A security camera captured video of the alleged would-be assassin charging through a magnetometer at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner Saturday night. Some saw the ease with which he breached the security perimeter as a failure. It wasn’t. The perimeter allowed Secret Service and other security officers to immediately identify and take down a deadly threat. That’s a successful exercise in prevention and protection, and it required careful preparation.
The partial government shutdown affecting the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) didn’t have any direct impact on the effectiveness of the response on Saturday. But with the shutdown now in its 11th week, Congress is playing with fire. The vital government function of prevention — the department’s most important mission — is challenging enough when DHS is running at full capacity. Congress should restore funding to end the shutdown now, before its cumulative effect leads to a catastrophic failure.
The establishment of DHS in 2003 was a massive effort to improve the federal government’s ability to prevent harm to Americans. The immediate context was the 9/11 attack and the lack of coordination among government agencies that allowed the al-Qaeda plot to go forward undetected. By the broadest measure — the non-recurrence of a 9/11-scale attack or anything close — the DHS consolidation of agencies, breakdown of silos, and the addition of preventive legal authorities have been a success.
Beyond examples like the Secret Service, whose importance in protecting the president and other VIPs is obvious, government preventive activities have always been a tough sell. One problem is that it’s not easy to prove you have successfully prevented something. Some will always argue that the bad thing in question would never have happened anyway. Foiled plots to kill the president end up in federal court, and a conviction requires proof beyond a reasonable doubt, so there’s some possibility of vindication there. But provable cases of prevention are relatively rare, not least because much of the preventive activity is necessarily secret.
The failure of prevention, however, is easy to spot. The United States does not lack foreign enemies or domestic threats, and the expenditure of public resources to anticipate and identify them with the goal of disrupting them is money well spent. Much of the activity of prevention consists of informed speculation about what might happen. The idea is to map out plausible sequences of events leading to a bad outcome, then to derail the sequence. A lot of planning and war-gaming is essential to getting ahead of potential threats.
Yet the partial shutdown at DHS has forced much of this activity to close shop as “non-essential.” The ability to respond, which DHS can mostly still do, is indeed “essential.” But a shutdown that shuts down anything but reactive activity is doing serious damage. The active-duty Coast Guard kept patrolling, but its civilian employees mostly faced furloughs. The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) is likewise operating mostly in a reactive mode. The government has managed to find other resources it can legally divert to meet payroll for some employees — mainly from the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which also funded Customs and Border Protection and Immigration and Customs Enforcement. But the ability to work around the absence of congressional funding is limited and won’t last forever.
The threat profile the United States faces is diverse. The most recent DHS unclassified Homeland Threat Assessment identified terrorism and illegal drugs as threats to “public safety and security,” as well as migration and transnational crime in the area of border and immigration security. It warned of disruptive cyber and physical attacks on critical infrastructure. And it pointed to threats in the form of “economic manipulation and coercion” as well as espionage.
Any catalog of potential dangers would have to note that the war in Iran has increased risks — but has also raised awareness of them. There can be little doubt that if hostile actors have the means to do so, they will direct drone attacks on the United States. It’s a preventive challenge of the first magnitude for DHS and U.S. intelligence agencies.
The United States (along with Mexico and Canada) will host the World Cup this year. In addition to the 16 stadium venues, each of the 48 national teams has its own hotel and training center, and the 16 main venues have dedicated facilities for teams before they play there. The world will indeed be watching — as it was in Munich in 1972 when the Palestinian “Black September” organization took Israeli athletes hostage, ultimately murdering 12. In contrast, the world was simply enjoying the Paris Olympics in 2024 because French officials foiled several planned terror attacks before they could take place.
Our situation is hardly hopeless. We have competent people working hard to meet these and other threats. Now we need to get them the resources they need to do so.
The Secret Service and the Transportation Security Administration were both on the scene Saturday to perform essential functions, and they did their jobs. Because Democrats loathe the Trump administration’s immigration policies, it falls to the GOP to find a way to fund DHS. Never has “non-essential” been so essential.
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Tod Lindberg is a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute.
