Lieberman’s folly

In an interview with Isaac Chotiner, Carrie Cordero explains that the creation of the DHS was been a disaster, expanding the capacity available to an authoritarian president:

D.H.S. is less than twenty years old—it was formed after 9/11. If Donald Trump had wanted to do this, but there was no Department of Homeland Security, what would he have done? And how has D.H.S. changed the capabilities that Presidents have?

It would have been a lot harder. What D.H.S. has done is combined all these different entities that perform different functions. The purpose of the department was really to protect against terrorism. That was the main mission focus when the department was created, in 2002. Then what’s happened is, over time, it fell into being the largest law-enforcement force in the country. When you count all of the federal law-enforcement officers that reside under the big umbrella of D.H.S., there are more than sixty thousand of them. That dwarfs any other federal law-enforcement agency, including the combination of the F.B.I., the D.E.A., and the A.T.F.

I don’t think that’s what Congress actually intended. What they were trying to do was to enable better coördination in order to protect against homeland-security threats. They didn’t intend to create a national police force. That happened through a combination of factors, including the sheer size of the law-enforcement force available within D.H.S. and its ability to use its deputizing authority—because D.H.S. has legal authority to deputize officers to perform other functions and to assist in other law-enforcement activities. That can have a useful function if you’re trying to bolster manpower to respond to a particular threat, but the department is using that in a very, very robust way to marshal all of its law-enforcement capacity to serve this political agenda, which here is to have a show of force in cities that the President interprets to be needing more “law and order.”

And then you layer on top of that two things. One, there are very, very weak internal controls within D.H.S. itself. For example, there’s no overarching set of law-enforcement guidelines. There’s no coördinating mechanism for oversight and accountability. Each agency component has its own different oversight functions, but there’s nobody coördinating that at the secretary level. And then you layer on top of that the high turnover in political appointees and the President having gutted the Senate-confirmed leadership of that department. And you end up with a politically malleable leadership willing to use this robust law-enforcement force and capacity.

These consequences may have been largely unintended, but they’re real. There will be a lot on the plate of the next Dem Congress but breaking it up should be a serious consideration.