The United States Department of Homeland Security (DHS) was consolidated from some 22 government intel-, defense- and customs-oriented agencies after the September 11, 2001 World Trade Center attacks. DHS is charged with handling natural disasters and protecting the United States from "terrorism." DHS spends over US$50 billion a year.
DHS supervises customs and immigration and border security in addition to fighting terrorism. It has grown to some 200,000 employees and is thus the third largest cabinet department, behind Defense and Veterans Affairs. Its duties are guided by the Homeland Security Council, which operates out of the executive branch. Departments of Health and Human Services, Justice, and Energy all have Homeland Security responsibilities.
More than two million police, firefighters and others work for local communities; DHS has provided some $30 billion all told to support such efforts locally and to train communities in how to respond to terrorism. The vast scope of DHS means that the Bush Administration created the most significant restructuring of government services since after World War II when the War Department was consolidated and the CIA formalized.
When one looks at the creation of DHS from a purely analytical point of view, what becomes clear is that a vast domestic, anti-terror infrastructure has been put into place in the US that is expanding its tentacles into every corner of citizens' private lives. The IRS itself demands to know people's income in specific detail. The DHS intends to unearth whether or not people hold specifically anti-American ideas that are then labeled terrorist.
These ideas ironically include many of the concepts under which the US was founded and have to do with individual liberty, sound money and freedom to live and work as one chooses. It is ever clearer that what DHS defines as terrorism actually has to do with US Constitutional principles that are honored as talking points in modern America but not much more. (See also Western-style democracy.)
Vast government apparatuses funded by fiat money-from-nothing and graduated tax strategies are ultimately most hostile to freedom because they rely on authoritarian approaches to generate the revenue needed to survive. This means that millions of police and military individuals are gradually being indoctrinated with the idea that the Republican ideals on which America was founded are actually subversive ones. In the long run, this is bound to erode civil liberties and cause other significant problems that will lead to an even greater degree of state authoritarianism.