¶ Project 2025 Chapter 5 Department of Homeland Security
Chapter 5 argues that DHS has become structurally incoherent and should either be dismantled or radically reorganized. Its core focus is immigration restriction, border enforcement, and replacing diffuse homeland-security management with more centralized, politically controlled operational authority.
- Chapter title: Department of Homeland Security
- Chapter number: 5
- Major institutional domain: border security, immigration enforcement, agency restructuring, and homeland-security administration
- Chapter position: second chapter in Section 2, "The Common Defense"
- The contents page places this chapter at page 133, with Chapter 6 beginning at page 171
¶ Major claims and proposals
- The chapter's strongest recommendation is to dissolve DHS as currently constituted and redistribute its components into other departments or into a new border-and-immigration-focused structure.
- It proposes combining CBP, ICE, USCIS, HHS ORR, and key DOJ immigration functions into a stand-alone agency centered on border and immigration control.
- It recommends moving CISA, FEMA, the Coast Guard, the Secret Service, TSA, Science and Technology, and CWMD to other homes, including Transportation, Interior, DOJ, DOD, Treasury, or the FBI depending on function.
- If DHS is retained, the chapter still calls for a dramatic narrowing of mission around border security and immigration enforcement, with major budget cuts and bureaucratic reduction.
- It advocates wider detention, broader use of expedited removal, rollback of humanitarian or protective visa pathways, restructuring of USCIS toward fraud detection and vetting, and stronger internal political control of the department.
- The chapter also calls for greater use of political appointments, political-only succession, and limits on internal labor protections and unions.
¶ Institutions, actors, or domains involved
- Department of Homeland Security
- Customs and Border Protection
- Immigration and Customs Enforcement
- U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services
- Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency
- Federal Emergency Management Agency
- Transportation Security Administration
- U.S. Coast Guard
- Secret Service
- Department of Justice immigration functions
- HHS Office of Refugee Resettlement
¶ Policy mechanisms and implementation logic
The chapter's implementation logic is structural and enforcement-driven. It assumes that immigration and border policy can be strengthened by reorganizing agencies around a narrower mission, stripping away functions seen as peripheral, and maximizing leadership control over personnel, succession, and operational priorities. It treats administrative fragmentation as a core problem and political discipline as the solution.
- The chapter combines arguments for dismantling DHS with fallback plans for running a more centralized DHS, which can blur whether the preferred solution is abolition or takeover.
- It treats mission focus as a reason to move agencies elsewhere, but large redistributions of functions would themselves create major implementation risk and transitional disruption.
- The repeated emphasis on political control and reduced internal protections creates tension with claims about efficiency, expertise, and continuity in emergency and security functions.
raw/papers/2025_MandateForLeadership_FULL.pdf- Contents pages identify Chapter 5 as beginning on page 133 and Chapter 6 as beginning on page 171
- Extracted chapter text covers the chapter's abolition-or-reorganization argument, agency reassignment proposals, immigration-enforcement agenda, and internal management recommendations
¶ Evidence limits and open questions
- This chapter is especially broad and internally segmented by component agency. If it becomes a frequent citation target, it may need later splitting into narrower summaries for border enforcement, emergency management, and cyber/infrastructure functions.
- The chapter is prescriptive and should not be treated as evidence that any agency transfer or enforcement recommendation was adopted.