An Act passed by the Congress and signed into law by President George W. Bush creating the Department of Homeland Security and reorganizing several other government agencies.
The attacks of September 11, 2001, created considerable fear among the US population and pressure for the government to punish those responsible for the attacks, as well as to better secure the homeland. The USA responded with a “war on terrorism” and the largest reorganization of the US government apparatus since the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and Department of Defense (DoD) were created in the wake of World War II (Crenshaw and Lafree 2017). President George W. Bush and his staff moved quickly to address the identified weaknesses and vulnerabilities within our counterterrorism structure, while some within the government made pleas for a more judicious approach to such an extensive reorganization (Chang 2014; Crenshaw and Lafree 2017). Nonetheless, the Homeland Security Act of 2002.
