03/04/13 – Chris Hellman – The Scott Horton Show

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All right y'all, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show, scotthorton.org is my website.
I'm not really an org, but that was the best URL I could get, so scotthorton.org, you can find all my interview archives there going back to 2003.
All right, so next up on the show today is Chris Hellman.
He is Senior Research Analyst at the National Priorities Project.
That's nationalpriorities.org, which is, I guess, the best URL they could get.
Welcome back to the show, Chris.
How are you doing?
I'm doing fine, Scott.
Thanks for having me back.
Well, you're welcome.
I'm very happy to have you here.
I don't know how bad your ears burn, but I mention your name all the time because you're a great footnote.
I mean, besides being a human being, I'm not trying to say that, but you are a great footnote.
You're the guy, along with Robert Higgs at the Independent Institute, and I forgot his name and her name, I'm sorry, I think it was two people, over at Mother Jones.
You're one of the other people who proved that the government spends a trillion dollars a year, a trillion, on the national security state, and so I end up explaining that to people all the time, and then I cite you to prove my case.
Jesus, is that really right, a trillion dollars a year?
Yeah, it's a staggering amount of money.
Now, how much of that is the Department of Homeland Security?
This year, it's going to be about $70 billion, so it's not a whole heck of a lot in the context of the other things that we're doing.
Not compared to the World Empire and the hydrogen bomb maintenance and all of that stuff.
Exactly.
I see.
It's a lot of money, and the degree to which it's wasted, we can all be thankful, but it seems like they actually spend it on doing things to people, too, yeah?
Yeah.
Obviously, one of the things that, if you're concerned about this type of stuff outside of the budget, and I don't expect it costs all that much, but the components of the Patriot Act that permit domestic surveillance and detention of people who are here illegally or trying to enter the country illegally, those are all things that are funded through, at least in part, through the Department of Homeland Security.
Now, this institute of yours, you're based in Washington, D.C.?
No, actually, we're in Massachusetts.
Oh, I see.
Okay.
I was going to ask you, back in the days when they passed the Homeland Security Act, of course, they used all the, geez, I guess we could have stopped it if we were doing our job pressure from the 9-11 Commission to justify passing the thing, but I was wondering, do you have any insight into whether people in Washington, D.C. ever really believe that the solution to a problem is to create a giant new bureaucracy to oversee a bunch of giant bureaucracies and et cetera like that?
Is that what they really think?
Well, and I was in D.C. at the time, and one of the concerns when they created the Department of Homeland Security was just how scattered the authority and the functionality of providing for our nation's homeland security was.
At that point in time, in excess of 40 federal agencies had a piece of the, quote-unquote, homeland security pie, and the creation of the Department of Homeland Security was an effort to at least in part streamline and centralize this, and they drew together all or parts of 22 federal agencies, but that still leaves several dozen outside of the Department of Homeland Security that contribute budgetarily and functionally to providing homeland security, however you define that.
Well, so now you cite the GAO studies in here.
When the GAO, that's the Congress's auditing department that they use against the executive branch kind of thing, right?
My favorite department of the government.
When they study this, do they show that, for example, it's proven beneficial for the Border Patrol or the Coast Guard or these other agencies to be centrally coordinated like this?
If we take these now subsets of this department, these former departments, and judge them by their former standards, that kind of thing, because it seems to me like if they had a chance to stop a terrorist attack, it would be the decentralization of power that would give them the chance rather than centralization.
Yeah.
It's an interesting question.
I mean, one of the things that centralization was, well, there were actually two, several functions that centralization was supposed to serve.
One was to avoid duplication and save some money, and the other was to coordinate activities across federal agencies that were somewhat disparate in their function, and the third was to hopefully bring some sort of sanity to the budgeting process.
But I think what you have found as a practical matter is that agencies that traditionally have not worked well together don't work all that well together moving forward just because historically, you know, they've had their own turf that was respected as part of their function.
And the other part of it is just when you bring together, you know, 200,000 bureaucrats and put them all in the same room effectively, it's not easy to coordinate their function and streamline it overnight.
And what you point to, the GAO, has looked at the Department of Homeland Security amongst others and categorized a lot of their activities being high-risk in terms of management and those types of things.
And being a member of the GAO's high-risk series is not a place where you want to find yourself.
And what it really says is, you know, there are more than a few bugs in the system, and we're going to be watching you to see how well you do in ironing them out.
And Homeland Security, you know, has been identified in several areas as being lacking.
The biggest offender, not surprisingly, when it comes to, you know, being high-risk for management mispractices is the Department of Defense, but Homeland Security is right up there.
Well, you know, this goes more to Tom Englehart's introduction to your piece here at Tom Dispatch, and of course it's running under Tom's name at Antiwar.com as well.
More to his intro than what you wrote, but it really is a thing, isn't it, the name Homeland Security?
I mean, I'm not sure what percentage of people in the polls ever said that they were bothered by that, but as Tom puts it, it really does smack, doesn't it, a Germany or Soviet collective totalitarianism.
Homeland.
What is this homeland?
It's our country where we all live.
That's all.
You know, come on.
Yeah.
And I mean, you know, words mean things.
So I think, you know, we're budget analysts, but I understand Tom's rhetoric.
I think it's, you know, I think it does have those connotations to it.
Interestingly enough, however, when you look underneath it, the name doesn't really fit the operation as far as, you know, its efficiency and effectiveness and even its sort of unity of purpose.
Right.
You know, it seems to me like really, if it has a successful purpose anyway, it's just selling the idea that we need such a thing.
Like you know what I mean?
It seems to me like the Department of Homeland Security itself is just another bogus orange alert that we're all in such danger.
We even need one when really they just want you to be afraid enough that they can go invade Iraq.
Well, yeah.
And one of the interesting things that it's sort of somewhat related is that, you know, one of the recently Friday, the the across the board spending cut sequestration was supposed to go into effect.
And prior to that, in an effort to head that off, the White House sponsored a series of press briefings where heads of the various federal agencies came in and said, this is what sequestration is going to mean if it kicks in.
And Janet Fultano, who's the secretary of Home Department of Homeland Security, came in and the focus of her discussion wasn't so much on we're going to be less safe from terrorist attack.
Her focus was on this is going to have a really direct impact on the nation's economy.
Why?
Because it's going to be it's going to reduce the number of inspectors at our borders and that type of thing.
It's going to slow the process down.
So it wasn't we're going to be at greater risk from people trying to sneak into the country.
It was it was going to be the weighing effect that that having fewer, fewer people, you know, fewer people hours at the Department of Homeland Security was going to have on the U.S. economy.
I sort of scratched my head and I said, so it's not about Al Qaeda.
Yeah.
It turns out there were only ever a few dozen of those guys a long time ago.
But anyway.
Well, OK, so now we talked about those GAO reports.
Can you take us through some of what you learned digging through that stuff?
Because that's the kind of thing that I always want to do, but I never really do dig through GAO reports.
Well, for instance, one of the things that the Department of Homeland Security does that's not related to counterterrorism is it's where the where the Federal Emergency Management Agency lives, FEMA, whose primary function is to respond to disasters of all sort, be they natural or manmade.
But we most closely associate FEMA with with, you know, hurricanes and that type of thing.
And they get about 14 billion dollars a year through the Department of Homeland Security.
But one of the things that GAO found is that FEMA's method for assessing disasters in in in regions and their ability to respond and recover is is is completely outdated and ineffective in helping regional responses to to either, you know, any type of disaster, be it natural or manmade.
You know, and when you're spending that kind of money and you're finding that you're unable to assess the damage done after a hurricane, that's rather troubling from a budgetary standpoint.
Yeah, for sure.
Money down the drain.
Well, you won't have to tell the people of Occupy New York who turned themselves into Occupy Sandy and went around feeding the FEMA people.
Yeah.
It will be in one of the great ironies.
Yeah.
Well, it's just par for the course from what I'm looking at here.
I don't know what's so ironic about it, other what they claim that they're for, you know.
But they never have been really about disaster relief.
Right.
It's all about continuity of government.
That's why it took so long to get around to trying to save anybody from their attic during Katrina was because the first thing they were doing was making sure that the state was still the state from instant to instant with no interruption.
And and, you know, and that's one of the problems with with large bureaucracies is that they they turn slowly and getting, you know, so, you know, even 10 years after its creation the Department of Homeland Security was created 10 years ago on Friday or opened its doors even 10 years after its creation.
Will you find, for instance, you know, another GA report that that recommended 1600 changes in the way the administrative agency was administered that that had not had not been implemented.
So, you know, by again, I'm not I'm not trying to politicize for him, but by their nature, you know, federal bureaucracies move very slowly.
And so important changes, even though the recommendations have been made, are often are often slow to manifest themselves.
Well, and I guess that's true with any bureaucracy.
But of course, the economic incentives for a government agency are always all kind of strange where they're better off if they spend every last dime rather than they're going to be in real trouble if they spend every last dime, which is how it would be.
Well, typically, not necessarily every time, but typically that's how it would be in a business is that's the boss's money.
He's going to be mad if you're spending more than you absolutely need to.
Right.
Yeah.
It's a fairly unusual occurrence for a federal agency to return money to the Treasury, saying we were able to do it more efficiently than we had hoped to.
And here's your change.
Right.
Yeah.
Ron Paul did that as a congressman.
But he's about it.
I've ever heard of.
Yeah, it's and again, you know, the incentives are not for that type of thing because the government is not a for profit.
And unfortunately, you know, the government the government is less responsive to taxpayers than most corporations are to shareholders.
I think if if we were thought more of as shareholders than taxpayers, we'd see we'd see a little more efficiency.
And now, you know what, I don't really understand what the homeland security thing is.
I mean, other than just being a new name, an umbrella organization for the Coast Guard and the Border Patrol that already exist and whatever.
But and I understand they have these fusion centers that are kind of just a new form of multijurisdictional task force like they've had for the drug war, which, you know, I don't really like those.
But, you know, their whole thing is supposedly preventing a terrorist attack or being a homeland security.
And so but I wonder, do they compete with the FBI as far as actually trying to solve crimes or follow that Arab or entrap that idiot or that kind of stuff?
Or they leave all that to the FBI still?
And they just stand around the parking lots?
Or who are these people?
Yeah, it's a good question.
And they tend to again, it goes back to the the inception of the Department of Homeland Security, how it was going to function.
They brought certain functions into, you know, under their umbrella, but others, they did not.
And how this was done, for instance, the Coast Guard used to be part of the Department of Transportation.
And it was it was subsumed to the Department of Homeland Security.
But the FBI was not.
And so, you know, you wonder where jurisdictions begin and where they end.
And I think that this is an imperfect method of doing it.
They still farm that work out to the FBI and and and other intelligence gathering organizations.
And there's a hope that that that information is shared with the right people, not just at the Department of Homeland Security, but other federal agencies.
But you know, information flow is imperfect, definitely, you know, between agencies.
I mean, there are oftentimes situations where one hand doesn't know what the other is doing.
And it's those cracks in the process that really render efforts in in in the direction of improving these things.
It's where they fall down.
And the unfortunate part is you really only learn about them in many cases, despite the auditing that gets done.
You really only learn about them in in the practical situations where where they occur.
So, you know, you cast your mind back to Katrina and the inability of FEMA to coordinate activities at the state and local level there.
That was a real wake up call, I think, for a lot of people.
And and and, you know, fortunately for the people of the mid-Atlantic and Northeast, those were lessons learned before Sandy came along.
But unfortunately, you know, in the in the future, I think we're doomed to to see the impact of of of poor planning and poor coordination in other areas.
And hopefully it won't be in the form of a terrorist attack.
But but, you know, you never know.
All right.
Now, here's the thing for I think you probably learn a hell of a lot going through these reports the way you do and crunching the numbers the way you do when it comes to the new kind of side of the national security state.
I mean, we already had a domestic national security state in a big way before Homeland Security.
But, you know, all of this is layered in so much secrecy.
But it seems like in your position, really digging through these details on a regular basis, you really begin to see a picture of, you know, what it all really looks like without necessarily access to all the details about, you know, which which contract does SIAC get to accomplish what evil deed or whatever, you still kind of get a flavor for for what's going on.
And I wonder if you could describe to us how much you think things have changed.
I mean, it would be crazy to say the Clinton years was the era of accountability or something like that.
But, you know, when it comes to slippery slopes, how far past, you know, a rule of law have we gone to just national police state here?
Well, yeah, I don't think those are actually really budgetary things.
I think that those are policy initiatives.
I mean, obviously, you know, things like the Patriot Act have have have have really changed the way we view personal privacy and the ability of government agents to reach into our lives.
I think any time you see any effort to regulate information on on any level, you're you're you're witnessing a portion of that slippery slope.
I can tell you that, you know, as far as as providing resources for law enforcement at all levels of of government, those certainly have been, you know, the spigots have been turned wide open and how they're being utilized.
You know, that's a question that's a that's an important question.
And and budgets don't always show you the answer to that.
It's one of the things we tried to get at as we started building our work around the Department of Homeland Security and Homeland Security generally.
And, you know, this is an ongoing project for us.
We expect to spend considerable time in the month and probably years again learning more about Homeland Security, because the truth of the matter is the reason we got into this was being able to follow the money is very difficult within within the context of Homeland Security.
And, you know, we're dealing with individual agencies right now trying to ascertain exactly how they spend the money that that's being allocated to them.
And there's not there's a real dearth of information.
So, you know, being able to figure out how the money is being spent is is a is a is a real problem for us.
But but we know that there's an awful lot of money out there.
I mean, annual Homeland Security funding went from about 15 to 20, about 20 billion a year in current dollars back in 2001, up to about 70 billion a year now.
I mean, that's adjusted for inflation.
That's that's a staggering amount of growth.
That's almost like, you know, four times as much as we were spending on it before 9-11.
And being able to track that money and know exactly how it's spent is a task right now that that we're having trouble doing.
And that's that's a concern for me.
Yeah.
Boy, and you think about all those officials and semi officials and all those contractors, you know, spending all that money.
Each and every one of those people becomes a brand new vested interest in making sure that none of this ever goes away.
Yeah, I mean, you know, bureaucracies take on momentum all their own.
You know, I spend a lot of time, for instance, looking at at the Pentagon budget and, you know, virtually every program and weapon and and initiative has has its own constituency, both in the industry and within within the agency.
And, you know, taking those on is a difficult thing to do.
And and as we learn more about the homeland security, homeland security spending in this country, we recognize that that that situation is being replicated.
And I suspect it's true.
You know, at the other federal agencies, I just don't spend as much time thinking about agriculture as I do about security.
Right.
Yeah.
But you know what?
Go take a look at Jim Bovard and you'll cry your eyes out about agriculture.
I mean, it's just an absolute catastrophe.
It's as bad as you imagine, I promise.
And again, you know, I don't mean to single out that that particular agency.
They they're they're just first in the alphabet.
But yeah, no, no, no.
Of course.
Yeah, yeah.
That just makes them exactly the same as the rest, too.
All right.
Hey, listen, I really appreciate your time and your great work.
It's always a pleasure.
Thanks for having me on the show.
All right.
That is Chris Hellman.
He is senior research analyst at the National Priorities Project.
That is National Priorities dot org.
And he's got this great piece co-written with Mattia Kramer.
Under Tom Englehart's name, of course, at Antiwar dot com and at Tom Dispatch dot com.
The shadow boondoggle that is Homeland Security.
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