Opportunity ‘08: Homeland Security
Source: The Brookings Institution
“Homeland security”—both the term and the policy—were effectively born amid the crisis of September 11, 2001. The policy started with a simple purpose: to prevent further terrorist attacks on American soil. It once made sense to take measures that responded to the circumstances of that attack and reassured a nervous public. But more than five years into the apparently endless war on terrorism, homeland security should evolve from a set of emergency policies into a permanent field of important government policy that, like any other, must justify its allocation of taxpayer funds through solid analysis.
