MB Civic

It has been just over four years since the Department of Homeland Security was created, and it has hardly covered itself with glory. Katrina was a disaster of a disaster; ports are still far from secure, and chemical plants remain a huge target of opportunity for evildoers. But there’s one area in which Homeland Security has excelled beyond anyone’s wildest expectations: creating a giant, expensive crop of government-trained consultants and lobbyists.

As Eric Lipton reported in The Times this week, at least 90 top Homeland Security officials have gone through that famous revolving door between the government and the lobbying industry. That’s more than two-thirds of the most senior executives from the department’s infancy. It is hard to believe that the people running an agency that performs so badly could be so much in demand.

What they have, of course, are contacts on the inside. The domestic security industry has become an enormous money pot, and the ability to set up a meeting with a former Homeland Security colleague is invaluable. Former Secretary Tom Ridge, whose best-known contributions to homeland security were the color-coded alerts that always seemed to be most alarming just around election time, benefited from a quick appointment to the board of a company that worked with the department while he was boss. The move came complete with stock options that should become very valuable, now that the company is being bought by Lockheed Martin. Three of his five under secretaries have also joined the commercial domestic security game. Even Michael Brown of FEMA fame has started a consulting firm.

If homeland security is the central concern of the Bush administration, one wonders how it managed to create a department in which so many of the top brass were so eager to quit the crusade so soon and cash in so efficiently. But the worst effect of this kind of take-the-money-and-run mentality is on the people left behind. How many of them, having watched others land lucrative jobs as lobbyists, will temper their own judgments about what systems to buy and what consultants to use with an eye on their own private-sector prospects?

To stop this kind of destructive back-scratching, Congress passed a law in 1962 that required former officials to wait a year before lobbying former colleagues. But officials in Homeland Security managed to get a loophole through the Office of Government Ethics in 2004. It divided the department into seven areas, and allowed former employees to lobby all but the one where they worked.

That ruling should be revisited immediately. In the meantime, let’s hope Homeland Security hasn’t left the airport screening process as ridden with holes as its own ethics rules are.