Article is paywalled after three paragraphs. Related link in comments.
A Department of Homeland Security unit eliminated policies prohibiting personnel from conducting intelligence activities based solely on a person’s gender identity or sexual orientation.
The Office of Intelligence and Analysis posted an updated policy manual late last week that removes references to those characteristics in sections that set guardrails on gathering intelligence.
The revisions follow President Donald Trump’s Jan. 20 directive to scrap policies and protections focused on diversity, equity, and inclusion across federal agencies.
In the wake of 9/11 it reported that the FBI/CIA/NSA all some information about the attacks before they happened, but no single one of them had enough of it to figure out what exactly was going to happen and when, and had no dedicated channels for coordinating on that sort of thing.
DHS was then (theoretically) created to solve that problem.
Sounds to me like poor leadership and communication from other departments. Creating a whole new department when emails, phone calls, meetings, and generally giving a shit would solve the problem is waste we can do something about.
At the scale those agencies operate at that sort of coordination requires a level of bureaucracy, especially when you consider that we’re talking about intelligence agencies who are often, by the very nature of their jobs, looking at vague incomplete pictures of things.
We’re not talking about 3 or 4 agencies here, we’re talking more like 25 so without some sort of centralized department even knowing who you may need to email about any one thing is easier said than done. (And that’s keeping in mind that with just a small bit of a picture that the thing you want to talk to someone about could be nothing.)
That’s not to say that there’s no bloat in the US intelligence apparatus, but your comment feels like a wild oversimplification of the problem the agency was intended to address
If our intelligence agencies are too bloated to even communicate or form a joint task force to resolve basic issues like sharing information than the last thing we need is another agency/department. Yes it’s very complex but not on this issue. It’s there anything the DHS is doing that is unique or not already covered by another department?