The two Bush presidents created more problems domestically than they solved in their inimical do-gooder-government-is-the-answer way. Bush 41 advocated and signed into law the "American Disabilities Act." This effort to do good has added regulations, requirements and costs into the uncounted billions with limited benefits to the handicapped that didn't already exist.
Bush 43, in his effort to show protective action following 9/11, created the every growing, bloated, inefficient velum overlay of a massive bureaucracy that made redundant existing, inept and inefficient enforcement bureaucracies that failed to work before 9/11. The Department of Homeland Security is good at one thing: Protecting Itself. The President's Oath of Office needs to incorporate the phase from the Hippocratic Oath: Primum non nocere (First, Do No Harm). Not that Presidents have paid much attention to their oath in the last century. m/r
Do We Need the DHS?
by MICHAEL TANNER March 4, 2015 4:00 AM
We might well ask what the DHS is doing to further our national security.
So House Republicans have accepted the inevitable and passed a clean bill funding the Department of Homeland Security.
We always knew how this would play out. The media, congressional Democrats, and President Obama deluged us with tales of impending disaster, as if ISIS were about to wade ashore in Miami, despite the fact that, according DHS’s contingency plan, 86 percent of the department’s workers would be exempt from any furlough, including virtually all employees at key security agencies like customs and border protection, the Coast Guard, and the Secret Service.
On the other hand, the Republicans really had no end-game. The provision defunding the president’s executive order on immigration could not pass the Senate or be signed into law, meaning that sooner or later the House Republicans had to give in. Of course, being Republicans, they had to do maximum political damage to themselves first.
But amidst all the noise and drama, there is one additional question someone might ask: Do we really need a Department of Homeland Security in the first place?
The creation of the DHS was a classic example of how Washington reacts to a crisis. In the wake of 9/11, the pressure was on Congress and the Bush administration to “do something,” or at least look as if they were doing something. The result was a new Cabinet-level agency that cobbled together a host of disparate agencies, ranging from the Federal Emergency Management Administration (FEMA) to the Fish and Wildlife Service. Nearly every federal employee who wore a badge was simply swept up and dumped into the new bureaucracy. From a simple management or “span of control” perspective, lumping together so many unrelated functions is an invitation to failure.
Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/414782/do-we-need-dhs-michael-tanner
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