Security for sale: the Department of Homeland Security has a section on its Web site labeled "Open for Business." It certainly is.

AMID THE POLITICAL AND CULTURAL UPHEAVAL that followed the September 11 terror attacks, Americans were warned repeatedly that everything would be different because a vulnerable nation could no longer afford to remain complacent, careless, and profligate. Politicians of both parties vowed discipline, self-sacrifice, and diligence. Perhaps the most ostentatious symbol of this shared national commitment was the creation of the new Department of Homeland Security (DHS) in 2003.

Less than three years later, the brief but uninspiring history of DHS proves how little has actually changed in Washington, where the institutional cultivation of influence peddling, cronyism, and waste continues to thrive unimpeded. At the bureaucracy that is supposed to protect us, Republican lobbyists bustle through the revolving door, carrying millions in contracts for their corporate clients, with all the predictable failures and cost overruns; Congressional committee chairmen collect their campaign contributions from contractors and lobbying firms, just like their counterparts on the defense committees; and even the son-in-law of the vice president benefits from a patronage appointment that leaves him overseeing his former lobbying clients.

Some of the country's largest government contractors, already fat on Pentagon pork, have retained well-connected lobbyists to win their slice of the DHS budget. Lobbyists who double as Bush Rangers and Pioneers, raising hundreds of thousands of campaign dollars, now represent some of the biggest DHS contractors. These lobbyists and their clients--through both individual donations and those of their political action committees--have poured still more hundreds of thousands into the campaigns and PACs of powerful Republican members of Congress who control DHS appropriations and oversight.

In the age of terror and natural catastrophe, knowing the right people is still the right way to get rich.

The Department of Homeland Security Web site includes a section--titled "Open for Business"--that is designed to assist companies seeking to win part of the $10 billion in procurement contracts doled out annually to enhance our security. The array of goods and services needed to protect the homeland ranges from detection equipment for explosive, radioactive, biological, and chemical agents to private security guards, surveillance, computer and telecommunications equipment, as well as port, border, railroad, and aviation security, and the management of immigration detention centers. Yet while the Bush administration has promised that good government and good old American ingenuity will yield world-class innovations, the product has been considerably less than advertised. The newest bureaucracy is not only open for business, it is wide open for business as usual. This is nothing new or different, but the same old way that Washington has worked for many, many years. The difference is in the stakes: While the politicians, contractors, and lobbyists pursue their familiar agendas, what is the cost to our safety?

The corporate exploitation of the new department became inevitable even before it was founded, during the first dark days after 9-11, when Tom Ridge was appointed to direct the White House Office of Homeland Security. With the former Pennsylvania governor came three aides who had no apparent experience in the field of homeland security but a keen understanding of the business of politics. Mark Holman, who was appointed deputy assistant to the president in the Office of Homeland Security, had been Ridge's chief of staff for 18 years, both in Congress and later in the Pennsylvania statehouse. Ashley Davis, a former lobbyist who had worked on Ridge's gubernatorial campaigns, the Bush-Cheney campaign, the Florida recount, and the Republican National Convention in 2000, became Ridge's special assistant. Joining them was Carl Buchholtz, the former general counsel to Ridge's gubernatorial campaigns and a partner in the Philadelphia-based law and lobbying firm Blank Rome LLP, who took a year away from the firm to help the White House plan the DHS. Blank Rome's chairman, David Girard-diCarlo, a former Ridge fundraiser and Bush Pioneer in 2000, is among Ridge's closest friends.

By the time DHS opened its doors in 2003, Buchholtz had returned to Blank Rome, taking Holman and Davis with him. All three quickly turned to lobbying the department whose creation they had helped to oversee. When Blank Rome signed up 18 companies as new homeland security clients that year, and added homeland security to its lobbying duties for half a dozen existing clients, no ethics rules barred Buchholtz, Holman, and Davis from lobbying the new department--because technically, none of them had worked there. Blank Rome had just merged with Dyer Ellis & Joseph, a firm that employed several former Capitol Hill aides with ties to influential members of Congress and expertise in maritime and transportation issues--important knowledge because DH S had absorbed the Coast Guard and the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), which are now the top dispensers of procurement dollars in the DHS.