This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Thursday, September 8th, 2011.

I'm Caleb Brown.

The attacks of September 11th, 2001 spurred a reshuffling of federal law enforcement.

That's been for ill, according to Cato Institute Legal Policy analyst David Ritgers.

He argues the massive Department of Homeland Security is duplicative,

engages in jobs that should be left to states in the private sector, and state... is Cato Paper abolish the Department of Homeland Security.

Why should people seriously consider that this department that has amalgamated all of these different

law enforcement tasks be eliminated wholesale?

Well, as a managerial technique, the amalgamation of disparate fields of responsibility

within government really doesn't make a lot of sense.

And if this did make sense, then long ago we would have consolidated all

the responsibilities within the cabinet under one official, the Secretary of Government,

and been done with it. We haven't done so because that doesn't make sense. And if this made sense, we haven't done so because that doesn't make sense.

And if this made sense in the private sector, there would be one company,

ACME or corporation or whatever you would call it,

where everything would naturally run together and so the instinct to

lump all of these responsibilities under one cabinet official it really

doesn't make sense as a as a manageable span of control, the number of subordinates under any supervisor.

It's a very difficult way to run government and because of that we're now spending 3.4 billion dollars to build a massive

headquarters for parts of the DHS headquarters apparatus within the national capital region. but it's actually only going to house

14,000 of the 35,000 DHS headquarters employees in the area, and so we're projecting a $400 million savings with a $3.4 billion expenditure over the next 30 years.

Now I think first the number itself, it's pretty hard to project anything 30 years with any accuracy.

...