DHS: The Frankenstein Department That Never Quite Worked

108. That is how many congressional committees and subcommittees claim oversight jurisdiction over the Department of Homeland Security. The Department of Defense, with ten times the budget and millions more employees, answers to 36. The ratio alone tells you what went wrong when Congress stitched 22 agencies together during a national panic and never went back to check whether the seams held.

They did not.

The Arithmetic of Panic

The Homeland Security Act became law on November 25, 2002, fourteen months after the September 11 attacks. By March 1, 2003, the Department of Homeland Security opened for business, roughly 100 days from signature to launch. In that span, 22 agencies from eight different federal departments were pulled from their homes in Agriculture, Commerce, Defense, Energy, Health and Human Services, Justice, Transportation, and Treasury, then reassembled under a single new roof.

The roster reads like a federal directory thrown into a blender. The Immigration and Naturalization Service. The U.S. Customs Service. The Coast Guard. The Secret Service. FEMA. The Transportation Security Administration, which itself had existed for barely a year. The Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service's agricultural border inspections. The Federal Law Enforcement Training Center. The Federal Protective Service. The list continues through entities most Americans have never heard of, all the way to the National Domestic Preparedness Office and the Nuclear Incident Response Team.

It was the largest government reorganization since the Department of Defense was created in 1947. But the 1947 reorganization took years of planning, involved fewer entities, and followed a war that was already over. The 2003 reorganization happened in months, involved more agencies, and was launched while the threat it was designed to address was still evolving.

The initial workforce numbered roughly 170,000 employees. And the agency most responsible for domestic counterterrorism, the FBI, was not included. From day one, DHS was a department built around its own central mission's absence.

The Secretary Treadmill

Eight confirmed secretaries have led DHS in its 22 years of existence. A ninth, Senator Markwayne Mullin of Oklahoma, was nominated in March 2026 after President Trump fired Kristi Noem following a dispute over a $220 million advertising campaign. The average confirmed-secretary tenure runs roughly three years, but that average masks wild variation.

Tom Ridge, the first secretary, served about two years from January 2003 to February 2005. Michael Chertoff stayed nearly four years. Janet Napolitano managed four and a half years under Obama, the longest tenure of any DHS secretary. Jeh Johnson served three. Then the Trump era introduced a new tempo. John Kelly lasted six months before moving to the White House as chief of staff. Kirstjen Nielsen held on for 16 months before resigning under pressure in April 2019, after Trump publicly demanded a "tougher direction" on immigration enforcement and grew frustrated with border crossing numbers.

What followed was worse than rapid turnover. It was legally dubious turnover. Kevin McAleenan served as acting secretary from April to November 2019. Chad Wolf assumed the title in November 2019 and held it until January 2021. The Government Accountability Office later found that Wolf's appointment violated the Federal Vacancies Reform Act. A federal judge agreed, ruling that Wolf had served without lawful authority. Orders he signed, including asylum restrictions, were subsequently vacated by courts.

Alejandro Mayorkas brought stability under Biden, serving the full term from February 2021 to January 2025. Then Noem arrived, was confirmed by a 59-34 Senate vote on January 25, 2025, and was fired just over a year later. She became the second Trump-era DHS secretary to be ousted in a tenure measured in months rather than years.

The pattern matters because DHS is not an agency that can function on autopilot. Its 240,000 employees operate across missions so diverse that strategic direction from the top is not optional - it is the only thing that holds the structure together. Every secretary departure resets the clock on relationships with Congress, interagency coordination, and internal reform initiatives.

The Budget That Buys Confusion

DHS's fiscal year 2025 budget totaled approximately $112 billion, including mandatory spending and the Disaster Relief Fund. The discretionary portion, the money Congress actively allocates, came to $60.6 billion. By comparison, the entire State Department and USAID together operate on roughly $60 billion.

Where does the money go? The bulk flows to three areas: border enforcement, disaster relief, and transportation security. Customs and Border Protection alone accounts for roughly 70,000 positions. The Disaster Relief Fund absorbed $22.7 billion in FY2025, a figure swollen by Hurricanes Helene and Milton and the California wildfires.

What gets starved is integration. Between 2005 and 2023, DHS spent $262 million trying to modernize its human resources IT systems, the backbone that would allow a unified department to manage hiring, payroll, and promotions across its components. The GAO's verdict after 18 years and a quarter-billion dollars: "limited results." To put that figure in perspective, $262 million spread over 18 years works out to about $14.5 million per year, less than DHS spends in a single day of operations.

The department cannot build shared systems because its components were never designed to share. Coast Guard payroll follows military rules. TSA screeners operate under a different personnel system than CBP officers. FEMA's disaster workforce surges and contracts seasonally. Immigration judges, until recently under the Justice Department, follow yet another set of procedures. Each system was inherited from the pre-merger world, and 22 years later, they still have not been unified.

Culture Clash at Federal Scale

The Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey, conducted annually across the government, consistently ranks DHS last or near-last among large federal agencies in employee satisfaction and engagement. This is not a recent development. Congress held a hearing titled "Building One DHS: Why Is Employee Morale Low?" in 2012, barely a decade after the department launched. The question has not been answered since.

The numbers are specific. TSA, with approximately 55,000 employees, scored 11.6 percentage points below the government average in engagement metrics. ICE, with roughly 20,000 employees, trailed by 7.9 points. The Countering Weapons of Mass Destruction Office registered some of the lowest scores in the entire federal government.

These are not numbers that reflect poor management at the margins. They reflect a structural impossibility: you cannot merge a military service with a law enforcement agency, a civilian disaster organization, a regulatory body, and a cybersecurity directorate and expect a shared professional culture to emerge. Coast Guard sailors follow the Uniform Code of Military Justice. Border Patrol agents carry firearms and operate in a paramilitary hierarchy. FEMA coordinators are civilian project managers. CISA analysts are technologists whose closest peers work at Google and Microsoft, not in government. Each group brought its own pay scales, promotion ladders, union arrangements, and professional identity into DHS, and each has spent two decades resisting absorption into a culture that does not match its own.

The workforce data from 2025 shows the consequences accelerating. CISA's headcount dropped by nearly one-third between June 2024 and May 2025, from 3,400 employees to 2,500. FEMA lost roughly 2,400 active employees over the same period. Meanwhile, ICE grew by 500 and CBP by 1,500. The department is not shrinking uniformly. It is hollowing out in areas that require technical expertise while expanding in enforcement, a rebalancing that reflects political priorities rather than organizational coherence.

The 108 Bosses Problem

The 9/11 Commission, in its 2004 report, recommended that Congress consolidate its oversight of DHS into a smaller number of committees. Congress ignored the recommendation. Two decades later, the number of committees and subcommittees claiming jurisdiction has grown from 86 at one count to over 108 at another. Each committee that oversaw a pre-merger agency kept its claim after that agency moved to DHS.

The result is that DHS officials spend enormous amounts of time preparing testimony, briefings, and reports for dozens of different legislative bodies, many of which issue conflicting directives. A Heritage Foundation analysis described the situation as "chaos." The Atlantic Council's Future of DHS Project called it the single largest obstacle to meaningful reform.

The structural trap is elegant in its perversity. To reform DHS, you need congressional action. To get congressional action, you need committee chairs willing to give up jurisdiction. Committee chairs gain power from jurisdiction. Therefore, the people who would need to act have the strongest personal incentive not to.

No other cabinet department faces this arithmetic. Defense answers to Armed Services and Appropriations. State answers to Foreign Relations and Appropriations. DHS answers to everyone and therefore, in practical terms, to no one.

Permanently High Risk

The GAO placed DHS management on its High-Risk List in 2003, the year the department opened. It has never come off. As of 2025, two DHS areas remain on the list: "Strengthening DHS IT and Financial Management Functions," a designation that dates to 2003, and "Improving the Delivery of Federal Disaster Assistance," added in 2025 after a decade in which disaster appropriations exceeded $448 billion.

Eight specific outcome areas in IT and financial management remain unresolved after more than two decades of work. The department's financial management systems still cannot produce a clean audit opinion across all components. Its IT infrastructure remains a patchwork of legacy systems inherited from the pre-merger agencies.

No other federal department has spent its entire existence on the GAO's high-risk list for basic management functions. The designation is the bureaucratic equivalent of a credit rating agency marking an institution as junk-grade from the day it opened and never upgrading it. The problem is not that DHS has failed to improve. It has, in some areas. The problem is that the gap between what it needs and what it has never closes, because each improvement reveals another layer of inherited dysfunction.

What Other Countries Built Instead

The DHS model has no true international equivalent, because no other major democracy made the same structural choice. The United Kingdom's Home Office handles immigration, policing, and counterterrorism, but disaster relief sits with the Cabinet Office, the coast guard with the Maritime and Coastguard Agency, and transport security with the Department for Transport. Australia created its Department of Home Affairs in 2017, covering immigration, borders, and cybersecurity. Disaster management was initially kept separate but has since been folded into Home Affairs through the National Emergency Management Agency, moving Australia closer to the American consolidation model. Germany distributes civil protection across its 16 Länder, with the federal interior ministry handling federal police and migration policy.

The prevailing pattern abroad has been functional specialization: keep immigration enforcement, disaster response, and cybersecurity in separate organizations with separate leadership, separate budgets, and separate parliamentary oversight. Australia's recent consolidation under Home Affairs is the closest parallel, though it still involves fewer agencies and a smaller workforce than DHS. The American approach of maximum consolidation under one roof was driven by the politics of September 11, not by any organizational theory that suggested it would work.

Twenty-two years of data suggest it has not.

Reform That Never Arrives

The proposals exist. Richard Clarke, the former White House counterterrorism coordinator, recommended splitting DHS into a focused "Department of Public Safety" built around the FBI's counterterrorism division and DHS's cyber units, with a separate "Borders and Transportation Security" department for enforcement, and FEMA restored to independent agency status. The ACLU published 15 reform proposals in 2022, timed to the department's 20th anniversary. Brookings has studied it. The Atlantic Council has studied it. Heritage has studied it.

The number of major structural reforms Congress has passed since DHS was created in 2002: zero.

The reasons are the ones documented throughout this article. The 108 oversight committees will not consolidate. No secretary serves long enough to build the political capital for reform. The budget is large enough to sustain dysfunction but not structured to fix it. And every time the political conversation turns to DHS, it becomes a debate about immigration policy rather than organizational architecture.

Markwayne Mullin, when confirmed, will become the ninth person to hold the title of Secretary of Homeland Security. He will inherit a department that has never once been off GAO's high-risk list, that ranks last in employee satisfaction among large agencies, and that answers to more congressional committees than any other cabinet department in the federal government. The question is not whether secretary number nine can succeed where the previous eight could not. The question is whether anyone can fix what 22 agencies were turned into when a panicked Congress decided that bigger meant safer.

The numbers say no. But the numbers have been saying that since 2003, and the department is still here, still spending $60 billion a year, still trying to make a Frankenstein walk.