Department of Homeland Security

[tivodan1116]

Why are we spending money on this? I mean, not since forever has such a massive bureaucracy been created from the get-go with no real purpose except to duplicate the purposes of other huge bureaucracies already in existence....

They should have called it "The Department of Bureaucratic Redundancy"

Am I right or wrong?

[bishop]

government's answer to solving real problems has always been to throw money at it. our intelligence agencies failed big time on 9/11.. the response? don't restructure the intelligence organizations, create an entirely new bureaucracy to duplicate efforts (as you pointed out).

i agree, i don't see the need for this department to exist, especially when bodies like the cia and fbi remain autonomous.

[Scribbler1]

Originally posted by bishop, government's answer to solving real problems has always been to throw money at it. our intelligence agencies failed big time on 9/11.. the response? don't restructure the intelligence organizations, create an entirely new bureaucracy to duplicate efforts (as you pointed out). i agree, i don't see the need for this department to exist, especially when bodies like the cia and fbi remain autonomous.

Absolutely correct. The government seems to ALWAYS follow this "logic". Instead of it's broke so fix it, they always go with the replace it but keep the old defective system, even to the point of praising the "retiring" head of XYZ agency following some scandal. I remember the whole problem was blamed not on the agencies methods so much, but on the fact that they didn't share the information. Seems logical to just order the CIA and FBI to clean up their act as well as start sharing and we would not need to give Ridge a job. I'll bet it comes out later that we now have THREE agencies which don't share intel.

The stupidity makes me sick but we Americans seem to love our bloat, don't we?

[PatrickHenry]

We Americans? Scrib, I can to say this with confidence: Washington, DC is the OWNER of America, not our servant. So when we find bloat happening and greater expenditures by the pols, that is in DC's interest, nothing loved by America.

[bishop]

I'll bet it comes out later that we now have THREE agencies which don't share intel.

or, we'll be attacked and then hindsight inquiry will show that nobody knew who they should talk to.. or people were told but the info wasn't circulated. they could always do something simple and compile their own daily intelligence reports and send them to homeland defense which will then compile everything into one comprehensive report. however, even that wouldn't give us the sort of "up to the minute" information sharing we really need.

personally, i think the heads of the cia, nsa and fbi should all report to one person. why some 100,000 new people were hired into the homeland defense department is beyond me. they ignored efficiency while grasping for more and we're the ones who will pay for it.