Academic

Tino Cuéllar, usually at Stanford, but currently in the White House, recently published a fascinating piece in the Chicago Law Review on national security agency reorganizations - there is DHS, of course, but there's also a New Deal security agency with a history he uncovered.  I did a quick response for Chicago's online co-venture.  Here's a taste, give it a look if you like:

As Cuéllar explains, the Roosevelt administration spent significant capital on the FSA because it believed that the agency could, by defining security expansively, contribute to health, education, and public welfare as well as to domestic and international security.  The modern-day DHS, by reaching so broadly into state, local, and national law enforcement and by integrating immigration, customs, counterterrorism, and drug enforcement, among many other things, also contains more than a whiff of the suggestion of total war.  And total wars are worth fighting only if absolutely necessary.  I think that actual domestic security almost always involves more bureaucratic slicing and dicing than it does consolidation.  And in the same vein, although security and social welfare are linked in grand theory, the best practice, endorsed by most modern bureaucracies under most conditions, is to keep social programs separated from the national defense.