While the Sanders campaign doesn't state that he'll abolish the department, he makes it clear right away that he's not DHS' biggest fan. To quote the website directly:
Bernie voted against the creation of the Department of Homeland Security in 2002, a plan concocted by Senator Joe Lieberman in the wake of 9/11 that centralized disparate and distinct agencies into one bureaucratic behemoth. DHS is now the third-largest government agency and suffers from wasteful spending, bureaucratic bloat, and no clearly defined mission.
The plan focuses much more on DHS' responsibilities in border patrol and immigration rather than its disaster relief or counterterrorism missions. Border patrol and immigration are important pieces of DHS, however. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) received the second-largest chunk of the DHS budget for fiscal year 2020, exceeded only by FEMA's share. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement had the fourth-largest piece, behind the Coast Guard and ahead of the TSA.
TSA, the Coast Guard, and FEMA may be have more visible or familiar missions to some Americans than ICE or CBP. But removing ICE and CBP from the DHS would might considerably weaken the department's overall power within Washington.
This may be part of the plan, of course. ICE would be transferred to the Department of Justice, the CBP would return to the Department of the Treasury, and US Citizenship and Immigration Services would return to the State Department. "Immigration is not a threat to national security," the website states.
ICE was formed specifically to be part of the DHS when it was created in March 2003. The CBP and USCSIS had roots in the Department of Labor (as Immigration and Naturalization Service), then spent decades with the Justice Department. They became charter members of the DHS in March 2003 when they were split off.Transferring those three offices out of the DHS would fundamentally change the composition of the DHS, as Sanders seeks to do.
It would likely accomplish his objective of separating immigration from national security as an issue, but could cause other problems. For one, separating the three structures would likely make cooperation and communication more difficult. It might serve to strengthen other departments, which might reasonably expect to inherit large budgets along with the departments. The Department of Justice might stand to be the biggest winner; its 2020 budget request totaled $29 billion while CBP is expected to receive a record $18.2 billion in 2020. Even a return to Obama-era levels of funding would mean about $10 billion for CBP, increasing Justice's budget by more than a third.
DHS, on the other hand, might see more than $30 billion walk out the door under this plan, if 2020 projections hold true. That totals about 60 percent of its proposed 2020 budget. Sanders' plan might not be to kill DHS, but a blow of that size would be felt for a long time to come.
No comments:
Post a Comment