Homeland securities 'insane' digs

Gene Healy:

It's “a boondoggle of epic proportions,” an exasperated Rep. Richard Hudson, R-N.C., told Department of Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson at a recent congressional hearing, “if you're in the middle of a huge mess, you stop digging.”

The specific object of Hudson's ire was department's massive new headquarters complex in southeast Washington, the biggest federal construction project since the Pentagon. As the Washington Timesreported Sunday, the project -- featuring amenities like eco-friendly “rainwater toilets” and sustainable Brazilian hardwood decking -- is running at least a decade late and over a billion dollars short.

But the larger point applies to the department itself and the nebulous, all-encompassing rubric under which it's organized. “Homeland Security” is a mess; “stop digging.”

“We should finish what we started,” Johnson countered, “the morale of DHS, unity of the mission, that emphasis would go a long way if we could get to a headquarters.”

The department, which ranks dead last among large agencies on the Partnership for Public Service's 2013 “Best Places to Work in the Federal Government” list, could use a morale boost. But it would take a pretty goth sensibility to be cheered up by a move to the site of what Congress established in 1855 as “St. Elizabeths Government Hospital for the Insane.”

The hospital's former employees include the inventor of the “icepick lobotomy”; among its famous inmates were disgruntled federal job-seeker Charles Guiteau, who assassinated President Garfield, and pioneering recreational chemist Owsley Stanley, who supplied Ken Kesey's “merry pranksters” with high-grade LSD. “One of many historically interesting features of the site,” the redevelopment webpage boasts, “is a cemetery originally established for ... 'friendless patients.' ”
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There is more.

This agency has been poorly managed for the last five years, and the prospects do not look to improve.  While Rome was not built in a day, it appears that a home for Homeland Security wont be finished in decades.