The house al Qae­da built — a sprawl­ing new head­quar­ters for the Depart­ment of Home­land Secu­ri­ty, an agency cre­at­ed in response to the Sep­tem­ber 11 attacks — was sup­posed to open next year.

It’s just a bit behind sched­ule.  Its open­ing is now slat­ed for 2026, 21 years after plan­ning began.

Despite the project’s glacial pace, it already is 36% over bud­get, bal­loon­ing to $4.5 bil­lion from the pre­vi­ous esti­mate of $3.3 bil­lion.  Those esti­mates, accord­ing to the Gov­ern­ment Account­abil­i­ty Office (GAO), are “unre­li­able” [GAO report, p. 1].  They have not been updat­ed to reflect “sig­nif­i­cant pro­gram changes, includ­ing actu­al costs” [p. 1]. So the actu­al cost of com­plet­ing this project over the next 12 years is like­ly much more than $4.5 bil­lion.  If the facil­i­ty is ever completed.

The Depart­ment of Home­land Secu­ri­ty (DHS) is a case study in bureau­crat­ic mud­dle.  Its Con­gres­sion­al archi­tects believed that cre­at­ing a “safer, more secure Amer­i­ca” required gov­ern­ment to birth a new fed­er­al agency.  Al Qae­da inspires ter­ror; we con­jure bureaucracies.

Or, more accu­rate­ly, we reshuf­fle exist­ing bureau­cra­cies.  DHS, for the most part, doesn’t do any­thing that gov­ern­ment wasn’t already doing before its cre­ation.  Con­gress took 22 dif­fer­ent enti­ties – every­thing from the Secret Ser­vice to FEMA to the Coast Guard to some­thing called the Plum Island Ani­mal Dis­ease Cen­ter – away from their par­ent bureaus and cob­bled them togeth­er into the new depart­ment.  Islamists no doubt quail in fear when they see its orga­ni­za­tion­al chart.

Reor­ga­ni­za­tion of the fresh­ly orga­nized agency soon became a pre­oc­cu­pa­tion of a series of DHS Sec­re­taries.  Hur­ri­cane Kat­ri­na rav­aged Louisiana just months after one such reor­ga­ni­za­tion was announced and the ensu­ing bureau­crat­ic bed­lam con­vinced the department’s lead­er­ship that fur­ther reor­ga­niz­ing was needed.

Agency offi­cials also con­front­ed the daunt­ing task of find­ing office space for employ­ees of the new­ly mint­ed depart­ment.  DHS head­quar­ters employ­ees cur­rent­ly occu­py 9 mil­lion square feet of real estate in Wash­ing­ton and its envi­rons, scat­tered across 94 build­ings and 50 loca­tions [p. 4].  Gov­ern­ment offi­cials plau­si­bly argued that hous­ing much of the DHS head­quar­ters staff on a sin­gle cam­pus would increase its orga­ni­za­tion­al effi­cien­cy and reduce its real estate costs.  They just can’t seem to make it happen.

Plan­ning began in 2005.  It took three years to select a site: the west­ern por­tion of a large prop­er­ty that once includ­ed the nation’s old­est insti­tu­tion for the men­tal­ly ill.  Its most famous res­i­dent was John Hinck­ley, Pres­i­dent Reagan’s would-be assas­sin.  Bad karma.

It should be not­ed that DHS chose the site in con­junc­tion with the Gen­er­al Ser­vices Admin­is­tra­tion (GSA), the fed­er­al agency tasked with mak­ing gov­ern­ment pro­cure­ments more effi­cient.  GSA’s involve­ment did­n’t improve things much.  From its incep­tion in 2005, fed­er­al audi­tors placed the project on their “high-risk” list [p. 1].  It has lived down to expec­ta­tions.  The GAO report cat­a­logs a lengthy list of fail­ures by DHS and its GSA min­ders that con­tributed to delays and cost overruns..

DHS blames Con­gress for the cost over­runs and decade-long delays.  It is cer­tain­ly true that Con­gress hasn’t pro­vid­ed the full amount of mon­ey that the agency request­ed.  Enti­tle­ment spend­ing pro­grams like Social Secu­ri­ty, Medicare and Med­ic­aid, along with inter­est pay­ments on our $17 tril­lion debt now con­sume 78 per­cent of fed­er­al rev­enues. That leaves lit­tle mon­ey for things like the DHS con­struc­tion project, even after account­ing for recent tax increas­es and a gov­ern­ment bor­row­ing binge.

But it is also true that DHS’s slop­pi­ness, inef­fi­cien­cy and incom­pe­tence have tar­nished Con­gres­sion­al per­cep­tions of the agency, par­tic­u­lar­ly since the department’s defi­cien­cies are not con­fined to this one project.  GAO notes that “most of DHS’s acqui­si­tion pro­grams con­tin­ue to cost more than expect­ed, take longer to deploy than planned, or deliv­er less capa­bil­i­ty than promised.” [p. 2]

Agency morale fur­ther evi­dences its malaise.  The Wash­ing­ton Post recent­ly report­ed that near­ly one-third of the department’s senior lead­er­ship has left in the past four years.  The arti­cle attrib­ut­es the depar­tures to “what employ­ees wide­ly describe as a dys­func­tion­al work envi­ron­ment, abysmal morale, and the lure of pri­vate secu­ri­ty com­pa­nies pay­ing top dol­lar that have pro­lif­er­at­ed in Wash­ing­ton since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.”

The exo­dus has cre­at­ed a revolv­ing door of tem­po­rary direc­tors at the high­est lev­els, com­pro­mis­ing its mis­sion.  “The department’s ter­ror­ism intel­li­gence arm,” the arti­cle notes, “has cycled through six direc­tors dur­ing the Oba­ma admin­is­tra­tion, dec­i­mat­ing morale and con­tribut­ing to months-long delays in releas­ing intel­li­gence reports.”  Cyber­se­cu­ri­ty efforts also have been ham­pered by flag­ging morale, accord­ing to the report.

It would go too far to sug­gest that what one for­mer offi­cial describes as “a tox­ic cul­ture” is the cause of recent DHS laps­es.  The list of those laps­es is nonethe­less trou­bling.  It includes fail­ure to antic­i­pate and respond effec­tive­ly to the mas­sive migra­tion of chil­dren from Cen­tral Amer­i­ca across our bor­der (the respon­si­bil­i­ty of DHS’s Immi­gra­tion and Cus­toms Enforce­ment), as well as a fright­en­ing series of fail­ures by the Secret Ser­vice, also part of DHS, that led to the res­ig­na­tion of its director.

DHS dys­func­tion is a cau­tion­ary tale for those who believe in the capac­i­ty of gov­ern­ment to achieve its stat­ed objec­tives.  Cre­at­ing an agency, entrust­ing it with a sweep­ing and impor­tant mis­sion, and endow­ing it with tens of thou­sands of employ­ees and a size­able bud­get is risky busi­ness.  We should not expect effi­cien­cy from gov­ern­ment because it is a monop­oly.  It has no com­peti­tors and needn’t per­suade you to part with your mon­ey.  It can there­fore be expect­ed to behave as a monop­o­list: it will be prof­li­gate, clum­sy and cost­ly, regard­less of the nobil­i­ty of its mis­sion and the puri­ty of its intentions.

In mat­ters of nation­al secu­ri­ty, we must resign our­selves to this inevitabil­i­ty.  Pro­tect­ing its cit­i­zens is among government’s core func­tions, even if it does not per­form these func­tions opti­mal­ly.  But gov­ern­ment does not lim­it its diet to core func­tions.  Its appetite to spend is omniv­o­rous, and it often spends on friv­o­li­ties.  Wit­ness the gov­ern­men­t’s patron­age of the turgid­ly named musi­cal, “The Great Immen­si­ty.”

Financed by a $700,000 grant from the Nation­al Sci­ence Foun­da­tion, the musi­cal report­ed­ly fea­tured a char­ac­ter named Karl, who aban­dons his wife and his sweet gig with “Shark Week” because the pro­gram devotes too lit­tle atten­tion to glob­al cli­mate change.  The play chron­i­cles his wife Phyllis’s search for her hus­band, who thought­ful­ly leaves behind a jar of his frozen sperm, since the cou­ple had been plan­ning to start a family.

Karl, mean­while “dis­ap­pears with a 15-year-old ‘Earth Ambas­sador’ for the UN, Julie, who con­vinces him to stage a kid­nap­ping of young chil­dren dur­ing a glob­al cli­mate sum­mit, on the emi­nent­ly ratio­nal assump­tion that such an event would make the world act on glob­al warm­ing,” accord­ing to an account pub­lished in the Wash­ing­ton Free Bea­con.

With such a com­pelling sto­ry line, how could the Nation­al Sci­ence Foun­da­tion not have green-light­ed this cre­ative effort to win souls to faith in cli­mate change?  And yet, the play died after just one night in Kansas City, the first leg of what was to have been a nation­al tour.

Tales of improv­i­dent gov­ern­ment spend­ing fill vol­umes.  So long as there is gov­ern­ment, its waste will con­tin­ue to flow. Gov­ern­ment is not a busi­ness and it is unrea­son­able to expect it to func­tion like one. Busi­ness­es face exis­ten­tial threats.  Even large and suc­cess­ful com­pa­nies fail.  They must com­pete and evolve to sur­vive.  Gov­ern­ment faces no such threat, nor do mil­lions of its employ­ees face the real­is­tic prospect of being fired.   Watch­dog agen­cies and inspec­tors gen­er­al can iden­ti­fy some inef­fi­cien­cy and waste.  Effec­tive admin­is­tra­tors might reduce it, but they can­not elim­i­nate it.  Gov­ern­ment will con­tin­ue to squan­der resources that would oth­er­wise have been put to more pro­duc­tive use.

To lim­it its waste, we must lim­it its scope.