The Department of Homeland Security should be broken up immediately.

It was October 2001, a month after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, when President George W. Bush created the Office of Homeland Security in the White House. “The mission of the office will be to coordinate the implementation of a comprehensive national strategy to secure the United States from terrorist threats or attacks,” Bush announced.

The following year, Congress enacted the Homeland Security Act, consolidating 22 federal agencies into one Cabinet department. Bush told the country, “This comprehensive plan lays out clear lines of authority, clear responsibilities, responsibilities for federal employees, and for governors and mayors and community and business leaders and the American citizens. With a better picture of those responsibilities, all of us can direct money and manpower to meet them.”

How’d that work out?

Not well at all. Although Bush promised that these structural changes would eliminate “overlapping responsibilities,” what we’ve got is a system that has no brakes on bad decisions from the top. Take the COVID pandemic response, for example. Once Washington, D.C., put out the word that “social distancing” was recommended, the structure of the Department of Homeland Security enabled that “recommendation” to become an enforceable mandate on federal employees, governors, mayors and even non-governmental leaders in community organizations and business. Failure to comply with DHS “recommendations” could put grants and other funding in jeopardy.

Now the government has admitted that the 6-foot social distancing rule was pulled out of the air without any scientific basis. No apology was offered to the many small businesses that went under because they didn’t have room for their customers, or to the children who were kept out of school because classroom space couldn’t accommodate the 6-foot distance requirement. That’s what happens when “clear lines of authority” are paired with “all of us can direct money.”

A less centralized system with “overlapping responsibilities” might have enabled equally senior officials in different departments of the government to offer competing visions of the best response to the pandemic, leading to a transparent national debate in which the consequences of policy choices could be fully considered before anybody got hurt.

The purpose of the Department of Homeland Security was to “win the war on terror,” Bush said, by creating a structure that “will be able to deal with the threats that will continue to be directed at a nation that loves freedom.”

Somehow that vision evolved into a department that became ground zero for a massive censorship operation that worked through third parties to suppress and remove the constitutionally protected free speech of Americans on social media platforms. DHS’ Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) set up a “disinformation” group at Stanford University to police Americans’ political speech before the 2020 election, according to a House Judiciary Committee report.

The U.S. Secret Service is another example of an agency that is failing under the “clear lines of authority” that were supposed to create more accountability. The assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump resulted from so many egregious and inexplicable security failures that at least one member of Congress asked Kimberly Cheatle, then the director of the Secret Service, whether there was a conspiracy to kill President Trump.

Cheatle eventually resigned under pressure but if there was true accountability, she would have been fired. Meanwhile, Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas still has his job and the deputy director of the Secret Service is now acting director. It’s hardly the housecleaning that the near-assassination of the leading candidate for president would seem to require.

Liberal groups including the ACLU have complained about DHS dysfunction and abuse in the enforcement of immigration policy, and conservatives have complained that DHS’ Office of Intelligence and Analysis sought warrantless surveillance of credit card data to track purchases of religious texts and firearms.

Meanwhile, an update on the actual war on terror: This week, Washington, D.C., was the scene of massive riots by individuals supporting Hamas, a terrorist organization. U.S. flags were removed from flag poles and burned, and Palestinian flags flown in their place.

Break up the Department of Homeland Security. Pencils have erasers for this very reason.

Write Susan@SusanShelley.com