Dept of Homeland Security is Broken

[Doug]

The Department of Homeland Security has wasted and mismanaged billions in taxpayer dollars and is plagued by internal criminal activity, a study released on Wednesday reveals.

Five years after it was created to help coordinate America' security apparatus, the DHS continues to suffer from massive failures. According to a report by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, the department's border agencies are rife with crime, its employee morale is at a dangerous low, information technology is obsolete, and several programs are either mismanaged or overrun.

"The Department of Homeland Security is an embarrassment that would be comical if only our national security were not at stake," said Melanie Sloan, executive director of CREW. "The agency and its leadership must be held accountable for its failures and pushed to do better."

Within DHS, wasteful spending is seen as ubiquitous. CREW highlighted at least $178 million that was spent on a failed Coast Guard Deepwater program, more than $600 million allocated for unworkable radiation border scanners, and $1.3 billion devoted to a US-VISIT program that was never implemented.

But it's not just the money. The Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agency of the DHS has been haunted by smuggling, bribery, sexual misconduct, assault and theft of government property by its own employees. As the CREW report notes, rather alarmingly, "The former head of internal affairs at U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services thought the problem was so severe that he began complaining to Congress about rampant corruption that he claims remains un-probed".

Read the rest here.

[Barbara Fitzpatrick]

DHS was designed to show the voters that the Rs are right - government IS the problem. It's really been hard work - the president said so - to convert an efficient organization governing over 300 million people into something dysfunctional enough that they could pull out St. Reagan's schtick agian.