Federal Auditors Just Caught Homeland Security Failing the One Test That Matters Most

TSA agents secretly failed to catch fake guns, knives, and explosives in undercover government tests for years.

Twenty five years after 9/11, Washington finally added up every dollar Homeland Security has burned through since.

The final number is so staggering it makes you wonder what two decades of spending actually bought.

A 31 Billion Dollar Agency Ballooned Into a 118 Billion Dollar Machine

Congress created the Department of Homeland Security in 2003.

Lawmakers smashed together 22 separate agencies into one giant bureaucracy and promised it would keep America safe.

The first full year budget came in around 31 billion dollars.

The proposed 2027 budget sits at 118 billion dollars.

That's not inflation.

That's a department nearly quadrupling in size while the threats it was built for barely changed shape.

Add it up since 2003 and Congress has poured close to 1.6 trillion dollars into this one agency.

The Government Accountability Office still keeps DHS on its "high risk" list for financial mismanagement.

Auditors slapped the department with an adverse opinion on its internal financial controls in 2025.

Fifteen out of nineteen major DHS acquisition programs blew past their cost estimates by a combined 11.4 billion dollars.

By 2017, DHS had already burned through 50 million dollars trying and failing twice to build a working financial computer system.

The third attempt started at 79 million dollars and climbed past 124 million before anyone admitted it still didn't work.

David Ditch, a budget analyst at the Cato Institute, said the spending "failed to deliver" the security Americans were promised.

He said TSA regularly fails its own covert screening tests, where undercover agents try to slip weapons past checkpoints, and has "become more of a jobs program than a security service."

Bruce Hoffman, a senior fellow for counterterrorism and homeland security at the Council on Foreign Relations, says today's threat landscape – ISIS and its offshoots, plus domestic terrorism from both the far left and the far right – looks far messier than anything imagined on September 11, 2001.

Maybe that's true.

It still doesn't explain why a department built to stop terrorists can't stop a fake bomb from walking through a checkpoint.

Congress Finally Started Gutting the Watchdogs No One Elected

This isn't the first time Washington got warned about this mess.

Back in 2017, the Government Accountability Office was still logging hundreds of separate examples of federal agencies duplicating each other's work, costing taxpayers billions of dollars a year.

Heritage Foundation scholar John York pointed to the military's old Base Realignment and Closure process as proof that Washington can shut down redundant infrastructure once it actually decides to.

Nobody ever built anything like that for Homeland Security.

Instead, DHS grew a bloated internal oversight apparatus that spent its time investigating ICE agents instead of catching terrorists.

House Appropriations Chairman Mark Amodei is finally doing something about it.

His fiscal 2026 spending bill zeroes out the Office of Immigration Detention Ombudsman, an office that used to get 28.6 million dollars and roughly 100 employees.

Amodei said the office was "led and staffed by people who fundamentally opposed ICE's mission to detain and remove dangerous criminal aliens."

The bill also slashes the Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties from 42.9 million dollars down to just 10 million, shrinking its staff from over 150 people to about 20.

The Citizenship and Immigration Services Ombudsman gets cut too, dropping from 11.6 million dollars to 5 million.

The Same Bloat That Built the Cold War Pentagon Built This Department Too

That much time and that much money bought America a department that can't pass its own financial audit.

It can't catch a fake bomb in a TSA line.

It spent decades funding bureaucrats whose entire job was second-guessing the agents actually doing the work.

That's the same pattern that produced a bloated Pentagon after the Cold War and a bloated CIA before it – agencies built in a panic that never shrink once the panic fades.

The difference now is Republicans in Congress are actually pulling the plug on the parts nobody needed.

They're gutting the ombudsman's office right as ICE holds a record 73,000 detainees.

That's what winning looks like.

Sources:

• Center Square Staff, "25 Years After 9/11, Department of Homeland Security Has Cost Taxpayers Trillions," Just The News / The Center Square, 2026.
• John York, "Bloated Federal Agencies Have Become the Norm. Here's the Key to Sizing Them Down," The Heritage Foundation, November 21, 2017.
• Staff, "DHS Spending Bill Would Formalize Trump Cuts to Oversight Offices," Federal News Network, January 2026.
• U.S. Government Accountability Office, "Department of Homeland Security: Key Areas for DHS Action and Congressional Oversight," GAO-25-108615, 2025.