The Department of Homeland Security consists of a hodgepodge of government agencies, including the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the Transportation Security Administration, the U.S. Secret Service, Customs and Border Protection, and the Coast Guard. In this year's $49.7 billion budget, border security costs make up a third of total costs.
The department is also responsible for coordinating federal cyber-security efforts through the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. Despite growing domestic cyber concerns, however, the budget request for that agency has fallen since last year's budget.
Homeland Security total: $52.1 billion
Running tally: $1,087.3 billion
Interest on the Debt
And don't forget the national security state's part in paying interest on the national debt. Its share, 21.5% of that debt, adds up to $123.6 billion.
Interest on the debt total: $123.6 billion
Final tally: $1,210.9 billion
The Budget's Too Damn High
In other words, at $1.21 trillion, the actual national security budget is essentially twice the size of the announced Pentagon budget. It's also a compendium of military-industrial waste and misspending. Yet those calling for higher budgets continue to argue that the only way to keep America safe is to pour in yet more tax dollars at a moment when remarkably little is going into, for instance, domestic infrastructure.
The U.S. already spends more than the next seven countries combined on a military that is seemingly incapable of either winning or ending any of the wars it's been engaged in since September 2001. So isn't it reasonable to suggest that the more that's spent on what's still called national security but should perhaps go by the term "national insecurity," the less there is to show for it? More spending is never the solution to poor spending. Isn't it about time, then, that the disastrously bloated "defense" budget experienced some meaningful cuts and shifts in priorities? Shouldn't the U.S. military be made into a far leaner and more agile force geared to actual defense instead of disastrous wars (and preparations for more of the same) across a significant swath of the planet?
Mandy Smithberger, a TomDispatch regular, is the director of the Center for Defense Information at the Project On Government Oversight (POGO).
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Books, John Feffer's new dystopian novel (the second in the Splinterlands series) Frostlands, Beverly Gologorsky's novel Every Body Has a Story, and Tom Engelhardt's A Nation Unmade by War, as well as Alfred McCoy's In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power and John Dower's The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II.
Copyright 2020 Mandy Smithberger
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