Can We Afford Homeland Security?
Exactly how much are we willing to spend on safety measures? The money the federal government spends on homeland security is no longer a modest amount, and it is projected to increase steeply in the years ahead as the government runs massive deficits.
Much of the federal spending politicians tell voters they'll cut is minor, if not inconsequential. For instance, Mitt Romney has proposed eliminating funding for Planned Parenthood and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting as part of a deficit-reduction package. President Obama, on the other hand, spent weeks last year arguing for cutting a tax expenditure on private jets as a way to reduce the deficit.
These measures may be worthwhile on their own terms, but they are insignificant in terms of the larger budget picture. They don't compare with federal spending on Social Security, government health care programs, and national defense. Planned Parenthood, NPR, and the private jet tax subsidy together cost the government at most a few billion a year. Last year's deficit, in comparison, was $1.3 trillion.
In 2011, the federal government spent at least $70 billion on domestic security. ThatÂ’'s the official tally by the government of how much is spent by all the agencies on programs related to Homeland Security: border protection, domestic preparedness, the TSA, and so on. It doesnÂ’'t include all the funding for the huge amount of surveillance done by other branches of the government. Federal funding for the Department of Education was also about $70 billion this year.
In the decade-plus following September 11, 2001, the federal government has spent around $600 billion on homeland security (which doesn't count the trillions spent on military actions in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere).
And although Osama bin Laden is now dead, the war in Iraq has officially ended, and the Afghanistan conflict is winding down and supposed to be over by 2014, the domestic war on terrorism is only going to grow steadily. According to White House projections, the U.S. will be spending over $75 billion a year on homeland security by 2017.
In 2001, the federal government spent about $20.1 billion on homeland security, or about $25 billion in today's money. That means that spending on defending against domestic attacks has more or less tripled within a decade, making it one of the fastest-growing segments of government.
We might say DHS employs a small army, except that it really isn't that small. It has a 230,000-person workforce, the third-largest in the government, and also employs more than 200,000 contractors. And the people working directly for DHS are only a small part of the overall security apparatus: the Washington Post estimates that there are 854,000 people with top-secret security clearances.
Apart from civil-rights groups' worries about domestic surveillance and travelers' complaints about the TSA's intrusions into their personal space, the growth of the part of government devoted to homeland security hasn't been controversial. As 9/11 recedes into the past and the debt continues to mount, though, maybe it should be.
