As if flying wasn’t frustrating enough nowadays, headlines last week proclaimed how long security lines at major airports. Reportedly, passengers at William P. Hobby Airport in Houston were told to arrive four to five hours before departure times.
These “extended wait times” at TSA security checkpoints came courtesy of the partial government shutdown, which began on Feb. 14. Congress has yet to agree to extend funding for several agencies, including the Department of Homeland Security, under which TSA operates.
All of these agencies operating with three-letter acronyms, including ICE, were created within the context of national security, as a response to the tragic events of Sept. 11, 2001 and the Global War on Terror. The problem is, as Mr. Jefferson opined so many years ago, is that we’ve traded freedoms for “security,” and are allowing our constitutional democratic republic sink further into a police state.
DHS and ICE have had total impunity as of late to kill citizens, and these murdered U.S. citizens were decried by incompetent government officials as domestic terrorists.
With American citizens experiencing consternation to the point that some are afraid to leave their homes, due to ICE presence in their communities, the answer is crystal clear: DHS should be dismantled.
In a statement from Steven Nekhalia, who serve as chair for the Libertarian National Committee, the steps toward a technocratic police state are mapped out, and yes, if recent events are to be taken as signs, then we are edging dangerously close to the nightmarish conclusion that Nekhalia lays out, which is all powers going to the state.
While Nekhalia, in his statement, is hyper-focused on one component of DHS (ICE), and the rise of the “warrior cop,” the ineffectiveness has been witnessed by the American taxpayer at all levels of DHS function – from the abuses of power that have made headlines as of late to disaster response through the years (FEMA).
It’s been more than a quarter century now, since policymakers believed that consolidating numerous security-related agencies into one monolithic department would make our country safer. It hasn’t.
Since 2001, DHS has become a costly and unwieldy bureaucracy, and time and time again, taxpayers have asked “Does it actually improve national security at all?”.
The most recent negotiations brought by Senate Democrats asked for unanimous consent to pass a bill to fund agencies within DHS that do not conduct immigration enforcement, efforts which were blocked by Republicans.
It’s absurd when considering that under the Big Beautiful (for Billionaires) Bill championed by Trump, ICE was funded to the tune of $85 billion, which skyrocketed from a previous funding of $10 billion or so for years.
The problems with ICE have created many calls within the Beltway for accountability, potential reform and investigation into abusive tactics, but when you have an agency that’s more well-funded than the combined militaries of several countries, that agency can, and has, thus far, gotten away with murder.
Many of the agencies that were folded up under the DHS umbrella, already existed and performed their functions effectively before DHS’s creation. Border security, disaster response, transportation safety and intelligence analysis were all handled by agencies within other departments.
One of the reasons many Americans claim (and rightfully so) that large bureaucracies are inefficient comes down to slow decision making and wasteful spending. As one of the largest federal departments, DHS oversees hundreds of thousands of employees and an enormous budget. The 2025 budget reconciliation bill allocated $191 billion to DHS for the remainder of Trump’s presidency.
While much of the attention in mainstream media and polling represents public concern over ICE’s tactics, the problem is not limited to one sliver of the pie. We the People have, in essence, ended up funding an exercise in administrative complexity instead of gaining a meaningful measure of national security.
Disbanding DHS would not mean abandoning homeland security; instead, it would involve taking the functions under it to redistribute to departments where the missions are clearer and oversight is stronger.
This could greatly reduce bureaucratic waste, improve accountability and save the taxpayers a good deal of money while protecting the country.
Demanding better leadership is not anti-law enforcement. It’s pro-Constitution and pro-human dignity.
Chris Edwards is editor of the Tyler County Booster, a sister newspaper in the Polk County Publishing Group. He can be reached at cedwards@polkcountypublishing.com.