Congress created the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) in 2002 by combining 22 agencies that are responsible for a vast array of activities. President George W. Bush promised that the new department would “improve efficiency without growing government” and would cut out “duplicative and redundant activities that drain critical homeland security resources.”

The president’s promise of creating a lean and efficient DHS did not materialize. The department’s spending doubled from $27 billion in 2004 to $54 billion in 2014. Its workforce expanded from 163,000 employees in 2004 to 190,000 by 2014. And far from being efficient, DHS agencies are some of the most poorly managed in the federal government.

DHS houses the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), Customs and Border Protection (CBP), Transportation Security Administration (TSA), Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), Secret Service, and many other agencies. These agencies are known more for scandals than for high performance, and burying them within the DHS bureaucratic superstructure did not help matters.

This article explores three types of DHS failing: general mismanagement, misallocated investment, and civil liberties abuse. It argues that DHS should be closed down. Needed DHS agencies should be moved to other departments or should report directly to the president. Other DHS agencies, including FEMA and TSA, should be terminated because their services would be better provided by the states and private sector.

General Mismanagement

DHS has suffered from management failures since the beginning. It has long been on the Government Accountability Office (GAO)’s “high risk” list of troubled federal organizations. Employee surveys by the Partnership for Public Service have found that DHS is the worst department to work for in the government.

In October, The Washington Post reviewed a new survey of 40,000 DHS employees, and it found grim results. Only 42 percent of DHS employees said they are satisfied with the department, only 25 percent have a positive view of their leaders’ ability to “generate high levels of motivation and commitment in the workforce,’’ and only 39 percent said department leaders “maintain high standards of honesty and integrity.”

In September, a separate Washington Post investigation found that many DHS employees say they have “a dysfunctional work environment” with “abysmal morale.” Not surprisingly, DHS has a high employee turnover rate. Current and former DHS officials told the Post that “the department can be an infuriating, exhausting place to work” with “stifling bureaucracy.”

One of the exhausting factors is that DHS leaders have to devote extraordinary amounts of time dealing with the complex tangle of 90 congressional committees and subcommittees that oversee the department. Congress is thus partly to blame for DHS failings by creating such an inefficient oversight structure.

One might have hoped that putting a layer of expert DHS officials over top of the 22 agencies would improve governance, but it has not. Consider FEMA, which had been a stand-alone agency before 2002. It had already been known for sluggish responses to disasters, but FEMA’s performance during Hurricane Katrina in 2005 was worse than ever.

Or consider the Secret Service, which has had a series of management failures in recent years despite being overseen by DHS. The Service has spent huge amounts on security for foreign presidential trips, yet trips have been undermined by scandals related to prostitution and drunken agents. At home, the Service had a series of embarrassing security failures leading up to the remarkable White House intruder incident of September 2014.

TSA has long struggled with poor management. In 2012 reports by House committees found that TSA’s operations are “costly, counterintuitive, and poorly executed,” and that the agency “suffers from bureaucratic morass and mismanagement.” Former TSA chief Kip Hawley argued in a 2012 op-ed that the agency is “hopelessly bureaucratic.” And, in 2014, former acting TSA chief Kenneth Kaspirin said that the agency has “a toxic culture” with “terrible” morale.

Employee misconduct is a problem in numerous DHS agencies. At TSA, for example, employee theft from passenger baggage is a serious problem. At Customs and Border Protection (CBP), there appears to be a growing corruption problem related to drug and human smuggling. And, according to a September Washington Post editorial on CBP, there has been “an alarming number of incidents involving the use of lethal force . . . all too frequently under circumstances that suggest the agency is indifferent or hostile to the most basic standards of restraint, transparency, and self-policing.”

Many organizations have management problems. But DHS leaders allow problems within agencies to fester for years, and only promise to make changes after major scandals erupt. In the wake of the recent White House intruder incident, the head of the Secret Service resigned. But the head of DHS did not resign and said very little about it, presumably to evade responsibility. But if DHS does not proactively correct agency problems, and DHS leaders do not take responsibility for failures, then the DHS structure provides little value from a management perspective.

Misallocated Investment

Federal agencies often make wasteful spending decisions, and DHS agencies are no exception. In one recent case, CBP built 21 small homes for border agents in Ajo, Arizona, at a cost of $680,000 each, but this is a town where the average home price is just $86,500. A 2014 DHS Inspector General review of the project concluded, “this is a classic example of inadequate planning and management leading to wasteful spending.”

This was a small project, but these sorts of problems plague major DHS projects as well. In their 2011 book, Terror, Security, and Money, homeland security experts John Mueller and Mark Stewart discuss how DHS often fails to rigorously evaluate projects to see whether the benefits outweigh the costs. A 2010 National Academy of Sciences (NAS) report made similar criticisms, as have numerous GAO reports.

Without a rigorous process to steer spending to high-value uses, DHS has funded many boondoggle projects, including: