ABSTRACT
Few would have imagined, prior to the Bush years and 9/11, that government efforts to protect the homeland and its borders would be doled out to the highest bidder. Even Milton Friedman, the father of modern American neoliberalism, suggested that immigration was off limits to free market profiteers and should be reserved for government. But Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, a Friedman acolyte, had other ideas. Even though he said he felt smarter when Friedman was in the room, Rumsfeld eagerly and quickly leapt out of his mentor’s shadow on September 10, 2001 to declare war on his own bureaucracy, the Pentagon and its big government bureaucratic ways (Klein, 2007).1 Rumsfeld declared privatization and outsourcing were the solution to this problem (Roberts, 2008). The next day-9/11-Rumsfeld and the rest of the Bush administration saw the tragedy as the free market opportunity of their professional lifetimes and they ran with it. With the American people and Washington insiders in a daze following the tragedy, Rumsfeld and his fellow neoconservatives quickly privatized the war in Iraq, and, after first opposing the creation of a DHS, Rumsfeld’s cronies designed the new Department along a similar neoliberal track. DHS would be the perfect hydra, ripe for outsourcing with no central headquarters but with 22 agencies. Unlike Friedman, the Bush administration tried to privatize many new projects and activities intended to secure the homeland, linking its efforts to the war on terror. Within DHS, the administration privatized everything in sight, especially immigration, the unwanted stepchild of every previous bureaucratic home (Klinenberg & Frank, December 15, 2005).
