I never once said that there wasn't a problem with how the gov't has been expanded. There's a big difference between what you're talking about and the "DHS is buying enough ammo to shoot us all 5 times" BS I heard on the radio this morning. I don't know about you but I'd prefer a police dept, whether there was only one or 15,000+, that had officers that at least made an attempt to be proficient in the tools of thier jobs. You can't do that without expending ammunition but whenever anybody tries to order some, whether 100 or a billion, somebody wants to say they are going to shoot us with it. Can't have it both ways, sorry. If you don't want the police to have ammo, then don't complain when they actually have to use a firearm but they don't hit anything but bystanders.
SWAT is overused, even SWAT guys will tell you that. Problem is the people that are causing the problems now are better equiped and better armed than the cops. It was unheard of for a criminal to be wearing body armor, now its almost a given. A beat cop is not equiped to enter a meth lab or anywhere there is significant resistance. Look at North Hollywood. The LAPD Patrol officers had to go and get rifles from a gunshop down the street before they could engage the to bank robbers, and it still took SWAT to actually stop them. Now almost all of them have a rifle. The training has gotten better, but on a very limited scale.
There are 175 police departments within the 50 miles of DC but most of them have a nationwide jurisdiction that is measured in SQUARE FEET. The FBI for example, has a uniformed police dept that is technically seperate from the FBI itself, but only has authority to do anything on the physical property of the FBI HQ building. Is it dumb? Yes. Unlike a local or even state agency, a federal law enforcement entity is only allowed to conduct investigations in a VERY narrow field. That's why they have so many task forces. The Marshals can't arrest a drug dealer, the FBI can't arrest a counterfitter, DEA can't arrest a fugitve, and the Secret Service can't arrest an illegal, somebody else has to do it. Everybody has to stay in thier "swim lane." Hell, some federal agencies can't arrest or conduct surviellance at night by law, they have to have a local do it. Trying to consolidate some functions resulted in DHS and you think they're to big. Everytime someone tries to make those agencies smaller by moving responsibilities around, it dies because then there is to much power in one agency, so they break it up. Then there's to many agencies doing similar things and they're tripping all over themselves, which costs billions.