Our friend and colleague Jaybird hit on something a while back that has some application.
Via the Ordinary Times Commentariat:
The debate over The Department of Education generally just boils down to the name.
“The Department of Good Things has failed in its mission. We should shutter it.”
“What? Don’t you support Good Things?”
The widely debunked claim that “every education statistic has gone down since the Department of Education was established!” points to a couple of claims as to why it’s not true: High School Graduation Rates and College Degrees.
Both of those have gone up since 1979. Indisputably.
Of course, we’ve discussed the whole “people graduating without being proficient at reading or math” thing a hundred times and college graduation rates have been discussed a little less (but we’ve discussed Student Loan Forgiveness a bunch… the consensus does seem to be that the degrees aren’t worth what the students paid for them).
And we’re back to arguing over whether or not we support the idea of Good Things…therefore we should support The Department of Good Things.
This is not an education problem alone.
Dare to point out any unnecessary spending at the Department of Defense — by far the largest department of the federal government — and you self-identify as one who does not support the troops. Don’t you dare point out that mid level admin junkets to Orlando have nothing to do with beans or bullets for the grunts, you hater of puppies, Francis Scott Key lyrics, and all that is American, you. Same goes with Veterans Affairs but swap “troops” for “veterans” and you see why the second largest department of the federal government suffers from many of the same challenges as the first, plus running the largest integrated healthcare system in the United States.
Consider, if you will, our most recent American Department of Good Things, the Department of Homeland Security. Coming to the conclusion that the federal bureaucracy had some blame in the failures of 9/11, the federal bureaucracy decided to solve the problem by creating more federal bureaucracy. Stopping terrorists while the deaths of thousands of Americans and the images of burning & collapsing buildings is fresh in everyone’s mind is the perfect primordial ooze for the Department of Good Things fish to evolve, sprout legs, and proceed to stomp the earth. Thus, we have DHS, the money guzzling government chimera dedicated to the proposition that if less is more imagine how much more more could be when it comes to a Department of Good Things that can’t even secure the secretary of Homeland Security’s own purse or how to conduct civil air travel without molestation of the masses.
Indeed, it is uncouth in polite circles to even ponder on the majestic galloping unicorn of the Department of Good Things with such snark and suspicion. How dare we, the little people, not stand in dumbstruck awe as the noble and pure Department of Good Things is enshrined into law and endowed by its creator with the immortality of official United States Government bureaucracy and salute.
The history of the current Department of Education stands testament to the founding American ideal that you can’t keep a Department of Good Things down. The original version of the Department of Education started in 1867 by a soon-to-be impeached President Andrew Johnson, but was quickly stripped down by congress embroiled in trying to reintegrate a South that still was plenty rebellious to ideas like educating anyone who wasn’t white.
The idea of this new Department of Education was that while the South had freed enslaved people, only education could complete their liberation.
The bill for the Department of Education was introduced by Ohio Congressman and later president James A. Garfield in 1866 and simply said the department was responsible for “collecting such statistics and facts as shall show the conditions and progress of education in the several States and Territories.” The purpose of this collection, it said, was “the establishment and maintenance of efficient school systems,” and to “promote the cause of education throughout the country.”
Innocuous enough. The legislators knew that if they endorsed the idea of federal control of schools in the South and the schooling of formerly enslaved people, the bill would never have passed.
That first Department of Education had four employees and a budget of $15,000.
Even so, the move to abolish the new agency began within months of its creation. The arguments were familiar: too big, too expensive, unnecessary, and an unconstitutional use of federal authority. But there were more, well, undisguised arguments. “Those thousands of lazy, idle Negroes,” said New York Congressman Fernando Wood, “people who do not work, people who will not work, people who are supported out of the public Treasury by appropriations of Congress.” Wood was a New York city real estate speculator and former mayor of New York whose terms were characterized by authoritarian rule and political corruption.
In 1867, the House voted to completely eliminate the new department, but the Senate settled on a compromise measure that demoted the agency from a cabinet department to a sub-cabinet bureau in the Department of the Interior.
There it remained until President Jimmy Carter, a true believing champion of the Department of Good Things if ever there was one, got congress to establish the current Department of Education in 1979. Which dovetailed nicely with Ronald Reagan’s 1980 “Make America Great Again” campaign that called for the abolishment of the Department of Education. While winning landslide elections himself, Reagan had a Democratic congress that kept that from happening. But “Abolish the Department of Education” has been bedrock rhetoric on the political right ever since. Some of the nomenclature has changed, but the basic arguments from 1867 were the same in 1987 and will be in 2027, and beyond.
Which leaves us with the eternal tug-o-war between needing federal power to try and organize, assist, cajole, fund, enforce, and matriculate the ideals of good things between 50 different states, 16 thousand plus school districts, and a legion of local, state, and federal officials, PTAs, and advocacy groups from Facebook gossip to 501c3s. All those folks and groups all having the best ideas on the best good things and please fund those ideas and my kid over those ideas and those kids, thank you very much.
After all, there is no greater Good Thing than being “for the children” which makes the mission of the Department of Good Things become gooder and gooder. Trees don’t grow to the sky, but ideas do, always evolving and reaching for the bright horizon of better that is just over the next hill of policy/election/news events. Social media peer pressure and the current social currency of everything about your kids — and the kids themselves — being online for the world to see makes the good thing of education the perfect battlefield for the five armies of government, education, parents, politics, and policy to fight it out to the death. For the children. For the good things.
Under the marble perfection of the Department of Good Things edifice are four truths:
1) there are things only the federal government can handle
2) the fact that only the federal government can handle certain things means perpetually more federal government under the eternal occurrence of things only the federal government can handle
3) “let the government do it” is most citizens go-to for things they don’t want to deal with on the day-to-day basis
4) in a constitutional federal republic system, we, the people, have the government that reflects us for good, bad, or — in most cases — indifferent
The Department of Good Things is a necessary body for the national id to funnel actionable urges within America’s ego trying to self-govern an increasingly diverse, pluralistic country. We must have some good thing to tout, just as humans being, for the same reason we, the people, don’t want to be held to account for the bureaucratic creep that comes from losing interest after the initial cries of “do something” from the mob die down. Governing is hard. Self-governing is really hard. That’s why it hasn’t been successfully done much in recorded human history compared to kings, conquerors, and tyrants of various descriptions. Eventually any kind of democratic system yields to the tyranny of “only I can fix this mess you yourselves have caused…for the children.” America is having a live action role play of this as she approaches her semiquincentennial as a country and people in a semihotmess.
The American experiment in a free people self-governing has mostly been a success story, with plenty of dark chapters and collateral human damage when the idea that an entire nation could be a good thing if properly checked and balanced failed to adhere to our better angels. The current battle in the centuries old war over how much role the federal government should have in education or anything else, and more to the point who has the power in deciding what is and isn’t a good thing, is telling. The Department of Good Things is not only out of unicorns but never had any to begin with. Good Things the idea is too often just the skinsuit for the struggle over power and money. But we still need Good Things…
History shows what happens when the Department of Good Things is not kept on task, held to account, or honestly scrutinized for solving the problem they were created to solve. But like our education system in America, no matter how annotated or required the reading is, you can’t make anyone learn the lesson if they don’t want to. And most don’t. Cause why mess up a good thing.
Seems almost inappropriate for me to say that this was an awesome post.
The whole “the purpose of a system is what it does” criticism has, itself, a number of criticisms but it makes sense to look at what a system actually accomplishes and then say something like “a jobs program with zero deliverables? Is that really what we wanted to end up with?”
I’m 100% down with improving education for everybody. Universal literacy! Cuba pulled it off! We should be able to pull it off! Let’s look at the trendlines over the last few decades.
Oh no. Oh no no no.Report
I’d lay those trendlines more at the doorstep of our evolution from the internet of text to the internet of video *shudders*.Report
“the federal bureaucracy decided to solve the problem by creating more federal bureaucracy. ”
They had plenty of bureaucracy that was perfectly capable of finding the guys in question, but A) that would involve collection of intelligence against persons legally residing in the United States, and the 90s were a time when we decided that sort of thing had extremely serious privacy concerns and should be curtailed unless there was a clear-and-present-danger situation; and B) Clinton didn’t want anyone looking too hard into where he was putting his wiener and felt that knackering the NSA’s practice of tipping the FBI was a good way to address that.
So for a variety of reasons we couldn’t just go back to the way it used to be, which is why we needed a new outfit to handle it.Report
Gary Tan is talking about California’s attempt to force California’s universities to water down math standards here.
I mean, if your goal is to get more people accepted to college and more people to graduate from college, making it so that you don’t have to know algebra to get into/graduate from college will open doors for the millions who can’t do algebra.
But then you go back and wonder “why did we want college graduates?”
And part of it had to do with needing a quick and dirty way to signal “this person is capable of doing algebra”.
So in answer to the question “Don’t you want more college graduates?”, my answer is “yes, but no.”Report
I think you mean this: https://x.com/garrytan/status/1919105128465944866
Also this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DdqAMrtQGRwReport
The “We hate algebra 2, pre-calc, and most especially calculus” folks aren’t ever going to stop coming. Nor are they going to allow substituting discrete math and algorithms, which might make sense. No, they’re going to teach them enough probability and statistics to make them seriously dangerous.Report
Fun fact: I switched majors as a freshman in order to avoid algebra.Report
Do you feel that doors were opened for you thereby?Report
Who gets to decide whether a Department or a law failed in its intent or not?
The Department of Education is also about enforcement of various provisions of the Civil Rights Act as they apply to schools and universities including but not limited to, making sure that the girl’s softball team has adequate funding and it isn’t all just funneled to Friday Night Lights. Also the DOE provides guidelines and support for parents of children with special needs in the public school systems. Shutting the DOE is just going to make it harder to educate children with special needs.
Basically, a reject JB’s premise and framing of the issue and it gives too much good faith to Trump and Co or right-wingers.Report
Who gets to decide whether a Department or a law failed in its intent or not?
Well, can we discuss what we’re shooting for?
If what we’re looking for is stuff like “our purpose is to provide union jobs to middle class people”, we can look at this or that school and say “we are succeeding!” or “we are failing!”
And if the goal is something like “We want 39% of our students to be able to pass a literacy test”, we can see if we’ve got 40% or more or if, seriously, literacy is a very difficult concept and can we really say that a person is “illiterate” (a slur, by the way) just because they aren’t good at taking Scantron tests? We shouldn’t be judging people on whether they are good at reading Harry Potter books and JK Rowling is a bigot and I don’t know why you’re in such of a hurry to sell more of her books to vulnerable children.Report
Who gets to decide? Its creators. Congress and the President in tandem, or Congress on its own with a supermajority.Report
For what it’s worth, if the biggest education problem we were facing was too much money for Girls’ Softball was being siphoned off to Boys’ Football (American), we wouldn’t be having this discussion.Report
I think a lot of people are just assuming that “not proficient in reading” means something like “functionally illiterate.” But it actually has a specific meaning. There are four NAEP achievement levels: Below Basic, Basic, Proficient, and Advanced. Historically, about 25-30% of 8th-graders are Below Basic, about 40% are Basic, 25-30% are Proficient, and 3-4% are Advanced. There have been some fluctuations in these numbers, with a concerning rise in Below Basic as the fad for “Anti-Racist” education swept the nation (from a low of 22% in 2013 to 27% in 2019 and 30% in 2022, a level not seen since 1994), but the 2010s were actually the best decade on record in terms of students at Proficient or higher. There’s a table of historical data here. There’s also a description of what the levels mean here.
So Proficient isn’t an extremely high level of achievement—I’m pretty sure everyone here would test at Proficient or above by 12th-grade standards—but it’s just not realistic to expect every high school graduate to be reading at the NAEP Proficient level. The number of Below Basic students, and especially the recent increase in such, is more concerning.
It is worth noting, though, that there’s a certain subset of students who aren’t even going to try. Scores aren’t reported at the individual level. In fact, individual students aren’t given the complete test, so individual scores aren’t even well defined.Report
So the schools that don’t have a single proficient student should do a better job of getting basic renamed to “proficient” and “proficient” renamed to “skilled”.
Problem solved.Report
Don’t waste your time with facts.Report
That attitude from teachers is part of how we got here, CJ.Report
No, it isn’t.Report
It’s worth reminding people that Departments are actually ways to _organize_ government programs, and we might be better off thinking of them like that, instead of ‘a thing’.
Like, the Department of Education has emergency funds to allocate to education in disaster areas, for doing things like renting buildings and flying in teachers if schools are destroyed, along with longer-term grants to actually fix schools as part of national disasters. It’s called the Disaster Recovery Unit, it actually was just formed in 2018, but that’s because it was sorta distributed across the entire Department of Education before that.
Presumably, if we think we should care the Federal government responding to national disasters, someone probably needs to be thinking about education in all that. And if we are going to have anything else in the government doing education, it should probably be those people we ask. And having a Department for something like that seems to make sense.
But even if you think we shouldn’t have a Department for Education, we still need to, uh, do that.
Another thing the Department of Education does: Education for Native American Tribes. Not only do they not have the tax base to do it themselves, we often have an obligation to fund education for them _under treaty_. (Let’s try not to break even more treaties with them, shall we?)
Other departments make less sense and have weirder grouping. But even the ones that do not make sense and seem completely arbitrary, that doesn’t mean anything.
Because that is thinking at the wrong level, it’s like looking at a giant office building and decided to abolish the office building instead of offices or jobs. A Department is just a big collection of things we put next to each other. If we have too many things, or they aren’t working well, the thing to do is to look at those things.Report
But even if you think we shouldn’t have a Department for Education, we still need to, uh, do that.
This is the “we still need Good Things!” argument.
I agree that we need Good Things.
“So you should support the existence of the extant Department as it exists in its current form!”
No.Report
“[T]he Department of Education has emergency funds to allocate to education in disaster areas…”
…which raises the immediate question of “why is this something the Department of Education is expected to do instead of FEMA?”
Like, I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that FEMA had a working relationship with Education specifically for that situation, but I am rather questioning the need for Education to have its own budget for “emergency education in disaster areas”.
Although you’re right that the Department Of Education Emergency Disaster Department does serve a useful purpose; it provides a full multi-level management structure that needs to be filled and it can accept college graduates with non-technical degrees, neither of which we can depend on private industry to do these days.Report
My hometown/county in WV is still waiting to rebuild two schools from the 2016 floods due to a mix of incompetence, greed, changing governments, FEMA being FEMA and the list goes on. Rebuilding and funding school buildings with federal money through a minefield of local and state school boards, parents, and regulations is a nightmare on a good day and making temporary arrangements for education in the meantime also is a minefield, and an expensive one at that. So yeah, the DoE should have a function in that if properly done.Report
I don’t see how it gets to be any less of an expensive regulations minefield if it’s coming from the Department of Education instead of FEMA, though.Report
Based on my time as part of the state legislative staff here, the state and local regulatory minefields are the bigger problem. At least for construction. Public K-12 schools across the country all look like big masonry blocks with, under all that concrete and brick, lots of steel. That’s the only reasonable way to meet the state/local codes for structural integrity, fire resistance, etc for schools.
Eg, here all of the interior hallways are required to qualify as tornado shelters. When I was a kid, the standard was to be a bomb shelter in case of a nuclear attack.
This has been the subject of considerable debate here. Charter schools* don’t have to meet the same construction code that the regular public schools do.
* Here, charter schools are part of the public school system, under the local school districts, but with some of the construction and personnel rules relaxed. The construction rules have to be relaxed; charter schools have to operate somewhere and nothing else is built to the K-12 standards.Report
Sure but I don’t see how that is something better addressed by putting a full structure (and budget) for “emergency education provision” in Department Of Education versus making it part of FEMA’s remit (and having FEMA call in Education for support, and FEMA paying for that to happen.)Report
Well, the Department of Education has facts about every child educated in that area and every teacher, it knows what schools exist where, it knows how schools have to function and what is needed to make a school, etc, etc.
On top of that, when it doesn’t know something factual, it’s the authority to figure it out. For example, how much school can students miss, what special things need to be done when students are trying to cope with the possible loss of their home and being shoved into a new environment, etc.
If you want all that in FEMA, you’re basically building a smaller Department of Education inside of FEMA that does _nothing at all_ and just sits there idle a good chuck of time.
Or you can have a dedicated department full of people who are experts in education who can put any long-term work aside in an emergency and deal with that, and then go back to doing other things.Report
…has facts about every child educated in that area and every teacher…
Teachers are managed and licensed by the State, not the feds. All the educational forms I’ve ever gotten about my kids have also been State. You need the State’s permission to start a school, not the feds.
The Department of Education is supposed to set/run financial aid (including loans), oversee research on education and disseminate this information to “inform policy and practice”. They also enforce anti-discrimination laws.
Under their watch…
1) We haven’t seen anything like a massive increase in student quality although they churn out new policies every few years just to change everything.
2) We’ve seen the massive increase in the cost of colleges.
3) We’ve also seen colleges decide that there are too many Asians going to college so they need to be held to different standards.
4) We had them remove due process under the Obama administration.
In addition in 2009 the GAO said…
5) They lack a common system to track and manage misuse of funds
6) They lack the staff an financial expertise to monitor their programs effectively.Report
I didn’t say they managed them, I said they had _information_ about them.
FEMA does not.Report
Consider, if you will, our most recent American Department of Good Things, the Department of Homeland Security. Coming to the conclusion that the federal bureaucracy had some blame in the failures of 9/11, the federal bureaucracy decided to solve the problem by creating more federal bureaucracy. Stopping terrorists while the deaths of thousands of Americans and the images of burning & collapsing buildings is fresh in everyone’s mind is the perfect primordial ooze for the Department of Good Things fish to evolve, sprout legs, and proceed to stomp the earth.
This conjures up recollections that I have of the Presidency of George W. Bush, towards the second half of his second term, wanting to appoint a “policy czar” or something similar, a person whose portfolio was to learn about and make decisions about how different federal policies interacted with one another and get them reconciled and streamlined and prioritized and integrated properly. Which I also recall was met with a lot of cries of, “That’s your job, Mr. President!”
I am, however, too lazy to do more than a single Google search for this event, because I don’t actually care about it that much, and if it’s an inaccurate memory, I’m content to let it rest there.
But that comes back to the justification of the creation of a Department of Homeland Security, which Bush also invoked: too many different departments of the government were handling too many different, atomized facets of national security, which meant that they weren’t communicating well with one another, weren’t sharing information efficiently, and there was no one putting together all of the information the various agencies were accumulating. Which left me asking, “Well, isn’t that the President’s job? Don’t we have a National Security Advisor and a National Security Council to help him with that?”
We already have so many Good Things! Like dolls and pencils, do we really need more?Report
As I recall, it was less that no one was putting the information together than that the organizations were inadequately staffed. Immigration didn’t have the resources to run down and deport everyone who overstayed their student visa. The FBI lacked the resources to check out every report of student pilots who were skipping the landing classes. It’s not clear that slapping them all together under a DHS tag means those things are being done.
The fundamental problem, though, is that everyone’s mindset towards hijackers hadn’t changed for decades. 9/11 wouldn’t have happened on Israeli planes because cockpit doors were reinforced and the protocol was that if a terrorist on the intercom said, “Open the cockpit door or I’ll kill this flight attendant,” the answer was “No, the door stays shut.” Then land the plane at the nearest field that can take it and then hit the big red button that disables the engines.
DHS, of course, chose instead to greatly inconvenience millions of flyers every day in hopes of keeping anyone from sneaking a box cutter onto jets. I always recall a bit from The Loo Sanction many years ago:
The world is full of weapons that don’t look like weapons.
In epee sport fencing, the pressure test for the spring in the tip is 750 grams (26.4 ounces, a bit under two pounds). At least in the folklore, that’s the pressure required to reach a vital organ with a well-sharpened object. A sharpened pencil isn’t an ideal shape for it, but wouldn’t take a whole lot more pressure.
If I were drafted to run for president, my first policy position would — and this sounds odd, but I’m looking for votes — eliminate TSA and we’d go back to meeting Grandma at her gate when her plane arrived.Report
“WITH A FREAKIN’ PENCIL”Report
If I were drafted to run for president, my first policy position would — and this sounds odd, but I’m looking for votes — eliminate TSA and we’d go back to meeting Grandma at her gate when her plane arrived.
I always thought my proposal would be funnier and stop anyone from trying to implement that sort of moronic thing again, because the TSA is _so_ bad at their job:
Me, as president: *holds up a bright orange piece of metal* “This is a pentest box cutter. It is the same size and shape as box cutters, but cannot be used as a weapon. You can buy them from the government for $100. We also have a gun-shape piece of metal for $500, and just a razor-blade-shape for $20. They are for you to attempt to smuggle them onto planes. If you get caught, it will be confiscated and you will be out the purchase price. If you hand one of these to a flight attendant while in the air, you will get a voucher for the price of what you smuggled in x10, written out of the budget of the TSA. You cannot be punished by the TSA for this.”
Sounds reasonable for a penetration test until you remember a) how hilariously bad the TSA is at their job, and b) how impossible and stupid their entire job is to start with. They’d start bleeding red. I just wish I could come up with some plausible method of judging liquid smuggling.Report
In Brasil, you can carry liquid in your hand luggage through security. I have routinely gone through with full or almost full bottles of water. Some weeks ago, I flew from Brasil to the USA with a bottle of cough syrup in my backpack, because I had a bad cough and wasn’t going to get into a 10 hours flight without it.Report
*shrug* if your worry is that the security crew is not sufficiently picky and intrusive, well, there’s a response to that!
“but it doesn’t do anything, it doesn’t do anything”
Sure it does! For one thing, if Richard Reid had put his homemade dynamite in a plastic bag he’d have been successful. And for another, it doesn’t take all that much bleach-and-Windex to fill a plane with chlorine gas. As for knives and poky-tools, maybe the reason they don’t care as much about those is just what was pointed out earlier–that locking the cockpit door leaves you completely protected from such items, at least for the time it would take to call in an emergency.Report
I have no idea what point you think you are making.
TSA repeatedly fails _accidental_ penetration testing, in that they allow people to fly with prohibited things all the time. By accident, not hidden.
They also notable do not punish people for attempting to fly with prohibited things, which is…very stupid if the goal is to stop getting prohibited things on planes. The TSA also does not bother to keep track of how many times people ‘accidentally’ tried to take box cutters through.
Put that together with their absysmal track record of actually detecting things, and literally any idiot with a few thousand dollars can get a box cutter on a plane…all they have to do is _keep trying_ via cheap flights. Oh, let me just constantly book a bunch for cheap-last minute flights and I’ll try to walk a box cutter on ‘by accident’ each time, and I’ll manage it, statistically, by flight 10 or so. (If someone needs it on a specific flight, they just have to do this in advance and find a hiding place at the airport where they can keep it until then.)
And you may notice that ‘Just use multiple flights and hide stuff’ is, uh, pretty obvious a way to get large amounts of liquids through, although that restriction is so inherently stupid no one even pretends it matters.
This discussion topic is about parts of the government that are failures, and the TSA is, as set up, is about as objectively a failure as it is possible for a government agency to be…they have literally one job, a job stopping a thing from happening, and any idiot who wishes to make that happen _could trivially do so_.
It’s just, no one really wants to.
(This is on top of the fact it’s probably impossible to stop razor blades but allow electronic devices, since people could just, ya know, hide them pretty easily in electronic devices. But no one has to!)
As for knives and poky-tools, maybe the reason they don’t care as much about those is just what was pointed out earlier–that locking the cockpit door leaves you completely protected from such items, at least for the time it would take to call in an emergency.
Pointing out that what the TSA is trying to do is utterly pointless is a very strange way to defend the fact they are a complete failure at doing what they are trying to do.
Like, sure, the entire premise of their existence is moronic to start with, which is good, because they are not actually fulfilling it.Report
1) a criticism of “you’re not strict enough to actually find all the things” is not an argument against attempting to find all the things.
2) the things the TSA actually does effectively filter for – articles hidden in shoes, liquids in quantity – actually could substantially affect an aircraft in a term short enough to be relevant.
3) the things they don’t effectively filter for are addressed by other measures.Report
‘The methods you are using cannot possible product the outcomes that need to have happen if your purpose was real, but it is not’ is, indeed, a pretty good argument against funding a part of the government that is incredibly invasive.
The TSA is not ‘effectively filtering liquids in quantity’ at all, mostly because of the incredibly obvious fact that multiple people can just carry liquids through and put them together on the other side. You don’t even have to cheat!
Meanwhile, cheating is trivial. You can get much larger amounts of liquids (Which you can then combine to make even more) just by signing a doctor’s note that they are medically required, which is trivial. I recommend insulin so they won’t check it…
…granted, I have no idea what you’re even trying to smuggle past security because liquid is merely ‘a state of matter’ and thus is not inherently dangerous.
As for shoes, firstly, we do not screen quite a lot of people’s shoes to start with. Secondly, there are quite a few ways to alter things to hide 10 ounces of plastic explosives such that they would be undetected by x-ray machines. If we actually wish to stop that, we need to do better nitrate detection, including airborne.
That actually _would_ be something useful for airport security, but we don’t do useful things, we do stupid things that assume that attackers are going to use literally, word-for-word, the same attack as last time.Report
” I have no idea what you’re even trying to smuggle past security because liquid is merely ‘a state of matter’ and thus is not inherently dangerous.”
please tell me that you are not attempting to have a conversation about air-travel security without being aware of the basic facts regarding threats to air travelReport
I don’t remember that at all.
That’s a pretty stupid objection. Yes, that is part of the president’s job, but the president only functions because he has literally dozens of advisors doing a first-pass over things to bring certain things to his attention and let him ignore other things.
Having someone whose job is ‘weird interactions and redundancies in policy’ seems entirely reasonable. Honestly, I feel like that should actually be a white house office, where every department has representatives in it who can say to other department’s representatives ‘Hey, have you noticed that our two Departments have nearly identical definitions of X, and it probably would make sense to make them _actually_ word-for-word identical?’ and things like that.
You think the _president_ should be handed a bunch of information about individual threats from the FBI and CIA and somehow integrate that? And coordinate the two? What?
The National Security Advisor and National Security Council are intended to talk to the _president_, they are not any sort of inter-agency communications.Report