If Congress doesn't act before February 27, the Department of Homeland Security is going to run out of money and go into a partial shutdown. (Eighty-five percent of employees would still be working, but they wouldn't be getting paid.) Congress doesn't appear to have a plan for action; as of last week, before it broke for recess, House and Senate lawmakers were each telling each other to do something. Meanwhile, politicians in both parties have already skipped to the step where they blame the other party for the possible shutdown — making them seem pretty resigned to it happening. House Speaker John Boehner said on Sunday he's "certainly" ready for a DHS shutdown.
It helps that both parties think they can win on the politics of a shutdown. Democrats see this as a replay of the government shutdown of 2013, when congressional Republicans tried to undo a major Obama administration policy (then Obamacare; now the president's executive actions on immigration) as a condition of keeping the government open. Republicans, for their part, appear to believe that because the Senate's Democratic minority is filibustering their funding bill, Democrats will take the blame — though there's little indication that they would become willing to roll back all of Obama's executive actions to end a shutdown. It's also not clear if Republicans could get a critical mass of support within their own party for anything less.
But the nonchalance with which both parties are treating the prospect of a Department of Homeland Security shutdown raises a big policy question: why does the department even exist?
The answer is that it shouldn't, and it never should have. DHS was a mistake to begin with. Instead of solving the coordination problems it was supposed to solve, it simply duplicated efforts already happening in other federal departments. And attempts to control and distinguish the department have politicized it to the point where it can't function smoothly — and might be threatening national security.
This isn't to say that DHS should be fully liquidated. The argument is there's no reason for it to exist as its own department when it can be reabsorbed into the various departments (from Justice to Treasury) from which it was assembled.
Since neither side is fighting to make the case for DHS, it's as good a time as any to look back over the agency's decade-plus-long history, and assess how the department's actually worked. The answer appears to be that the problems built deep in the department haven't aided national security — and might have damaged it.
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http://www.vox.com/2015/2/17/8047461/dhs-problems
