By Keith Johnson
Deficit hawks haven’t clipped the wings of the Department of Homeland Security. Its discretionary budget would increase 0.7% to $43.2 billion under the spending blueprint issued today by the Obama administration.
- A passenger passes through a full body scanner at O’Hare International Airport. (AP Photo/M. Spencer Green)
One area the administration is eager to expand: Airport security, including more of the full-body scanners that have proven a ligthning rod with certain sections of the traveling public. Partly in response to the uproar over the new scanners, the Transportation Security Administration has started testing new software for the machines that creates a generic, rather than graphic, image.
The budget request includes $77 million for an additional 275 full-body scanners (that’s $280,000 a pop), bringing the total number of scanners to be installed in U.S. airports at the end of the year to 1,275.
The administration’s budget will also up the ante on a different kind of airport security: Behavioral Detection Officers, or agents who are trained to spot abnormal behavior even before passengers get to the checkpoint.
The budget request includes $237 million to expand the program inside of big airports and broaden it out to some smaller airports. The whole program came under fire last year after a report from the Government Accountability Office found flaws in the way the program was conceived and put into practice, concluding “A scientific consensus does not exist on whether behavior detection principles can be reliably used for counterterrorism purposes.”
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There was no DHS prior to 2002, but the Historical Tables in the FY2012 Budget documents list DHS spending levels going back all the way to 1962. Presumably they have just added together spending for agencies which have since been placed under the DHS umbrella.
During the 1960s, spending for these agencies and functions rose from $500 million to about $1 billion.
By 1980, these pre-DHS agencies were costing roughly $4 billion, then $7 billion by 1990 and $13 billion by 2000.
Between 2001 and 2003, the cost of these DHS functions rose from about $14 billion to $32 billion, then to over $42 billion by FY2010
I support spending for the Coast Guard, the Border Patrol, and the Immigration Service. I support some federal resources for cyber-security. But airports are not federal property and airlines have not yet been nationalized, so why should our taxes be spent so frivolously to make them only slightly safer than they woud otherwise be.
IMO the entire Dept of Homeland Security should be disestablished, with the Coast Guard and Border Patrol transferred to the Dept of Defense, and immigration functions to the Dept of State. Let the NSA handle cyber security.