A $52 Billion Bureaucracy With 240,000 Employees Is Not "America"

Editor's note: Just wait until the Department of Health Security gets activated. This is the inevitability of what happens to bureaucracies that exist for their own survival. They become powers unto themselves answerable to no one including governments. The Department of Homeland Security with roughly 240,000 employees and an annual operating budget of around $52 billion is a federally subcontracted corporation. The majority of that $52 billion ($52 billion censorship machine) goes for salaries. It is a hybrid corporation operating outside of anything even remotely close to resembling constitutional law. These bureaucratic corporate monstrosities become terrifying in their reach and if not aggressively held in check have and will go to extremes to protect their own private bureaucratic corporate interests under color of public law.

Fifth Generation Warfare
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Source: The Federalist

Why Is The Government Arming More Federal Bureaucrats Than US Marines?

BY MARK HEMINGWAY | NOVEMBER 18, 2022

IMAGE CREDIT: U.S. DEPARTMENT OF STATE/FLICKR/PUBLIC DOMAIN

The idea that agencies are empowered to effectively create their own laws and go out and enforce them with armed federal agents should be alarming.

Then Congress authorized $80 billion this year to beef up Internal Revenue Service enforcement and staffing, Republican House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy warned that "Democrats' new army of 87,000 IRS agents will be coming for you."

A video quickly went viral racking up millions of views, purporting to show a bunch of clumsy bureaucrats receiving firearms training, prompting alarm that the IRS would be engaged in military-style raids of taxpayers. The GOP claims were widely attacked as exaggerations — since the video, though from the IRS, didn't show official agent training — but the criticism has shed light on a growing trend: the rapid arming of the federal government.

A report issued last year by the watchdog group Open The Books, "The Militarization of The U.S. Executive Agencies," found that more than 200,000 federal bureaucrats now have been granted the authority to carry guns and make arrests — more than the 186,000 Americans serving in the U.S. Marine Corps. "One hundred three executive agencies outside of the Department of Defense spent $2.7 billion on guns, ammunition, and military-style equipment between fiscal years 2006 and 2019 (inflation adjusted)," notes the report. “Nearly $1 billion ($944.9 million) was spent between fiscal years 2015 and 2019 alone."

The watchdog reports that the Department of Health and Human Services has 1,300 guns including one shotgun, five submachine guns, and 189 automatic firearms. NASA has its own fully outfitted SWAT team, with all the attendant weaponry, including armored vehicles, submachine guns, and breeching shotguns. The Environmental Protection Agency has purchased drones, GPS trackers, radar equipment, and night vision goggles, and stockpiled firearms.

A 2018 Government Accountability Office report noted that the IRS had 4,487 guns and 5,062,006 rounds of ammunition in inventory at the end of 2017 — before the enforcement funding boost this year. The IRS did not respond to requests for information, though the IRS’s Criminal Investigation division does put out an annual report detailing basic information such as how many warrants the agency is executing in a given year.

More than a hundred executive agencies have armed investigators, and apparently no independent authority is monitoring or tracking the use of force across the federal government. Agencies contacted by RealClearInvestigations from HHS to EPA declined to provide, or said they did not have, comprehensive statistics on how often their firearms are used, or details on how they conduct armed operations.

"I would be amazed if that data exists in any way,” said Trevor Burrus, a research fellow in constitutional and criminal law at the libertarian Cato Institute. “Over the years of working on this, it's quite shocking how much they try to not have their stuff tracked on any level."

All this weaponry raises questions about whether the 200,000 armed federal agents are getting adequate weapons and safety training. HHS did not respond to a request for comment on the $14 million in guns, ammunition, and military equipment it purchased between 2015 and 2019 or its new National Training Operations Center within the Washington, D.C. Beltway. Another government agency — Federal Law Enforcement Training Centers — also declined to speak with RCI for this article.

According to Burrus, recent history helps explain the militarization of the federal government. "This is 20 years of the war on terror, with the production of an excessive amount of access to weaponry," he says.

Please go to The Federalist to continue reading.
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Here's another efficient extremely well managed "government" bureaucracy with a budget of almost $10 billion and 60,000 employees:

The Only Solution to TSA's Problems: Get Rid of It

This is not America...