The 3 Mistakes That Doomed the Department of Homeland Security by Garrett M. Graff

 The 9/11 attacks showed we were vulnerable. DHS was the wrong response.

 Americans were badly surprised by the 9/11 attacks. But what would have surprised Americans even more during the fall of 2001, in the wake of the terror attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people, is that al Qaeda never successfully attacked the United States homeland again thereafter.

Twenty-five years later, what might surprise Americans now is how little the major government reorganization meant to prevent attacks — the creation of the Department of Homeland Security — had to do with that remarkable track record of success.

 

In fact, amid President Donald Trump’s ongoing unprecedented use of Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection to target cities like Chicago, Los Angeles and Minneapolis, large swaths of the nation today seem more likely to say that they fear DHS itself than terrorists from overseas. Roughly half the country now supports outright abolishing ICE.

Today, as the nation marks the 25^th anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks, many experts and politicians are calling for radical reforms of the very Cabinet department created to prevent the next attack. I’ve been studying 9/11 and the ways the attacks transformed America and its national security apparatus and in recent months, I’ve been talking to those who helped build and run DHS, including two of its Senate-confirmed secretaries. One of them, surprisingly, now agrees with critics that the department needs to be broken up and rebuilt into something different.

That’s because instead of an ever-vigilant department that defends Americans from pressing terrorism threats, DHS has swelled over the last quarter-century into a giant, sprawling, inchoate amalgam of agencies with an annual budget so vast it exceeds the entire military budgets of all-but four countries — the U.S., China, Russia, and Germany — and larger than the entire annual government budgets of New Zealand, Hungary or the Philippines. Moreover, a department that originally was created to look externally, identifying threats and stopping plots before they could enter the U.S., has instead become increasingly focused on policing U.S. residents.

To understand why DHS has become such a lightning rod for controversy, it pays to revisit what politicians of both parties have gotten right and wrong about homeland security over the last 25 years and reconsider three critical decisions that shaped the department and set it up for failure.

 The morning after 9/11, George W. Bush gathered the nation’s security leaders at the White House in an unlikely venue for such a conversation: the ceremonial Roosevelt Room. “We’re all sitting in the Roosevelt Room, because for the first time we had all these people who worried about internal security,” Condoleezza Rice, then the national security adviser, recalled to me in an interview this summer, noting that 9/11 was the first major attack on contiguous U.S. territory since 1812. “A national security meeting in the Situation Room would not have had a lot of the people that we needed, like the FBI director, the attorney general and the transportation secretary. The Situation Room’s not big enough for all of these people.” At that meeting, Bush delivered a short, crisp order that would become the guiding principle of the government in the days, months and years after 9/11: “Never Again.”

 The Sept. 11 attacks completely rewrote the public understanding and governmental fears of terrorism. Through the 1990s, much of what was labeled “terrorism” was homegrown — like the 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, or the decades-long string of mail and package bombs sent by the Unabomber. Events like the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center by Islamic extremists were seen more as the exception rather than the norm. Instead, “terrorism” by anti-American extremists was something that happened overseas — as underscored by al Qaeda’s earlier 1998 attacks against U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, as well as the bombing of the USS Cole in Aden, Yemen, in 2000

 The Sept. 11 attacks, though, raised terrorism from background noise to an existential dread. It was clear to the officials leading government at the time that living up to Bush’s mantra would require a new approach. “I don’t think that anybody of my generation — and even older generations — had ever experienced anything like this kind of successful attack, killing over 3,000 Americans. It was worse than Pearl Harbor in numbers and in terms of the fact that the victims were civilians and not even military,” Michael Chertoff, who at the time was head of the criminal division at the Department of Justice and who later became the second secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, told me this summer, when we spoke as part of my podcast, Long Shadow. “It was a real revolution in what the threats were. We needed to re-orchestrate how we secure our people and our property against this kind of attack.”

 

Bush resisted the push for the new Cabinet department for months, believing that he could best coordinate existing departments from a newly created White House Office of Homeland Security, which was created 11 days after 9/11 and first headed by former Pennsylvania governor Tom Ridge. He hoped to build a homeland security structure akin to the National Security Council, which coordinates interagency work among cabinet departments, and saw a presidential-level office with strong budget responsibilities as the best way to focus disparate agencies and functions.

Yet as evidence mounted about the myriad warning signs that U.S. law enforcement and intelligence had missed leading up to the attacks, congressional pressure for a major reorganization became politically inescapable by 2002.

“There was a recognition that we were too fragmented and that there were a lot of silos and that we needed to find a way to bring together all of the sources of information and all of the expertise to build a capability to prevent acts of terrorism,” Chertoff said.

Exactly what that new structure would look like, though, was very much an open debate. Amid fierce turf battles and lobbying by Cabinet officials and congressional leaders, the very agencies that failed to “connect the dots” ahead of 9/11 — the FBI and the CIA — remained apart from the new Cabinet department. Instead of a sweeping “homeland security” mandate, the new department that emerged from legislative and presidential wrangling and horse-trading in late 2002 might have been better termed the “Department of Border and Transportation Security.”

Jeh Johnson, who served as DHS secretary in the second term of the Obama administration, says the focus at the time the department was founded was more about securing borders than the more nuanced work of preventing terrorism.

 “The thinking was that terrorism was an extraterritorial threat, so let’s consolidate the regulation of all the different ways somebody can enter the country into one Cabinet-level department — land, border patrol, courts, customs, aviation security, air and water, Coast Guard — and throw in a few additional ones in there with it, like the Secret Service and FEMA,” Johnson told me in an interview.

 

Nevertheless, at the time of its creation, DHS was the largest reorganization of government since the creation of the Department of Defense after World War II and brought together all or parts of 22 separate government agencies, from the U.S. Coast Guard, housed in the Transportation Department, and Treasury’s Secret Service to the Immigration and Naturalization Service at the Justice Department to the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service and Plum Island Animal Disease Center, as well as FEMA, which had been an independent agency reporting to directly to the president.

The result became the nation’s third-largest Cabinet department, with an amalgamation of organizational cultures that ranged from the U.S. Customs Service and Coast Guard, which date to the first years of the U.S. government in the late 1700s, to the fiercely independent Border Patrol — whose leaders lobbied to keep its traditional green uniform rather than unite under a common CBP blue uniform — to then-entirely new creations like the Transportation Security Administration.

Given that complexity, it’s perhaps not surprising that DHS has struggled ever since to coalesce into one organization with a shared mission and culture — and it shows. DHS’s own workforce has borne the brunt of the mission mismatch; it has consistently ranked at or near the bottom of federal government morale surveys. In the 18 surveys of the U.S. government’s “Best Places to Work” conducted by the non-partisan Partnership for Public Service between 2005 and 2024, DHS ranked last or second-to-last an astounding 13 times among the roughly 20 large government departments.

Many of the agencies reflect deeply troubled internal cultures: Using CBP’s own discipline reports, I calculated earlier this year that 4,913 CBP officers and Border Patrol agents have been arrested for crime, corruption and misconduct from 2005 to 2024 — a total that works out to be one agent or officer arrested every 36 hours for more than two decades, and a number that itself would represent the nation’s fourth-largest civilian police department, equal roughly to the entire size of the Philadelphia police force. While exact statistics are difficult to calculate, it appears that CBP has a misconduct rate five times greater than other federal law enforcement agencies — and that perhaps CBP officers and Border Patrol agents even are arrested at a higher rate per capita than that of the unauthorized immigrant population.

 

While DHS leadership under previous presidents has been largely steady, it has proven a damaging revolving door in both Trump presidencies; the department lacked a Senate-confirmed leader through nearly the entire final two years of Trump’s first term and the administration even struggled to prove in court who was legally in charge of the department. In his second term, DHS secretary Kristi Noem lasted just 14 months before being forced out.

But if DHS has proven itself ill-suited to focus on foreign terrorism, it has become a useful catch-all presidential “Praetorian Guard” across both of Trump’s presidential terms. In his first term, amid the nationwide protests that followed the murder of George Floyd, Trump turned to a dubious legal interpretation to deploy Border Patrol agents and other DHS officers to do battle with protesters in cities like Portland, Oregon. “I don’t need invitations by the state, state mayors or state governors to do our job,” then-acting DHS secretary Chad Wolf told reporters amid the 2020 unrest. “We’re going to do that whether they like us there or not.” In recent days, Trump has launched a nationwide “surge” of ICE agents to investigate voter fraud, a vanishingly rare crime with no clear nexus to ICE’s normal investigative responsibilities.

 Altogether the ranks of DHS have swelled greatly since its creation and fundamentally altered the balance of federal law enforcement; recent government figures show that roughly half of all federal law enforcement officers are now housed inside DHS, while just a third of federal agents and officers are housed in the Department of Justice, which includes the FBI, DEA, and ATF. Today, again, while it’s hard to calculate exact figures given the recent hiring surge by ICE and CBP, DHS may in fact employ as much as 55% to 60% of all federal law enforcement personnel. Last summer’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act funneled billions of fresh dollars into DHS, ICE and CBP, turbocharging their budgets even further. As I calculated earlier this year, the $53 billion procurement and construction budget for CBP alone is equal to the entire 2024 defense expenditures of 10 European countries — Hungary, Austria, the Czech Republic, Switzerland, Finland, Greece, Belgium, Romania, Denmark and Norway.

 Today, 25 years after 9/11, DHS’s core original mission of combating and responding to terrorism seems all-but forgotten in the public eye — and it seems particularly ill-poised to respond to the modern terrorism or national security threats as they currently exist.

While al Qaeda certainly remained dangerous for years after 9/11 — including executing the 2004 Madrid train bombings and the 2005 bus and train bombings in London, remembered as the 7/7 attacks — Osama bin Laden never successfully directed another attack at the U.S. homeland before he was killed in 2011 by a SEAL Team Six raid after intelligence located his secret hideout in Pakistan. (The only al Qaeda-directed attack to hit the U.S. homeland since 2001 was a December 2019 shooting by a Royal Saudi Air Force aviation student at Naval Air Station Pensacola that investigators later determined was directed by al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, an affiliate group known as AQAP; the shooter killed three U.S. sailors before being killed by responding sheriff deputies.)

The U.S. did weather a wave of attacks across the mid-2010s by individuals inspired by ISIS, an Islamic extremist group that grew out of the chaos caused by the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq, but in the last decade, the primary terrorism threat has become domestic actors — especially far-right white supremacists and mass shooters. DHS has specifically struggled to even name that threat: Then-DHS secretary Janet Napolitano backpedaled after a 2009 intelligence report cited the rising threat of far-right actors and former military veterans.

Elizabeth Neumann, then-DHS assistant secretary for counterterrorism, told me that in Trump’s first term she was startled to realize that there was no one paying attention to the rise of domestic extremists and white supremacists. As she said, “In the analysis field, it takes years for you to gain an understanding of an enemy and their tactics, their techniques, so that you can look at an event and say, this matters or this doesn’t matter. It just turns out there had been nobody working the domestic terrorism beat…. We really felt like we were in the dark.”

 It’s a threat that has grown even more serious in the years since — and yet still remains largely off the radar of DHS. “Most acts of terrorism now — by any objective measure — in this country are from within,” Johnson told me. “There are not a whole lot of DHS cops running around the interior looking for terrorists. That task has always been with the FBI.”

 Looking back, there were three decisions that hobbled DHS’s mission and responsibilities from the start.

The first was FBI director Robert Mueller’s successful argument that the FBI should remain intact. At the time, there was a widespread push to split the bureau into a British-style domestic law enforcement agency, like Scotland Yard, and a domestic intelligence agency, like MI5. The U.S., in fact, is one of the few Western countries that unites its domestic intelligence capabilities along with its equivalent of a national police force. (Canada, for instance, has both the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and the Canadian Security Intelligence Service.) Immediately after the 9/11 attacks, and as evidence mounted of the failures of the FBI and the CIA to communicate successfully and “connect the dots,” many on Capitol Hill called to break the bureau apart. But in a careful, quiet personal lobbying campaign, Mueller made the case that having the bureau’s intelligence and law enforcement capabilities under one roof made the nation safer. Ultimately, congressional leaders acquiesced — largely as a personal endorsement of Mueller, who had taken over the bureau just a week before 9/11 and who had committed to a top-to-bottom reorganization of the bureau.

Second, despite its new labeling as “homeland security” — a phrase all-but born into official Washington lingo in the wake of the 9/11 attacks — the newly formed DHS actually had shockingly little responsibility for combatting terrorism, which mostly remained firmly the purview domestically of the Department of Justice, with its FBI and Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. Instead, DHS possessed very narrow domestic criminal investigative authorities, mostly focused on customs smuggling and human trafficking (Homeland Security Investigations) and counterfeiting and financial crimes (Secret Service). In fact, despite its name, many of HSI’s most legendary and important investigations and prosecutions have come in cases overseas, focused on cybercrime, transnational organized crime and the smuggling of weapons of mass destruction. As early as 2005, a Washington Post investigation concluded, “To some extent, the department was set up to fail. It was assigned the awesome responsibility of defending the homeland without the investigative, intelligence and military powers of the FBI, CIA and the Pentagon; it was also repeatedly undermined by the White House that initially opposed its creation.”

hird, there was a challenge more visible in retrospect: The new department inherited what would become one of the nation’s most divisive issues — immigration and border security — alongside a whole host of what were traditionally more nonpartisan responsibilities, from FEMA’s disaster relief to the search-and-rescue efforts and navigation aid maintenance of the Coast Guard to the airport security checkpoints of the newly-created TSA, as well as the protection of the nation’s critical civilian infrastructure, from water utilities to government IT networks, of what is now called the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. In many countries, these functions are housed in something more like a national civil defense agency. The shortcomings of this model became evident in multiple subsequent crises, including famously during Hurricane Katrina in 2005 when FEMA — which traditionally had reported directly to the White House — struggled to mobilize relief efforts across the government.   

  The result of this organizational mismatch has become an all-too-obvious mission creep — as a department ill-poised to do the thing it was created to do instead became a politically useful and opportunistic cudgel for a president with authoritarian impulses. Across his two terms, Trump has seized political openings and turbocharged DHS’s funding to target not foreign terrorists like al Qaeda or ISIS, but political dissidents and protesters here at home — people Trump himself has repeatedly labeled “terrorists.”

Today, as the country marks the 25^th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, it’s clear to many of even the department’s one-time champions that change and a refocusing is necessary.

 “The positive is we’ve not had another global terrorist attack successful in the U.S. since then —that was job number one. The threats have changed, though; you have cyber threats, biological, and chemical threats and artificial intelligence may pose new threats,” Chertoff told me. “There has to be a certain element of adaptability, and sometimes you have reset where your priorities are. I do think there’s been an overemphasis on being very muscular in terms of deporting people — some of whom may be here legally and some of whom are not. That’s an important mission, but it shouldn’t overwhelm all the other missions because we still live in a dangerous world. These are not times we want to take our eye off mission number one, which is protecting the lives and safety of American citizens.”

 

One of Chertoff’s successors now goes even further: Jeh Johnson so bemoans the current state of DHS and its ongoing management struggles that he now backs the dissolution of the very Cabinet department he once led.

“As I see it, when Congress created DHS, in some respects, they went too far — and in some respects, they went not far enough,” Johnson told me.

Indeed, Johnson, who served as the department’s fourth Senate-confirmed leader, from December 2013 to the final hours of Barack Obama’s presidency in January 2017, recalls that when he met with foreign counterparts, their governments often concentrated federal law enforcement resources inside a structure often known as the Interior Ministry or Home Office.

Now, he argues that both DHS and the Justice Department should be reimagined along similar lines — a move he argues would both improve federal cooperation and reduce infighting, as well as help ensure that the current non-law enforcement portions of DHS receive better leadership and oversight.

Johnson argues that the U.S. would be better served by a “Department of Public Safety” that brought all of the government’s major investigative agencies under one roof — including the FBI, ATF, DEA, U.S. Marshals Service, Secret Service, TSA, CBP and ICE, which includes both its Enforcement and Removal Office and HSI, as well as the protective responsibilities of CISA. As part of that reorganization, he believes FEMA should be returned to standing as an independent agency that can both better respond to presidential needs and also more directly work with state-level leadership.

 “I have seen firsthand how law enforcement agencies compete for space,” Johnson says. “Their jurisdiction does tend to overlap in ways the public does not understand — one agency is always nipping at the heels of the other, and very often who has the case depends on who got there first. A consolidation is in order.”

Johnson’s proposed model suggests also separating the government’s investigators from the prosecutors at the Justice Department — in the same way many states separate district attorneys from police departments at the local level. To him, that split would also limit the possibility of the weaponization of federal prosecution, requiring the assent of not just the attorney general but a second Cabinet leader before cases could be pursued against perceived political enemies.

Calls to undo the mistake of DHS’s creation aren’t exactly new — a one-time DHS official at the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute think tank was calling for the department’s end even before its 10th birthday, as did the libertarian CATO Institute. Ahead of the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, the ACLU joined in the call for its dismantling, and that was well before Trump sent ICE and CBP en masse into U.S. cities. Yet there are few examples in modern history of a former Cabinet official like Johnson calling for his own former department’s dissolution. Indeed, across Washington, most one-time Cabinet leaders spend the rest of their careers dining out on their prestigious presidential appointments; Johnson, however, tries his hardest now to avoid being publicly recognized as a former DHS official.

 

“The immigration mission has overwhelmed the department,” Johnson said. “If I have a DHS gym bag or a DHS hat, I don’t wear it in public anymore because the immigration mission has become so politically volatile.”

But DHS isn’t shying away from controversy or its combative stance domestically — in fact, this week, as the 25th anniversary of 9/11 approached, current Secretary Markwayne Mullin announced that he was redoing the department’s official seal to reflect that DHS was “at war every single day.”

It’s a striking admission that with the wind-down of the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, the longest-running of the “9/11 forever wars” appears to be the one we launched here at home, against ourselves.