Department of Homeland Security

Arizona has figured prominently in the evolution of the Department of Homeland Security since its creation in 2003. When Barack Obama took office, he appointed the state’s governor, Janet Napolitano, to head the department, and she was confirmed by Congress with little opposition.

But some critics, including reporters who covered her meteoric rise as a politician, argued that Napolitano was likelier to dodge controversy or lean in favor of public opinion after evaluating the mood of voters, rather than make tough decisions that might stunt her career’s trajectory.

A Phoenix-based alternative news weekly, New Times, raised repeated questions about her ties to a controversial figure from Maricopa County named Joe Arpaio, who bills himself as “America’s toughest sheriff” and is perhaps best known for dying pink the jail attire used by inmates.

Arpaio has since become a national flashpoint in the debate over immigration for his zeal in taking advantage of a U.S. Justice Department program that allows local authorities to make arrests based on federal immigration violations.

As governor, Napolitano allied herself with Arpaio and sent a joint letter to the nation’s then-homeland security chief, Michael Chertoff, complaining that a regional office of Immigration and Customs Enforcement wasn’t doing enough to support the sheriff’s crusade of arrests under anti-human smuggling laws.

New Times accused Napolitano of cozying up to the sheriff when it suited her ambitions. Arpaio currently is facing investigation by federal authorities for possible racial profiling and other civil rights violations in carrying out aggressive immigration raids and sweeps. He’s insisted the probe is being sought by political opponents intent on destroying him and has vowed not to let any federal inquiry slow him down.

Another Arizona newspaper, the East Valley Tribune, won the Pulitzer Prize in April of 2009 for a five-part series of stories that examined whether Arpaio’s passion for arresting undocumented immigrants had led his office to neglect violent-crime investigations and other areas of public safety.

As for Arizona’s use of federal homeland security grants, we made little progress in determining what types of purchases occurred across the state. The office in charge of anti-terrorism spending has changed frequently since 2001. First the Arizona Division of Emergency Management held that responsibility, but it was later shared with the state’s Office of Homeland Security within the Department of Emergency and Military Affairs.

The grants management role changed yet again in 2006 when a new Arizona Department of Homeland Security was established. After untangling the confusing web and determining who to contact, we learned after submitting multiple open-government requests that the state had no spending records available electronically, such as an Excel spreadsheet or PDF listing individual purchases that many other states have created. Everything would have to be photocopied from paper documents, but that was a logistical challenge considering the thousands of pages worth of grant applications involved.

“At the Arizona Department of Homeland Security, we are interested in digitizing records but have no concrete or funded plans in place to do so at this time,” spokeswoman Amy Bolton said.

Nonetheless, auditors did find in a 2008 report that due to a flawed accounting system at one of the offices overseeing grant expenditures, Arizona had excessively charged the federal government by $1.7 million. A separate audit in Sept. 2008 from the Department of Homeland Security’s inspector general found only minor paperwork issues but still pointed out Arizona’s failure to effectively watchdog local communities receiving grant funds.

The federal government says that without proper monitoring, states can’t tell if new equipment and training is leaving them better prepared.

When presidential candidate John McCain in 2008 announced Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as his running mate, we decided to have a look at how her hometown of Wasilla and the surrounding Matanuska-Susitna Borough handled millions of dollars in federal homeland security grants.

State officials had already supplied us with documents in response to a public-records request showing what other communities across Alaska had done with their own anti-terrorism funds. The result was a 3,600-word story published in partnership with Truthdig.com shortly before the November election. On the campaign trail, Palin had cast opponent Barack Obama as a big-government socialist who planned to redistribute wealth in the United States.

Alaska, however, is a leading recipient of assistance from the federal government per capita due to its small population and historically powerful congressional delegation. We reported that the area of Alaska from which Palin hailed had received approximately $4 million in homeland security grants.

The list of purchases included $66,000 worth of surveillance cameras and other security equipment for fire stations in Wasilla, a $410,000 mobile-command vehicle outfitted with a conference room and $427,000 for a hazardous-materials truck that contained a software program for plotting potentially deadly chemical plumes. Local authorities used at least $9,000 in grants to lease extra space for one of the vehicles.

Wasilla wasn’t the only Alaska town that benefitted, on the other hand. We calculated that statewide, Alaskans received at least $100 per person from major homeland security grants putting the state behind only three others nationally: Wyoming, Vermont and North Dakota.

Our story found that the city of Whittier, with just 175 people, bought a $24,000 incident-command truck, two 4x4 all-terrain vehicles and two Anthrax detectors. No case of Anthrax infection has ever been reported in Alaska.

A small fishing village spent $2,000 on an “impact-resistant door” and used $200,000 more to install a surveillance system for its downtown and port areas. The cameras caused a furor, which led to the local mayor’s resignation.

The state has also benefitted immensely from homeland security and defense appropriations, i.e. earmarks, sought by Alaska’s congressional representatives in Washington. City budget documents showed, for instance, that Wasilla received nearly $1 million in federal aid to outfit its small police force with radio repeaters and wireless mobile computers. Another $4 million in earmarks was awarded to the region in 2007 for a pilot broadband communications project designed to benefit emergency responders.

Grant spending records we obtained detailing individual purchases for the entire state can be downloaded at the right.

With help from federal homeland security grants, the state of Alabama earned national praise in 2007 after it rolled out an innovative program known as Virtual Alabama. It’s a database of existing satellite imagery and aerial photography, such as surveillance footage from the state’s transportation department, that enables emergency-response personnel to better visualize areas of Alabama facing a catastrophe or other critical incident.

The partnership with Google Earth that eventually led to Virtual Alabama’s creation resulted in the state receiving a number of awards for innovation including one from the National Governors Association.

Experts around the country have described to us in interviews the need to “see” an entire disaster scene, like the path of a tornado’s destruction. That way, resources can be deployed to locations that appear to have sustained the most devastation.

In bureaucratic-speak, officials call it “situational awareness” or “a common operating picture.” Virtual Alabama is considered among the best versions of it anyone’s come up with so far. It’s based on a public/private partnership with Google Earth, a program maintained by the Internet search company that consumers were already using widely for free.

The program can be used to determine the extent of storm damage relatively quickly, but the state’s also relying on Virtual Alabama for economic development projects, to determine if polluters are violating environmental laws, for establishing fire evacuation routes based on the floor plans of schools and for identifying critical infrastructure.

Users looking at a digital map of the state or individual communities can turn “on” and “off” with the click of a mouse the location of flood plains, fire hydrants, street lights, gas lines, water lines and more, the same way Google Earth already does for hotels, airports and restaurants. The general public does not have access to Virtual Alabama, however.

Unfortunately, our efforts to obtain homeland security grant spending information from the state of Alabama in electronic format, such as a spreadsheet, didn’t make it very far. State officials at the Alabama Department of Homeland Security told us in response to an open-records request that all such documents were in paper form only. We were welcome to drive a pickup truck to their offices with a copy machine in the back to duplicate records, one official said in response. But that wasn’t entirely practical.

A spokeswoman did tell us that about $150,000 in homeland security grants were used to create Virtual Alabama and to purchase a pair of computer servers totaling $45,000.

Federal reports of the state’s anti-terrorism grant spending have not revealed any significant problems with Alabama’s handling of these funds in recent years, at least as far as major homeland security programs are concerned. However, auditors have at times raised questions about the state’s oversight of disaster assistance received from the federal government following hurricanes Ivan, Dennis and Katrina.

Auditors found in February of 2009, for example, that the city of Gulf Shores, Ala., had not complied with federal guidelines when it awarded $14 million in contracts for debris removal. They also concluded that contractors had overcharged Gulf Shores officials by $500,000. The city, in turn, charged duplicate invoices to the federal government leading to more than $400,000 worth of additional questioned costs, according to auditors.

A turf battle between the inspector general's office in the Department of Homeland Security and the agency's Customs and Border Protection (CBP) division and the FBI has delayed some investigations and threatens to undermine enforcement actions, records and interviews show. CIR's Andrew Becker reports for The Washington Post.

>> Read the full article.

Confidential informants who don't have legal immigrant status have been led to believe that federal agencies would help them get U.S. residency in exchange for their assistance in undercover investigations, only to have the implied or explicit promises broken. CIR's Andrew Becker reports for the Los Angeles Times.

>> Read the full story in the Los Angeles Times.

Ernesto Gamboa, a native of El Salvador, spent more than a decade as an undercover informant for narcotics police, helping U.S. federal prosecutors secure nearly 100 convictions. Last summer, days after Immigration and Customs Enforcement announced a major bust it made with Gamboa's help, agents moved to deport him.

>> Listen to the full story on NPR.org on Saturday, February 13, 2010.

Graphic by House Committee on Homeland Security Republican Staff.

Tom Ridge, the Department of Homeland Security's first secretary, testified before the 9/11 Commission on a May morning in 2004. Ridge spoke before a hall packed with emotional New Yorkers, about two miles from the site of the World Trade Center. His subject, however, was Washington.

When Commissioner Tim Roemer asked for suggestions on improving DHS, Ridge brought up an institution in which both he and Roemer had served: Congress. It would be helpful, Ridge said, if Congress took a look at the number of committees that had power over DHS.

"I think we could be even more effective in what we're doing," he began, "if there was some means of reducing, frankly, the multiple layers of interaction that we encounter every single day."

"Well, sir, you're very polite about it," Roemer responded. "It is absolutely absurd that Congress would require you to report to 88 different subcommittees and committees when we're supposed to be fighting al-Qaeda."

Five years ago next week, the 9/11 Commission, a congressionally mandated panel investigating al-Qaeda's 2001 attacks, made 41 recommendations on such topics as improving screening at airports and creating a director of national intelligence. Commissioners say Congress and the executive branch have enacted 80 to 90 percent of their suggestions. The recommendation that Congress "create a single, principal point of oversight and review for homeland security" is a notable exception.

While insisting on changes in the executive branch, Congress did not demand that its members make the same tough choices. Under pressure from powerful committee chairs, congressional leaders allowed a system of widely distributed oversight to remain largely intact. As a result, the Department of Homeland Security is still coping with an extraordinary number of demands from Capitol Hill, which are tripping up a fledgling organization. And the crazy quilt of oversight is making it difficult for Congress to provide cogent guidance on budgeting, organization, or priorities for a department still struggling on all those fronts.

"When you have oversight conducted by numerous committees and subcommittees you tend not to get the rigor you need in oversight," 9/11 Commission vice-chair Lee Hamilton told the Center last week. "The more [committees] you have engaged in the topic, the less robust it is. We think the executive branch needs very rigorous, independent oversight that can only really come from the Congress."

Created in 2002, DHS fused together an unwieldy collection of 22 agencies ranging from the Secret Service and Coast Guard to the Federal Emergency Management Agency. The department is still struggling to manage its myriad responsibilities: With a budget of more than $40 billion and more than 200,000 employees, DHS must accomplish missions as disparate as screening airplane passengers, enforcing border security, processing immigration applications, protecting the president, and responding to terrorist attacks and natural disasters.

In 2007 and 2008, DHS officials attended more than 370 hearings and gave more than 5,000 briefings to staffers and members of Congress representing 108 committees, according to department records. No other agency spends as much time on Capitol Hill: Officials at Veterans Affairs, a department of comparable size and budget, testified at half the number of hearings, 183, before just two committees, and gave 413 briefings over the same time period.

"It takes a lot of time away from what you're trying to accomplish," says David Paulison, the administrator who fought to rebuild FEMA after the disastrous 2005 hurricane season. "I understand that Congress has the right to know what's going on and the right to ask questions. But there are just too many committees."

Others put it less delicately. A New York Times editorial late last year called the current situation "a comedy that invites fresh national tragedy unless congressional leaders finally resolve to streamline down to a few dedicated panels."

In response to the 9/11 Commission report, Congress did designate a committee in each house as the primary point of oversight for some DHS functions, reforms that congressional leaders described as sweeping, but that fell far short of the commission's vision. Committees continue to joust over slices of the department, and neither Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, a Nevada Democrat, nor House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, a Democrat from California, has shown any interest in making the political compromises that further reorganization would demand.

A House Divided

Secretary Ridge was the first person to experience the problem directly, after taking office in January 2003. But before DHS' creation and even before 9/11, the Washington establishment had doubted Congress' ability to oversee homeland security. Two earlier commissions — the 2000 Gilmore Commission on America's capacity to respond to a major terrorist attack and the 2001 U.S. Commission on National Security/21st Century — had suggested a special congressional committee to coordinate homeland security efforts. When Senator John McCain, the Arizona Republican, and Senator Joe Lieberman, then a Connecticut Democrat, drafted the 2002 bill authorizing the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States — the 9/11 Commission — they required that it examine congressional oversight.

The 9/11 Commission didn't spend much time on the congressional issue, focusing instead on failures of diplomacy, intelligence, and law enforcement, and relying on the long experience of members like Hamilton to guide its thinking on congressional organization. The recommendation that made it into the final report — the call for "a single, principal point of oversight" — required little debate.

What was uncontroversial for the Commission, however, would prove contentious in Congress. Consolidating oversight for homeland security would require taking away turf — "jurisdiction," officially — from other committees.

In 2004, the leaders of committees standing to lose jurisdiction over homeland security — a group that included tough infighters like Representative Don Young and Senator Ted Stevens, both Alaska Republicans — opposed the 9/11 Commission's recommendation. They argued that an increased focus on security within the current committee structure was already producing better results.

Since 2003, Representative Christopher Cox, a California Republican, and Representative Jim Turner, a Democrat of Texas, had led a temporary house committee on homeland security, formed to oversee implementation of the 2002 legislation that created DHS. The two representatives wanted to make their committee permanent, despite opposition from rival chairs, nine of whom sat on their panel. Cox worked well across party lines with Turner, according to John Gannon, the committee's first staff director; but that harmony did not extend to the other Republican chairmen on the committee. "Some chairmen were singularly unhelpful at times," Gannon says.

At four hearings on the committee's future, the first in May 2003, the last in March 2004, most witnesses cautiously supported Cox and Turner. Only the last panel, featuring high-ranking representatives of committees from Agriculture to Judiciary, disagreed.

"There is no substitute for expertise, institutional knowledge, and experience," said Representative John Mica, a Florida Republican, of the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee. "The standing committees are the only place where that depth of knowledge and experience exists. The stakes are too high to cast them aside."

Although Speaker Dennis Hastert, a Republican from Illinois, threw his support behind a permanent homeland security committee in November 2004, its fate was undecided until the night before the opening of the 109th Congress. For a month, Republican chairmen like Young (Transportation and Infrastructure), Wisconsin's James Sensenbrenner (Judiciary), and Joe Barton of Texas (Energy and Commerce) had fought to cripple, if not eliminate, the fledgling committee. Only after a late-night session on January 3, 2005, where these antagonists secured prime turf for themselves, did the House Republicans agree on a plan.

The permanent House Homeland Security committee they created ended up with what one congressional observer called "fuzzy jurisdiction." The Transportation and Infrastructure panel retained significant power over FEMA and the Coast Guard, for instance, and to this day, the Homeland Security committee's responsibilities overlap significantly with other committees, particularly those whose chairs opposed the new panel's creation.

'The Ugliest and Lowest Point'

Over in the Senate, following the 9/11 Commission report, Senator Harry Reid and Senator Mitch McConnell, a Kentucky Republican, the two parties' whips, were given two months to negotiate which committee would oversee DHS. One committee in particular had its eye on the department: the chair of the Governmental Affairs committee, Senator Susan Collins, a Republican from Maine, had been holding hearings on DHS nominations, budgets, and grant programs, while making the case to Senate leadership that, when the time came, her committee should be granted jurisdiction over the new department.

After leading a few unproductive meetings of high-powered senators like Ted Stevens and Dick Durbin, a Democrat from Illinois, Reid and McConnell retreated to produce a resolution on their own. Their offering handed jurisdiction over most of DHS to Collins and the re-named Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. The Finance Committee kept revenue functions of the Customs Service, and the Commerce committee, which Stevens would lead in 2005, retained power over the Transportation Security Administration and the Coast Guard.

Michael Bopp, then Republican staff director for the Governmental Affairs committee, remembers the debate on Reid and McConnell's resolution as "by far the ugliest and the lowest point of my career on the Hill." He was in his office when he received a call from the Senate cloakroom, telling him he'd better get down there. The resolution was on the floor, and the ranking member of the Finance committee, Senator Max Baucus, a Democrat of Montana, was offering an amendment to take back still more DHS customs functions. By the time Bopp had rushed to the floor, the amendment had passed. One of McConnell's aides apologized to him, saying it was too late to do anything about it.

Once the Baucus amendment passed, the flood gates flew open, and it was clear that neither Reid nor McConnell would go to the mat for their plan. Collins and Lieberman, then ranking Democrat for Governmental Affairs, took to the floor to argue for streamlining jurisdiction — keeping hold of their new turf — but over the next two days, a parade of testy committee leaders used amendments to take back jurisdiction they would have relinquished under the resolution's original terms. Their sense, as Stevens put it: "We didn't need the 9/11 Commission to tell us what to do."

When the resolution finally passed 79-6 on Oct. 9, 2004, the new Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee had lost jurisdiction over major chunks of DHS — Customs, flood insurance, the Secret Service, immigration, the Coast Guard and the TSA.

"It was like no other bill," says Bopp. "The coalitions were completely different. They weren't geographical, or partisan, or any of the normal ways that Congress divides up. It was purely about committee jurisdiction."

Reid and McConnell called the effort a success, and an advisor to Reid told the Center that the changes made "were the most substantial reforms of congressional oversight in years." Collins, chair of Governmental Affairs, was visibly upset, but as Reid said during the floor debate, "We have people here grousing from 10 different committees saying we gave [the Governmental Affairs committee] too much. … If people think we did nothing, why have I been berated the last few days about: How could you do this? How could you take this from me?"

The New Order

Estimates on the number of committees overseeing DHS have always varied, but no one is arguing that the Capitol Hill reshuffling substantially reduced the number of panels asserting some claim on DHS. "As a practical matter, any committee that has any part of jurisdiction is going to try to assert it, in order to get a shot on the news back home," says Representative Peter King of New York, ranking Republican member of the House Homeland Security committee. "Congress is like kids in school; you have to have rules."

In 2005, after the reforms, the bickering over jurisdiction moved to the back rooms of Congress, and top aides spent hours fighting for "primary referral" of legislation. Small changes in a bill's language can change which committee has power over it: when the House Energy and Commerce committee introduced a shorter version of chemical security legislation originally drafted by the Homeland Security Committee, the absence of the word "terrorism" meant it was referred to the energy and commerce panel. (The House Homeland Security committee took up the issue again this spring, and the bill that committee passed is now in the hands of the energy and commerce panel.) In 2006, a port security bill was held up for months when three different Senate committees — Commerce, Finance, and Homeland Security — pounced on the issue.

"We had almost identical bills for port security coming out of each committee," says Ken Nahigian, former chief counsel to the Commerce Committee. "For 30 straight days we were locked up in a room from 7 a.m. to 1 a.m. arguing about jurisdiction."

As the 110th Congress began in January 2007, eight different full committees in the House had a jurisdictional stake in H.R. 1, a bill implementing additional 9/11 Commission recommendations, most of which primarily affected DHS. Under the normal referral process, each committee would have had the chance to change the legislation or formally waive its right to referral, perhaps after striking a deal to have certain provisions included. The bill reached the House floor only because newly minted Speaker Pelosi bypassed that procedure and designated the House Homeland Security Committee as the lead committee. Her action was interpreted as a way to unofficially recognize the House homeland security panel's primary role without fighting a turf battle.

Even so, the committee had to negotiate with representatives of the other seven committees at meetings that could approach one hundred people.

This year, the House Homeland Security Committee put aside its long-stated desire to pass an authorization bill for DHS as a whole in favor of a piecemeal approach. The first step is a TSA authorization bill, which passed the House in early June. This bill was referred only to the Homeland Security committee.

Aides say that they're spending less time fighting over jurisdiction these days, perhaps because it's clear nothing will change in the near future. "A number of other committees continue to scrutinize aspects of protecting the homeland — and they should, as I don't think there are too many eyes on these issues," said that advisor to Reid who considers the 2004 changes substantial. "We rely heavily on the leadership of Chairman Lieberman and Ranking Member Collins and their committee staff … to shape the oversight agenda."

In the House, the rules for the current Congress granted the Homeland Security committee more leeway to conduct oversight, but no new legislative powers. A spokesperson for Pelosi reiterated that "the primary responsibility for the Department of Homeland Security falls on the House Committee on Homeland Security."

"We spent the better part of the last two plus years fighting for more jurisdiction," Lanier Avant, the staff director of the House Homeland Security Committee, explained recently. At the end of 2008, Representative Bennie Thompson, a Mississippi Democrat and the panel's chair, submitted a proposal to expand the committee's legislative jurisdiction. "The truth is that when we sat down with committee chairmen, and staff directors — there were about 15, 16 of us in a room on a December night for probably four or five hours — if you look around the room and look at other committee chairmen, you say well, this is what I want to take from you, it really doesn't happen like that," Avant said.

'The Secretary Better Come Testify'

Congressional leaders might have considered the 2004 changes significant accomplishments, but Thomas Kean and Lee Hamilton, the chair and vice-chair of the 9/11 Commission, later called them "halfhearted reforms, followed by steps backward." Hamilton told the Center last week that "we don't think sufficient progress has been made." For DHS staffers the reforms had little impact. In 2005, DHS officials attended essentially the same number of hearings as in 2004 (166 versus 165) and provided more than 300 additional briefings. In 2006 and 2007, these numbers only increased, and in 2008, although the number of hearings dipped to 146, the number of briefings continued apace.

"It's unbelievable," says Don Kent, a former assistant secretary for legislative affairs. "But if you're on the Hill, it's not a problem for you. You just want your briefing and your hearing."

And, in Kent's experience, congressional staffers want to have the highest-ranking person possible there. "We got a lot of: 'The secretary better come testify,'" he says.

Ridge, the first DHS secretary, did just that; he testified at eight hearings between January and May of 2003, and another eight between February and June of 2004. Asa Hutchinson, the undersecretary for border and transportation security, testified 25 times between January 2003 and August 2004, including six hearings in March 2004.

"It does get to the point that it is distracting to other objectives that you're trying to achieve," Hutchinson says.

In the last Congress, David Paulison, the FEMA administrator, testified before 12 different committees and subcommittees. Sometimes the interaction between the Hill and DHS seemed to border on the absurd. Kent remembers receiving a subpoena threat for the deputy secretary for a hearing in the Small Business committee about post-Katrina recovery.

In a typical week, DHS might handle more than 40 briefings, whether there's a hearing scheduled or not. Some weeks, the department testifies at multiple hearings and provides upwards of 50 briefings. Top officials are careful to emphasize that they consider working with Congress a necessity and a privilege but say responding to that volume of requests consumes too much time. DHS estimates that the average testimony takes about 60 hours to prepare but that, in some cases, a single hearing can require more than 200 hours of preparation.

"The pressure really was on the men and women on the staff level, who were briefing an assistant secretary or answering questions when there was real work to be doing on the budget or on the mission," says one former official.

Particularly frustrating are the thousands of "questions for the record" sent over after hearings. DHS gets more than 3,000 such questions each year, and while some require little more than a yes-or-no answer, others demand more thorough responses.

"It doesn't take a long time to write questions and push the send button, but it takes time to answer those questions in a thoughtful way," says Colonel Bob Stephan, a former assistant secretary for infrastructure protection. "I had a whole staff of people dedicated to being term paper writers."

Colonel Stephan actually found that for the most part the amount of congressional oversight of his area was about right. But many others remain skeptical. Since the 111th Congress kicked off in January, new Secretary Janet Napolitano has appeared eight times. When Peter King brought up the oversight issue with Napolitano, she was polite, but did cite the number of hearings department officials testified at during the last Congress — 269 in the House alone. "While it would be presumptuous of me to recommend to Congress how it be organized," she said, "I think that's a fact that is relevant."

Editor’s Note: This story marks the beginning of a collaborative effort between the Center for Public Integrity and CIR. Over the next few months, the two organizations will be working together to produce a series of investigative reports examining the effectiveness of America’s homeland security efforts.

Support for this partnership project of the Center for Public Integrity and the Center for Investigative Reporting is provided by the Open Society Institute. Organizational support for the Center for Public Integrity is provided by the Carnegie Corporation of New York, the Ford Foundation, Greenlight Capital Employees, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Open Society Institute, the Park Foundation, and the Rockefeller Brothers Fund.

"Contracting Rush for Security Led to Waste, Abuse." The headline of the Washington Post's lead story on May 22, 2005 was an eye-opener. Over the course of a 15-month investigation, veteran Post investigative reporters Scott Higham and Robert O'Harrow, Jr. had uncovered case after case of mismanagement and misuse of taxpayers' money by the U.S. government in its post-9/11 sprint to tighten national security. Their odyssey began with a tip from legendary Post reporter (now assistant managing editor) Bob Woodward. It led them to a secret world where politics, business and homeland security intersect to produce profit for a chosen few -- without necessarily making the country safer.

When Woodward told the investigative desk about a call from an unnamed source who claimed serious flaws in the way the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) does business, Higham and O'Harrow were assigned to the story. They learned, through a second anonymous tip, that a federal audit of the Transportation and Security Administration's (TSA) contracts contained evidence of some $700 million in misspending by companies hired by the agency to implement national safety programs -- and that many of these new systems simply did not work. But the contents of the audit were a closely held secret, and attempts to obtain other records were denied repeatedly. The reporters realized that federal contracts representing billions of tax dollars are cloaked in secrecy. Experienced in cultivating confidential sources, Higham found out the caller's identity and persuaded the person to meet with them face-to-face -- and provide a copy of the TSA audit.

With the audit in hand, the reporters had a virtual roadmap of abuse of the federal contracting system. It also became clear to them that Homeland Security, in its effort to meet Congress's demand for anti-terrorism measures in the chaotic weeks after 9/11, provided little if any oversight of the projects on which it had spent millions.

A company called Eclipse Events Inc., for example, was contracted to provide logistics for the hiring of airport screeners. The Post reported that, according to auditors, "$15 million in expenses submitted by Eclipse could not be substantiated." The paper also revealed that Eclipse's owner paid herself more than $5 million for nine months' work before taking a $270,000 pension. The major global consulting firm Accenture and its subcontractors were awarded a 10-year deal worth up to $10 billion to develop "a 'virtual border' that would electronically screen millions of foreign travelers." The system, the Post reported, is marred by obsolete technology and "a fingerprint system that does not use the government's state-of-the-art biometrics standard."

Higham and O'Harrow arranged to meet with Michael P. Jackson, Deputy Secretary of DHS, to get the agency's response to the allegation that it was authorizing rampant spending of tax dollars with little oversight. The Post reported that "Jackson praised government employees and said their efforts have made the country safer. But Jackson acknowledged that 'there were problems, and significant ones,' with some contracts."

The Post team also discovered a web of connections between Kentucky Congressman Hal Rogers (R-KY) -- the powerful leader of the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Homeland Security -- and businesses that bid for federal contracts. In one case, a company moved part of its business into Rogers' district and was later awarded a lucrative government contract.