Born to Spend Wild: The Messy Birth of the Department of Homeland Security

The creation of the Department of Homeland Security, the fifteenth Cabinet-level department and what one wag called "the Bush administration's secret plan to stamp out terrorism [by] getting 170,000 federal workers new letterhead," ¹ happened almost overnight, although its conceptual genesis may be said to have been a decade in the making. The tragic attacks of September 11, 2001, were the catalyst in the birth of a department that has become ground zero of the U.S. pork barrel.