The White House first wanted nothing to do with a Homeland Security department
After the September 11 attacks, George W. Bush resisted a new cabinet department for months, preferring a small coordinating office. Political pressure won. The result, launched in 2003, swallowed 22 agencies and became the biggest shake-up of the American federal government since the Defense Department was created five decades earlier.
The first step was modest. Bush set up an Office of Homeland Security and put former Pennsylvania governor Tom Ridge in charge on October 8, 2001, with a brief to coordinate a national strategy against terrorist attacks. According to The Washington Post, the administration initially had "zero interest" in a full department, and Vice President Dick Cheney worried it would bloat government. Politico reports that Bush hoped for something like the National Security Council instead.
Congress pushed harder, and the Homeland Security Act became law on November 25, 2002. Fights over the bill centred on whether the FBI and CIA should be folded in (neither was) and on the removal of civil service and union protections, which stripped 180,000 workers of union rights. Ridge became secretary on January 24, 2003, though most agencies only moved across on March 1. Political scientist Peter Andreas calls it the most significant reorganisation since the Cold War.
The merger reshaped immigration and border work. The old Customs Service and the Immigration and Naturalization Service were absorbed and split up: enforcement went to Immigration and Customs Enforcement, services to Citizenship and Immigration Services, investigators to Homeland Security Investigations, and border functions to Customs and Border Protection. The Coast Guard also sits inside DHS in peacetime, switching to the Navy in war. Passports, oddly, stay with the State Department.
Even the vocabulary was new. Before 2002, presidents spoke of "the nation" or "the republic" and of "domestic" policy; White House spokespeople began using "the homeland" that year. With more than 240,000 employees, DHS is now the third-largest cabinet department after Defense and Veterans Affairs, and in fiscal 2018 it received a net discretionary budget of $47.716 billion. Its personnel battles lingered too: a pay system called MaxHR was blocked in court in 2005 and abandoned by 2008.
Source: United States Department of Homeland Security
