One of the nation’s biggest domestic counterterrorism programs has failed to provide virtually any useful intelligence, according to Congressional investigators.

The report found that the centers “forwarded intelligence of uneven quality — oftentimes shoddy, rarely timely, sometimes endangering citizens’ civil liberties and Privacy Act protections, occasionally taken from already published public sources, and more often than not unrelated to terrorism.”

The investigators also discovered that federal officials cannot account for as much as $1.4 billion in taxpayer money earmarked for fusion centers and that some of the centers listed on paper by the Homeland Security Department do not even exist.

This is an example of what drives me nuts about US politics and the actual behavior of the obstensibly "small government" GOP. The creation of the DHS and creation and expansion of other security organizations was massive and intrusive, and there wasn't any pushback from the conservative media or conservative organizations. US voters are prisoners to team politics. If they weren't the GOP would have had to answer to their base for this.

As an aside, I know an air marshal who related that many marshals file fake reports of incidents in airports in order to show that they are actually working.