Politics & Power Quote by Warren Rudman

The line lands like a weary progress report, but it’s really an indictment delivered in the calmest possible tone. Rudman isn’t marveling at bureaucratic delay; he’s naming it as a political choice. Repeating “it’s taken a long time” functions as a metronome of frustration, implying that urgency was available on paper but absent in practice. In the post-9/11 climate, “Homeland Security” was supposed to be the era’s big, clarifying pivot. Rudman points out how quickly that moral clarity dissolved once it hit the old machinery of turf wars, committee gatekeeping, and budget poker.

The second clause sharpens the critique: “decide how much it wanted to fund” frames Congress not as a partner in national protection but as a shopper comparing price tags. The word “wanted” is doing heavy work. Funding becomes a matter of appetite, not obligation; security is treated like a discretionary purchase rather than a baseline duty. That phrasing also hints at performative politics: lawmakers can vote for the symbolic creation of a department, hold press conferences about resolve, then stall on the unglamorous part - the money - without paying the same reputational cost.

Context matters because Rudman, associated with the 9/11 Commission orbit and reform-minded national security thinking, is speaking from inside the system’s frustration with itself. The intent is to puncture the myth of seamless wartime unity. The subtext: America can declare emergency faster than it can govern one, and the gap between those two speeds is where preventable vulnerabilities live.