This is a continuation of the “Nothing is Sacred” miniseries that I began with Tuesday’s post on the Postal Service.  Today, thanks to a tip from a former professor, I’ll be writing briefly on the Department of Homeland Security.  True, it’s not a Maryland-specific issue, but the point is to illustrate that spending cuts (something MD will definitely need to make in the coming years) can come from nearly everywhere.

I do feel the need to remind readers that these are “off the top of the noggin” ideas, and are meant more to start a discussion than as final solutions to our problems.  The purpose is to illustrate that we will need to keep an open mind if we ever wish to get government spending under control -- and that this is not necessarily a bad thing.

My inspiration for this post comes directly from this wonderful piece by Zack Phillips for Government Executive from way back in 2007.  I cannot recommend a read through this piece (and some of the comments) highly enough, but for those without the time I will summarize a few of the key points below.

Phillips makes the argument that we are spending entirely too much on homeland security.  Why?  Because it makes almost zero political sense to react to terrorism rationally.  As he says, “everyone has an incentive to exaggerate threats.”  Politicians can score points by seeming to care about the community.  Defense companies can increase revenues by providing a technology that becomes a prerequisite to security checkpoints across the nation.  And on and on and on.

In 2006, John Mueller released a book called Overblown: How Politicians and the Terrorism Industry Inflate National Security Threats, and Why We Believe Them.  I have not read the book, but here are a few choice sentences from Phillips’ summary that sets the tone rather well: “…international terrorism annually causes the same number of deaths as drowning in bathtubs or bee stings. It would take a repeat of Sept. 11 every month of the year to make flying as dangerous as driving. Over a lifetime, the chance of being killed by a terrorist is about the same as being struck by a meteor.”

In short: the actual risk of future terrorist attacks is significantly lower than people perceive it to be -- and we’re spending far too much on homeland security as a result.

Is that to suggest that we should just give up entirely and allow terrorists free reign?  Not at all.  There are some very necessary security measures that should continue to be practiced, especially considering we will likely be pulling out of the Middle East soon and anti-American sentiment among extremists there seems completely untempered.

Enter the concept of risk analysis.  A proper explanation of this would take more words than I wish to include in this post (read the second half of the article by Phillips if you are curious), but it can be quickly summed up with this equation: Risk = Threat x Vulnerability x Consequence.  Security funding should be aligned with this formula.  The higher the risk, the greater the budget.

Here’s a perfect example of that type of thinking in action:                                                                   

Veronique de Rugy, a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research and a visiting scholar at George Mason University's Mercatus Center, has studied DHS' budget extensively. She points out that TSA will have spent more than $14.7 billion in five years screening airline passengers when it could have reduced most of the risk with a single measure that will cost only $100 million over 10 years: reinforcing cockpit doors. A would-be hijacker's options are severely limited if the cockpit is inaccessible.

Is it a bullet-proof solution?  Not necessarily.  But it is undeniably more cost effective, and it would go quite a ways towards pacifying travelers who are up in arms over the recently-added body scanners and mandatory pat-downs for those who opt out.

More importantly, it is a step that can be taken for a minimal investment that would likely be more than just the appearance of reducing the risk of future terrorist attacks.  Almost nobody would say that we should cut funding for homeland security blindly just to reduce deficit spending. Obviously, there is other fat that could (and probably should) be cut first.

But the fact is: we will need to cut back everywhere to some extent.  We might as well do it in a way that doesn’t actually reduce the safety of American citizens.