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Former officials with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security on Wednesday urged members of Congress to centralize oversight and codify the responsibilities of a department whose budget has more than doubled since its creation roughly a decade ago.
DHS was formally established in 2002 to combine 22 different federal agencies and departments and integrate intelligence, law enforcement, disaster response, and transportation security in the wake of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
While the United States has managed to prevent terrorist threats on the scale of the World Trade Center attacks 12 years ago, critics of DHS say vital intelligence still appears to slip through the cracks of the sprawling 240,000-employee department and its appendages. The DHS budget has swelled from nearly $20 billion in 2002 to $46 billion this year.
The Boston Marathon bombings renewed concerns about information sharing between federal agencies and local law enforcement entities. Congressional testimony in May revealed that the Boston Joint Terrorism Task Force received scant direction from the FBI about keeping tabs on Tamerlan Tsarnaev—the older of the two brothers who perpetrated the bombings—after the federal agency determined he did not pose a threat in 2011. The Massachusetts State Police and the local “fusion center” for intelligence sharing were also not aware of the brothers or Tamerlan’s 2012 trip to the radicalized Dagestan region of Russia.
Tom Ridge, the first DHS secretary, told members of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs that the department needs better oversight to improve its information sharing. He added that communication across branches of a department still poses problems for entities like NASA, which was formed by combining agencies in a similar manner more than 50 years ago.
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Former DHS Officials Say Oversight Needs to Be Centralized at Senate Hearing