardless of whom our POTUS is now or in the future. There is never a constituency to reduce crime fighting regardless of the spending inefficacy.

From the New Republic:
"...although Chertoff has performed impressively in an impossible job, the department is hard to justify with any rational analysis of costs and benefits. On the contrary, it's arguably one of the most expensive marketing ventures in political history--an enterprise that seeks to make us feel safer instead of actually making us safer. The best argument for DHS is that the illusion of safety may itself provide tangible psychological and economic benefits: If people feel less afraid, they may be more likely to fly on planes. But even if conceived on these terms--as a more-than-$40-billion-dollar-a-year pacifier--the department is hard to defend, since there's no good evidence that it has, in fact, calmed Americans down rather than making us more nervous.

The only way of calming people down is political leadership that puts the terrorist threat in perspective. But, despite efforts by Chertoff to avoid the color-coded hysteria that defined the department in its early days, DHS officials inevitably feel pressure to exaggerate the terrorist threat--scaremongering that creates further public demand for promises of security that can't be fulfilled. And so the very existence of DHS creates a chain reaction of self-justifying insecurity. For this reason, Republicans (who used to be the stiff-upper-lip party of limited government) and Democrats (who don't trust the government to run the war in Iraq and are generally cautious about spending too much on defense) are willing to sink billions into an institutional money pit that has more to do with symbols than substance. Both parties seem incapable of acknowledging an uncomfortable but increasingly obvious truth: that the Department of Homeland Security was a bureaucratic and philosophical mistake."
http://www.tnr.com/politics/story.html?id=5248f065-cbd3-4264-ac58-cffdfd947a22