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| Homeland Security spending by department, 2007 request (click chart to enlarge) |
Four years ago President George W. Bush agreed to a new approach in addressing the threat of terrorism. He announced his support for the creation of the Department of Homeland Security – the largest governmental reorganization since the creation of the Defense Department after World War II.
This was a change from his initial plan, announced just nine days after September 11, 2001, to appoint Tom Ridge, the former governor of Pennsylvania, as director of the Office of Homeland Security. Ridge was to oversee the federal government’s response to terrorism from inside the White House. But members of Congress asserted that Ridge lacked power to get the job done and insisted on the creation of the Department of Homeland Security. Among the chief powers he needed, they said, was control over homeland security spending.
Sen. Joe Lieberman (D-Conn.), for instance, said during a hearing in the spring of 2002 that it was imperative for Ridge and his successors to have budgetary control over agencies overseeing homeland security spending, so that “those agencies will do what the director concludes in the national interest needs to be done.”
Not all of the agencies that work on homeland security, however, could be bundled into one department. As it is, the Department of Homeland Security absorbed 22 agencies, now employs 185,000 people, and is the third-largest federal department. But it has consistently had authority over roughly half – 47 percent in the White House request for 2007 – of what the government classifies as “homeland security” spending since its inception, according to U.S. Budgets. Next in line, the Department of Defense accounted for 30 percent in this year’s request. The breakdown by department is displayed to the right (click to enlarge).
Over the next several weeks, Columbia’s Homeland Security Money Trail project will examine how well the federal government’s most focused effort to secure the nation has succeeded – and note where it has failed – in the five years since the attacks on Washington and New York. Stay tuned.
-by Rachel Monahan
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