A Harvard expert on mergers and acquisitions has low expectations for the new Department of Homeland Security, and I agree with him. Here’s the core reason why this new department is a dumb idea, from the interview:

So if a claim to make is that by putting everything together in Homeland Security, some magic solution will be found to a short-term problem — such as that our war on terrorism will immediately show short-term success, I think that is a case of hubris. Because in the short term you are going to have a lot of dislocation, a lot of tension, a lot of jockeying for position, a lot of restructuring internal focus. So what one ought to say is that in the long run, perhaps, this will be a good organization. But if the logic given for a merger is short-term gain, then that’s probably not the right way to do it.

Does anyone feel any safer now that the same 170,000 people working in the same departments that they were in before the new agency was created are all together?