Lots of budget numbers are floating around. The Department of Homeland Security is a conglomeration of 133 federal agencies from 12 Cabinet departments. Not all of these agencies are involved in "homeland security" as the term is commonly used. At the same time, more than 100 agencies that are very much involved in homeland security—many of them in the departments of Defense and Energy—have been, for various reasons, kept out of the Department of Homeland Security. So the numbers depend on how you define the term. If you look at the DHS budget plus the homeland security functions from other departments' budgets, the total request for Fiscal Year 2004 is $41.3 billion, a $3.2 billion increase over FY03's $38.1 billion. Yet, as with the numbers cited in the body of this article, Congress passed a $3.9 billion supplemental, putting the FY03 total at $42 billion ($38.1 billion + $3.9 billion), meaning the FY04 request is really a slight ($700 million) reduction.

Then again, of that $41.3 billion, just $23.9 billion is used for actual homeland security. (The DHS consolidation vacuumed up huge chunks of the Secret Service, Agriculture, Commerce, and other departments.) That amount represents a $1.9 billion increase from the FY03 amount of $22 billion. (These calculations are taken from a report by the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation. The DHS itself does not file this sort of breakdown, though the congressional act that created the department does require the Office of Management and Budget, starting in FY05, to submit "a detailed analysis, by budget function, by agency, and by initiative area … identifying the amounts … that contribute to homeland security.")

Looked at more functionally, DHS is divided into five directorates: Management; Border and Transportation Security ($18.1 billion for FY04, a slight reduction from $18.3 billion in FY03), Information Analysis and Infrastructure Protection ($829 million, way up from $177 million), Science and Technology ($800 million, slightly up from $600 million), and Emergency Preparedness and Response ($6 billion, up from $5.1 billion).