Homeland Security Restoration Act¶

Policy Brief¶

Published February 2026¶

Based on Rev 0.2 of the Homeland Security Restoration Act

Problem Diagnosis¶

The Design Failure¶

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) was not designed. It was assembled. The Homeland Security Restoration Act (HSRA), hereafter referred to as "the Act," treats DHS not as a failed merger to be reversed but as a concentration of coercive, informational, and operational power that must be fragmented to restore institutional friction and constitutional accountability.

In the months following September 11, 2001, Congress consolidated 22 agencies from across the federal government into a single new Cabinet department under the Homeland Security Act of 2002. The consolidation logic was simple: agencies with any connection to "homeland security" should report to a single Secretary who could coordinate their efforts. This logic was intuitively appealing and structurally catastrophic.

The agencies consolidated into DHS had fundamentally different missions, professional cultures, legal authorities, and accountability structures. The Secret Service (founded 1865) investigated financial crimes. The Coast Guard (founded 1790) saved lives at sea. The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) coordinated disaster response. Customs collected tariffs and facilitated trade. The Immigration and Naturalization Service adjudicated citizenship applications and enforced immigration law. The Transportation Security Administration screened airline passengers. None of these missions are naturally related. Placing them under a single political appointee did not create coordination -- it created a sprawling apparatus whose internal incoherence guaranteed that some missions would be subordinated to others based on political priority rather than institutional design.

The post-9/11 emergency also meant that the department's dominant institutional culture was enforcement and security. Agencies whose missions were fundamentally non-coercive -- disaster relief, maritime safety, citizenship services, cybersecurity research -- were absorbed into an organizational culture that prioritized threat prevention and border control. FEMA's "all-hazards" disaster response capability was diluted by the department's focus on counter-terrorism. The Coast Guard's search-and-rescue mission was subordinated to enforcement operations. The consolidation did not elevate non-security missions to security-level priority. It subordinated non-security missions to a security framework that had no use for them.

The Risk Profile¶

A systematic risk assessment of Cabinet positions -- evaluating each across seven dimensions (coercive power, civil liberties exposure, economic leverage, information control, scope of jurisdiction, speed of damage, and reversibility) -- rates the Secretary of Homeland Security at a composite risk score of 4.4 out of 5.0, tied for the highest risk tier alongside the Attorney General and Secretary of Defense.

The risk profile is driven by concentration. The DHS Secretary commands Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), Customs and Border Protection (CBP), the Secret Service, the Coast Guard, the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), FEMA, and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA). These agencies collectively possess broad arrest, detention, and border authority exercised with reduced judicial oversight; immigration enforcement operating in a civil rather than criminal framework with fewer constitutional protections; surveillance capabilities over domestic communications infrastructure; access to biometric databases, travel records, and domestic surveillance systems; jurisdiction touching every person entering or leaving the country, every port, every airport, and every coastal waterway; and the ability to execute immigration raids, travel bans, border closures, and disaster relief withholding immediately.

The "100-mile border zone" doctrine -- under which CBP claims expanded authority within 100 miles of any U.S. border or coastline -- covers roughly two-thirds of the American population. A single political appointee's authority thus extends, with reduced constitutional protections, over approximately 200 million Americans.

No other Cabinet position combines this breadth of coercive authority with this weakness of internal checks. The Department of Justice has comparable coercive power but benefits from decades of evolved independence norms and a professional prosecutorial culture. The Department of Defense has greater raw force but operates under the Posse Comitatus Act, the Uniform Code of Military Justice, and a deeply ingrained tradition of civilian-military separation. DHS has none of these safeguards. It is the youngest major department, and its institutional culture -- to the extent one has developed -- is enforcement-first.

The Empirical Record¶

The structural vulnerabilities identified in the risk assessment are not theoretical. They have been activated.

DHS agents have shot and killed U.S. citizens during immigration enforcement operations, with the department's initial public statements contradicted by video evidence. A federal judge found that ICE arrested 22 individuals without warrants in violation of a settlement agreement. ICE conducted military-style raids on residential buildings, detaining U.S. citizens, military veterans, and seniors for hours. DHS agents used facial recognition technology and license plate readers to monitor legal observers exercising First Amendment rights. Over 750 Coast Guard flights were redirected from search-and-rescue missions to deportation logistics -- including a directive to divert an aircraft from a search for a coast guardsman overboard. Approximately 10% of DHS employees departed in a single year; roughly 80% of career leadership at ICE was fired or demoted; FEMA lost 1,600 employees; CISA lost 1,000. DHS implemented a policy requiring seven days' advance notice for congressional visits to detention facilities, and Members of Congress were repeatedly denied access. During a partial government shutdown, DHS suspended the Global Entry program and briefly suspended TSA PreCheck, appearing to maximize public inconvenience as political leverage.

Every dimension of the risk assessment has been confirmed. The department identified as uniquely susceptible to authoritarian capture has demonstrated the fastest time-to-damage of any department and the least internal resistance.

The Compounding Loop¶

DHS does not operate in isolation. Its coercive capabilities combine with those of other departments to create a self-reinforcing enforcement loop: DHS conducts enforcement operations; the Department of Justice provides legal cover; the Department of Defense contributes military assets; the Department of the Treasury enables financial surveillance. When all four departments are aligned under loyalist leadership, the constitutional system of friction between departments collapses into unified command.

The decomposition breaks this loop at its most vulnerable and most recently constructed node. DHS is the only department in the enforcement triad that was assembled within living memory, lacks evolved institutional culture, and can be disassembled without disrupting functions that have always been organizationally unified.

Mechanism Design¶

Guiding Principles¶

Adversarial architecture. The Act assumes that any single department may be captured by loyalist leadership, and designs for structural isolation that limits the speed and scope of damage when capture occurs. This inverts the logic that created DHS. The 2002 consolidation assumed good-faith actors coordinating shared missions. Adversarial architecture assumes the design must function even when actors operate in bad faith.

Proportional structural protection. Not every agency requires the same governance safeguard. The Act calibrates protections to actual risk: independent governance structures where coercive power and civil liberties exposure are highest, existing departmental homes where the risk profile is lower. This proportionality is essential to legislative viability -- the Act creates two new independent entities and restores one, rather than proliferating nine or more new federal bodies.

Foreign-domestic domain separation. As a secondary organizing principle, the Act distinguishes between agencies whose missions face outward (border security, trade enforcement, external threat prevention) and those facing inward (disaster response, transportation safety, domestic cybersecurity, citizenship services). This prevents enforcement-oriented institutional cultures from subordinating service-oriented missions through institutional neglect.

Major Component Reassignments¶

ICE Enforcement and Removal Operations -- Independent Immigration Enforcement Commission. ICE's enforcement arm is the single most important structural decision. It operates in a civil legal framework with reduced constitutional protections; the border-zone doctrine extends its reach to two-thirds of the population; its career leadership has been 80% purged. The institutional default -- the Department of Justice -- is already rated at 4.6, the highest composite risk score in the Cabinet. Adding ICE's coercive power to DOJ's portfolio worsens the concentration problem. The Act establishes an independent commission with staggered six-year terms, partisan balance, for-cause removal, and documented use-of-force protocols.

CBP -- Department of the Treasury. Revenue collection, tariff enforcement, and port-of-entry operations have a direct historical lineage at Treasury, where the Customs Service resided for over two centuries before the 2003 merger. Air and Marine Operations follows CBP.

Homeland Security Investigations (carved out of ICE) -- Department of the Treasury or Department of Commerce. HSI's portfolio -- financial crimes, trade fraud, intellectual property, cybercrime -- has no operational connection to immigration enforcement. HSI agents themselves have repeatedly requested separation.

USCIS -- Department of State. Reunifies the immigration benefits pipeline with consular visa processing. Does not recreate the dysfunctional Immigration and Naturalization Service model. The Ombudsman for Immigration Services follows USCIS.

Coast Guard -- Department of Transportation. Returns to its pre-2003 home. The Act includes a statutory mission priority clause preventing subordination of search-and-rescue to enforcement operations.

TSA -- Department of Transportation. Unanimous across all analytical perspectives. Reunifies aviation security with the Federal Aviation Administration.

Secret Service -- Department of the Treasury. Returns to its 138-year institutional home. Core missions (counterfeiting, financial crimes) align with Treasury's mandate.

FEMA -- Independent Agency (restored). Fixed-term director (six years) with for-cause removal protections. Objective-metrics funding triggers tied to National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration damage assessments create a structural barrier to aid withholding.

CISA -- Standalone Cyber Security Board (National Transportation Safety Board model). Investigative and standard-setting authority without law enforcement power. Non-enforcement mandate. Strict statutory separation from the enforcement triad and the intelligence community.

Minor Components¶

The Act dissolves the Office of Intelligence and Analysis (transferring foreign-threat analysis to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and eliminating the domestic intelligence function) and the Office of Strategy, Policy, and Plans (whose coordination function has no purpose without a department to coordinate). The Federal Protective Service moves to the General Services Administration. Countering Weapons of Mass Destruction and the Domestic Nuclear Detection Office move to the Department of Energy. The Science and Technology Directorate moves to the National Science Foundation. The Federal Law Enforcement Training Centers move to the Department of Justice. Bioforensic and health functions move to the Department of Health and Human Services. Civil rights compliance and Inspector General functions distribute to successor agencies under existing frameworks.

Targeting and Safeguards¶

The Coordination Objection¶

The strongest counterargument to decomposition is that the pre-9/11 coordination failures -- agencies that did not share information across institutional boundaries -- enabled the September 11 attacks. Decomposing DHS appears to recreate the fragmentation that produced those failures.

This objection conflates coordination with consolidation. Coordination means agencies share information and communicate across boundaries. Consolidation means agencies report to a single political appointee who can direct their combined capabilities. DHS achieved consolidation but never reliably achieved coordination -- twenty-three years later, its component agencies have never fully integrated their information systems, institutional cultures, or operational procedures.

The federal government already has a functioning model for coordination without consolidation: the National Security Council. The Department of Defense, the Department of State, the CIA, and the intelligence community coordinate through the NSC framework without being merged into a single department. The Act preserves interagency coordination through statutory information-sharing mandates and joint operational protocols while eliminating the single political appointee who can direct combined capabilities simultaneously.

The diversion of Coast Guard flights to deportation missions, the use of CISA surveillance to monitor legal observers, and the suspension of TSA PreCheck as political leverage all represent coordination in reverse -- the subordination of one agency's mission to another's political objectives, enabled by consolidation. Fragmentation would have prevented each of these abuses.

The Security Continuity Claim¶

A variant of the coordination objection argues from empirical success rather than structural logic: DHS has produced demonstrable security improvements -- aviation hardening, the fusion center network, fentanyl interdiction capabilities, and the absence of another 9/11-scale attack -- and decomposition risks degrading these gains.

This claim commits an attribution error. It credits the organizational container for outcomes produced by specific components and protocols housed within that container. The analytical test is straightforward: for any claimed DHS success, identify which component agencies produced the outcome, then determine whether that outcome depended on consolidation under a single Secretary or on information-sharing protocols and operational relationships that can exist independently of the org chart.

Applied to the most frequently cited successes, the test consistently favors coordination over consolidation. The Secure Flight program transferred watch-list matching from private airlines to TSA -- a capability that requires TSA and its data-sharing agreements, not FEMA's disaster relief budget or the Secret Service's protective detail under the same political appointee. The National Network of Fusion Centers facilitates information exchange between federal, state, and local law enforcement through shared protocols and data standards -- the same interagency model that the FBI's Joint Terrorism Task Forces have operated since before DHS existed. Fentanyl interdiction at ports of entry is a CBP function supported by S&T Directorate detection tools -- two components with a specific operational relationship that requires a funding stream and joint requirements process, not twenty additional agencies yoked to the same Secretary. None of these outcomes trace their causal mechanism through the DHS Secretary's office. All of them trace through component-level capabilities and interagency protocols.

The burden of proof is correctly placed on those claiming consolidation was necessary. The claim that a single command structure prevented a catastrophic attack is an extraordinary causal assertion -- it requires tracing a specific mechanism by which the Secretary's unified authority over all 22 agencies produced a security outcome that statutory information-sharing mandates and joint operational protocols could not have produced independently. No such mechanism has been demonstrated. The security gains since 2002 are real. The attribution of those gains to the org chart rather than to the capabilities and protocols within it is unsupported.

The Act preserves every component capability and every interagency coordination protocol identified in the empirical record. What it eliminates is the single political appointee who can redirect those capabilities from their intended missions to serve unrelated political objectives -- the structural feature that the empirical record of the 2025-2026 period demonstrates is not a theoretical risk but an operational reality.

Structural Safeguards¶

The Immigration Enforcement Commission's multi-member governance makes simultaneous capture of leadership impossible within a single presidential term. The Cyber Security Board's non-enforcement mandate prevents weaponization of surveillance capabilities. FEMA's fixed-term director and objective funding triggers prevent aid withholding. The Civil Service Accountability Act's (CSAA) career workforce protections -- applied to every successor agency -- make the 80% purge of career leadership procedurally impossible. The CSAA requires that reduction-in-force actions affecting more than 5% of any component's workforce trigger automatic Government Accountability Office review and congressional notification.

Congressional Oversight Simplification¶

DHS currently answers to over 100 congressional committees and subcommittees -- a number that grew from the 86 the 9/11 Commission identified in 2004, despite the Commission's recommendation for consolidation. This fragmentation is a direct product of the 2002 merger: Congress consolidated 22 agencies without reorganizing its own committee structure.

Decomposition resolves this by aligning each agency with the committee structure matching its mission. TSA and the Coast Guard at Transportation answer to the transportation committees. The Secret Service and CBP at Treasury answer to the finance committees. The oversight architecture simplifies from over 100 fragmented jurisdictional claims to established committee relationships -- creating two new jurisdictional questions (the independent entities) instead of perpetuating over twenty unresolved ones.

Political Economy¶

Who Benefits from the Status Quo¶

The President benefits from a single phone call reaching a single Secretary who commands immigration enforcement, border security, disaster relief, cybersecurity, transportation screening, and federal protection services simultaneously. Decomposition requires navigating multiple independent governance structures.

The DHS Secretary holds a scope of authority unmatched in the Cabinet. No other single appointee commands this combination of coercive, surveillance, and operational capacity.

Congressional committee chairs with jurisdictional claims over DHS components benefit from oversight authority that translates into hearing calendars, subpoena power, and influence over grant funding. Committee jurisdiction is power, and over 90 chairs and ranking members currently claim a piece of DHS oversight. These members have a direct personal incentive to resist any reorganization that reduces their jurisdictional reach.

Defense and security contractors benefit from DHS's $60 billion annual budget flowing through a single procurement and contracting apparatus.

Who Is Harmed by the Status Quo¶

DHS career professionals -- 10% of whom departed in a single year -- serve in a department whose institutional culture, oversight structure, and career protections are the weakest of any major Cabinet department. The agencies with the longest institutional histories (Coast Guard, Secret Service, Customs) have seen their professional cultures subordinated to an enforcement-first department they never organically belonged to.

The American public is subject to the concentrated coercive authority of a department operating with reduced constitutional protections, minimal internal checks, and the fastest time-to-damage of any federal agency.

Congress as an institution is hampered by an oversight structure that the 9/11 Commission called "dysfunctional" and that has only worsened since. The Commission on the Prevention of Weapons of Mass Destruction gave Congress a grade of "F" for failing to consolidate DHS oversight; its former leader later said he would issue "an F-minus."

Blocking Power and Coalition Dynamics¶

The primary blocking power resides in congressional committee chairs who would lose jurisdictional claims. This is the same dynamic that has defeated every oversight consolidation attempt since 2004. The Act mitigates this through two mechanisms. First, agencies placed in existing departments automatically fall under those departments' established committee relationships, making jurisdictional realignment a structural consequence rather than a separate legislative fight. Second, the Act can be pursued as modular legislation -- individual agency transfers can proceed independently if the full decomposition faces resistance, with each successfully passed component reducing DHS's scope and making remaining transfers politically easier.

The Act's relationship to the Federal Elections Modernization Act (FEMA) and the Office of Congressional Procedure Act (OCP) also matters. The FEMA's House expansion reduces the scarcity of committee slots that makes jurisdiction valuable. The OCP's proportional committee leadership distribution eliminates winner-take-all committee control. Together, they dissolve the incentive structure that makes turf wars rational. Without these companion reforms, the decomposition faces the same jurisdictional resistance that has blocked every prior attempt. With them, the resistance structure itself is transformed.

Fiscal Framework¶

Order-of-Magnitude Costs¶

The decomposition involves transferring approximately 240,000 employees and $60 billion in annual budget authority across the federal government. The primary costs are transitional rather than ongoing:

Transition costs include IT system migration, facilities reallocation, personnel processing, union contract transfers, and administrative restructuring. The 2002 consolidation cost approximately $4.5 billion in transition expenses (inflation-adjusted). The decomposition's transition costs are likely comparable in scale -- estimated at $3 billion to $6 billion over the implementation period -- though the absence of a new headquarters construction requirement (the 2002 Act required building the DHS campus at St. Elizabeths) may reduce the total.

New entity establishment costs for the Immigration Enforcement Commission and the Cyber Security Board include governance infrastructure, administrative systems, and initial staffing for board support. Comparable independent commissions operate with annual administrative budgets of $20 million to $50 million each.

Ongoing savings are difficult to quantify precisely but are structurally real. DHS's administrative overhead as a centralized department -- duplicative management layers, the DHS headquarters apparatus, the congressional liaison burden of responding to 100+ oversight committees -- represents costs that do not transfer to successor agencies. The Heritage Foundation estimated that DHS spent $10 million annually on congressional briefings and testimony alone; this figure decreases when agencies answer to mission-appropriate committees rather than 100+ panels with overlapping claims.

These estimates are illustrative. A Congressional Budget Office score would be required for any legislative vehicle. The fiscal case for the Act does not rest on cost savings -- it rests on structural risk reduction. The decomposition may be approximately budget-neutral in ongoing costs while requiring significant one-time transition investment.

Open Design Questions¶

HSI placement -- Treasury or Commerce? Homeland Security Investigations' portfolio spans financial crimes (Treasury alignment) and trade fraud and intellectual property (Commerce alignment). The final placement depends on which investigative portfolio is prioritized. This is a decision that benefits from input from HSI leadership and the receiving departments.

FEMA funding trigger design. The objective-metrics funding trigger concept -- tying disaster relief disbursement to NOAA damage assessments -- requires detailed technical specification. What damage thresholds trigger what funding levels? How are NOAA's preliminary damage assessments converted into disbursement authorities? This mechanism is architecturally sound but requires collaboration with emergency management professionals and fiscal policy experts to operationalize.

Transition sequencing. Should the decomposition proceed as a single omnibus bill or a series of targeted statutes? The omnibus approach preserves conceptual coherence but creates a larger legislative target. The modular approach gains flexibility but risks leaving the most politically difficult transfers (ICE) for last. The sequencing strategy is a political judgment that depends on the legislative environment at the time of introduction.

Independent entity committee jurisdiction. The Immigration Enforcement Commission and the Cyber Security Board require new committee oversight assignments. The most natural homes are the Judiciary Committees (immigration enforcement) and the Commerce/Science Committees (cybersecurity). These assignments cannot be mandated by statute and must be negotiated within each chamber's rules process. The Act can structure reporting requirements and appropriations pathways to create functional primary oversight relationships, but formal jurisdiction is ultimately a chamber-internal decision.

Interagency coordination architecture. The Act replaces DHS consolidation with interagency coordination protocols. The specific design of these protocols -- which agencies participate, what information-sharing mandates apply, what joint task force structures are created -- requires detailed development. The NSC model provides a structural template, but homeland security coordination involves different agencies and different operational tempos than national security coordination. Domain expertise in interagency operations is needed to specify the coordination architecture.

Honest Limitations¶

This is a structural reform, not a guarantee. Adversarial architecture slows the speed of damage and limits its scope. It does not prevent all damage. A sufficiently determined political movement with sustained popular support and control of Congress can override any statutory structure. The Act buys time and creates friction -- it does not create permanence.

The transition period is a vulnerability window. Moving 240,000 employees and $60 billion in budget authority creates operational disruption. Coordination may degrade before it improves as interagency protocols mature. The conforming amendments problem is real -- federal law contains thousands of references to DHS and the Secretary of Homeland Security, and identifying every reference is a massive technical undertaking.

Political will is the binding constraint. The policy case for decomposition is strong. The structural design is sound. None of these matter without political will to act. The same congressional turf wars that have blocked oversight consolidation for twenty years will resist decomposition. The Act is designed to be technically and constitutionally viable. Whether it is politically viable depends on forces beyond its text.

Revision History¶

Revision 0.2 (Current)

Added "The Security Continuity Claim" subsection to Targeting and Safeguards, addressing the empirical variant of the coordination objection -- the claim that specific DHS security successes (aviation hardening, fusion centers, fentanyl interdiction) would be lost under decomposition
Introduces attribution test distinguishing outcomes produced by component-level capabilities and interagency protocols from outcomes requiring consolidation under a single political appointee
Places burden of proof on those asserting consolidation was necessary for demonstrated security gains

Revision 0.1

Initial policy brief establishing problem diagnosis, mechanism design, targeting and safeguards, political economy, fiscal framework, and open design questions
Decomposition matrix based on Cabinet Risk Matrix, Tier 1 Reality Check, Cabinet Loyalism analysis, and Structural Sketch
Incorporates adversarial architecture principles and proportional structural protection calibration
Companion document: DHS Decomposition Matrix (detailed agency-by-agency reassignment table)

Prepared by Albert Ramos for The American Policy Architecture Institute