(Just The News)—The U.S. Department of Homeland Security had a budget of about $31 billion in its first full year of operation. For 2027, the Trump administration wants $118 billion.
Created in 2003 in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks by folding 22 agencies into a single cabinet department, the Department of Homeland Security has become a permanent part of the federal government, and one that is getting bigger. Adjusted for inflation, its budget has grown substantially over its first two-plus decades, although it has held relatively steady as a share of the economy. What is harder to establish, 25 years after the attacks that created it, is what taxpayers have gotten for the money.
Estimates of the total overall cost run into the trillions. The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, drawing on White House budget data, puts spending from 2003 through 2025 at roughly $1.4 trillion in actual outlays, or about $1.7 trillion in budget authority. The department itself says Congress has appropriated about $1.6 trillion from 2003 through 2026, counting discretionary funding, mandatory accounts, fees and the disaster relief fund. The figures differ because they count different things over different years, but they agree on the order of magnitude: securing the homeland has cost more than a trillion dollars.
Much of that money has little to do with terrorism. The attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, triggered the department’s creation, but DHS today is largely not a terrorism-prevention agency, said Amy Pate, director of the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism at the University of Maryland. Most of its budget goes to missions such as border and immigration enforcement, customs, cybersecurity, critical infrastructure and disaster response. Some terrorism-prevention work has been scaled back. In 2025, DHS eliminated $18.5 million in grants from its Center for Prevention Programs and Partnerships, calling them wasteful and disconnected from counterterrorism, a move researchers in the field viewed as a loss.
The Department of Homeland Security has struggled to fully account for its spending for its entire existence. The Government Accountability Office has kept DHS financial and information-technology management on its “high-risk” list for years, and it remains there. DHS has earned a clean audit opinion on its financial statements for 13 consecutive years, but its auditor issued an “adverse” opinion for 2025 on the department’s internal controls over financial reporting, the systems meant to ensure the numbers can be trusted, citing weaknesses in five areas.
The department has also struggled to control the cost of what it buys. In a review released this year, GAO examined 27 major DHS acquisition programs, each worth more than $300 million. Of the 19 that had approved baselines, 15 had revised those baselines, most of those revisions delaying delivery, and their combined projected costs had grown by $11.4 billion, or 26%, over initial estimates.
DHS offered technical comments on the acquisition review, and when GAO faulted the department in a separate report for unreliable schedules in its financial-system modernization, DHS concurred with all five recommendations. None has been closed.
That’s not a new pattern. At a 2017 House Homeland Security subcommittee hearing pointedly titled “DHS Financial Systems: Will Modernization Ever Be Achieved?”, the subcommittee’s chairman, U.S. Rep. Scott Perry said the department had already sunk more than $50 million into two failed attempts to build an integrated financial system. Costs of a third effort climbed from $79 million to more than $124 million. A GAO official testified that DHS could keep its books clean only “through continued reliance on compensating controls and complex manual workarounds.” Nearly a decade later, the GAO’s assessment has barely changed.
To some, that track record is the problem.
“DHS has received a steadily increasing supply of taxpayer resources, yet that funding has failed to deliver,” said David Ditch, a federal budget analyst at the Cato Institute.
Ditch told The Center Square that the department’s cost has grown faster than inflation without a matching improvement in security. To put the price in simpler terms, Ditch calculated that the 2025 DHS budget consumed the equivalent of the entire annual income of more than 1.2 million typical American households.
Ditch pointed to failures across the department. The Transportation Security Administration, he said, regularly fails its own covert screening tests, and has “become more of a jobs program than a security service.”
The department defends its spending. Its budget growth since 2003 reflects “more than two decades of inflation, workforce and operational costs, technology and asset modernization, disaster response needs, and an increasingly complex threat environment,” a DHS spokesperson told The Center Square.
The department “views this funding as an investment in national security, public safety, resilience and mission readiness,” the spokesperson said, and pointed to a mission that spans border security, immigration enforcement, cybersecurity, disaster response and countering fentanyl trafficking.
Measuring what the money bought is harder than measuring what it cost. Backers of the post-9/11 buildup point to the absence of another large-scale foreign attack on U.S. soil as evidence it worked; skeptics counter that it is impossible to prove a negative. But the threat that justified the spending has not gone away.
“Twenty-five years ago, our enemies were foreign, and we only had to worry about the threat from one very prominent foreign terrorist organization, al-Qaeda,” Bruce Hoffman, a senior fellow for counterterrorism and homeland security at the Council on Foreign Relations, wrote this month. “Today, it’s not just al-Qaeda, but also ISIS and all the franchises and branches they’ve spawned, as well as significant threats of domestic terrorism from both the far left and the far right. This is a much more complex threat environment we face today than we did a quarter of a century ago.”
Twenty-five years on, the department born from the deadliest terrorist attack in American history has grown into a permanent, trillion-dollar enterprise touching nearly every corner of national life. What it has not done, by the account of Congress’s own watchdog, is build the financial systems and controls needed to ensure its books can be trusted.
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
