Aftershocks

In the weeks after 9/11, America’s lawmakers rushed to take action, granting vast new powers and establishing new institutions. No step seemed too drastic if it might prevent another attack. Programs launched in haste soon became permanent. No attack of the magnitude of 9/11 has ever happened again. It’s hard to know which—if any—of the post-attack measures are responsible. But they’ve all had far-reaching effects on American lives.

Here are five moves the government made in response to 9/11 that are still reverberating today.

The War on Terror

On Sept. 20, 2001, President George W. Bush told Congress, “Our war on terror begins with al-Qaeda, but it does not end there.”

That triggered a sweeping series of international military interventions. American forces and international allies invaded Afghanistan on Oct. 7, 2001, because the country’s Taliban government was providing safe harbor to attack mastermind Osama bin Laden and his organization, al-Qaeda. Justin Logan, director of defense and foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute, thinks the military interventions should have ended once international forces dislodged the Taliban, which took only a few months. “Beyond that, you’re at the point of diminishing returns,” he said.

Todd Huizinga takes a different view. He spent a decade as a U.S. diplomat, starting in 1992, and today serves as senior editor of nation and citizenship at Restoring the West, an online publication. He thinks a longer military intervention was warranted given the threat of another attack, noting the Taliban never fully went away.

In March 2003, American forces invaded Iraq. In the years that followed, America also intervened militarily—albeit to a lesser extent—in other countries, including Libya and Syria.

The War on Terror enjoyed initial success. After toppling the Taliban in Afghanistan, American forces overthrew Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein.

But Sumantra Maitra, a senior fellow at the Center for Renewing America, said if we look at how those countries are doing today, “nothing has changed.” He points out that the Taliban has returned to power in Afghanistan. In Iraq, Saddam Hussein may be gone, but “who we have in his place is essentially an Iranian proxy who doesn’t like us.” Other countries are not faring any better. “Libya is a slave trade hub, and Syria is ruled by Ahmed al-Sharaa who is basically an al-Qaeda guy,” Maitra said.

But Huizinga thinks it’s too early to make a judgment about the ultimate outcome of the military interventions. The situation in the Middle East shifts frequently. At least in the case of Iraq, “it’s important to remember that Saddam Hussein was a horrible, murderous dictator,” Huizinga said. He acknowledges Iraq has many problems, including the destabilizing presence of Iran-backed militias, but he believes many other areas of life there are better since the American invasion.

Jonathan Schanzer, executive director of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), said that while groups like al-Qaeda may still exist, they’re significantly weaker. “The al-Qaeda that Osama bin Laden founded does not exist today, and almost all of their top leaders are no longer with us,” he noted.

Maitra thinks the nebulous nature of the name “War on Terror” set America up for failure. Because it was a conflict against an idea, there was no clear definition of what constituted a victory or a defeat. “You needed to have a defining end line,” Maitra said.

But Huizinga noted it’s easy today to forget how much uncertainty America faced after 9/11. “There was so much we didn’t know at that moment,” he said. “We couldn’t define an end line.”

Over time, the War on Terror warped from justice for 9/11 to “nation building” and establishing democracies in the Middle East. Maitra thinks America was naïve about how quickly it could transform countries like Iraq and Afghanistan.

But Huizinga thinks commentators who called America’s presence in Iraq and Afghanistan “quagmires” or “forever war” are forgetting history. U.S. forces occupied Japan and Germany for years after World War II, and America still maintains a military presence in those countries today. “It can take tremendous time and effort to ensure U.S. security,” he said. “In a complex world, ultimate success is difficult to define and cannot be guaranteed in advance.”

But fighting the War on Terror took a significant toll. In Afghanistan, about 2,500 U.S. service members died and over 20,700 were wounded. The 2021 withdrawal from Afghanistan under President Joe Biden was chaotic and deadly. In Iraq, about 4,500 U.S. service members died, with over 32,000 wounded.

In terms of financial cost, Logan says the War on Terror added between $7 trillion and $8 trillion to the national debt, a substantial part of the $40 trillion total. America pays roughly $1 trillion per year in interest on its debts. “That constrains what this country can do,” he added.

Huizinga believes that while many things went wrong, hindsight is 20/20. Ultimately, “it’s important to remember that there was not another 9/11-style attack,” and on that score the War on Terror was a success, he said.

And Schanzer adds that the legacy of the War on Terror continues to keep us safe. “There is a level of deterrence that’s been established,” he said. “Our ability to continue to target jihadists in Africa or the Middle East is still there. Our counterterrorism efforts are significant, and we’re containing the threat.”

Wartime powers

In 2011, President Barack Obama ordered the drone strike killing of Anwar al-Awlaki. He’s believed to have helped plan terrorist attacks and served as an English-language recruiter for al-Qaeda. But Obama’s order caused controversy because al-Awlaki was an American citizen killed without a criminal trial outside a war zone. While Logan notes that al-Awlaki “was not a good guy,” he found his killing troubling.

“We now have a precedent on the books that says, ‘If the American president designates somebody of his own decision to be an enemy combatant, we could kill him,’” Logan says. He fears a future president might execute an American citizen who is not such a clear-cut villain. “If the history of government teaches one thing, it’s that authorities in existence will be used eventually.”

Maitra, however, is less concerned. He thinks America has enough robust checks and balances to restrain such killings. “The legal system will not allow a president to go completely rogue,” he said.

The War on Terror also firmly reinforced the idea that Congress doesn’t need to declare wars anymore. Under the Constitution, only Congress has the power to declare war. But that last happened in 1942. Presidents conducted the Korean and Vietnam wars without formal declarations of war from Congress. On Sept. 14, 2001, Congress passed a broad law known as an Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF). It let the president use force against “those nations, organizations, or persons” he determined “planned, authorized, committed, or aided” the 9/11 attacks, or harbored those groups. Congress also passed an AUMF authorizing the Iraq invasion.

Maitra thinks declarations of war are preferable because they set clearer boundaries: “It lets Congress actually go and debate each war.” AUMFs are more open-ended and vague.

But Huizinga thinks that’s actually why they are sometimes better suited to modern warfare. When a threat arises, “it’s important to be able to move fast,” he said.

Schanzer points out that Congress has been deeply polarized for years and struggles to pass any legislation at all. If Congress reclaimed the power to declare war in its current dysfunctional state, “I would question how and when that works,” he said.

Large-scale domestic surveillance

A mere 45 days after the 9/11 attacks, Congress passed the Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act of 2001—better known as the Patriot Act. The law expanded the federal government’s surveillance and investigative powers to detect, monitor, and disrupt suspected terrorist activity after the 9/11 attacks and had overwhelming bipartisan support. “There was really no political will in the presidency or in the Congress to say no to something that had national security as a justification,” said Cindy Cohn, who served from 2015 until earlier this year as executive director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit that focuses on digital privacy.

She believes 9/11 created the political conditions for a dramatic expansion of government spying powers that officials had long wanted. “A chunk of the things that they did after 9/11 was stuff that was in a package that they put together after the Oklahoma City bombing,” Cohn said. “I have this vision of them going into the desk drawer that says, ‘Open at the next emergency,’ and pulling it out.”

The worst part is that, according to Cohn, the spying powers granted by the Patriot Act would not have prevented the 9/11 attacks.

Cohn points to three categories of surveillance that dramatically expanded after 9/11. The first category was clearly authorized by the language of the Patriot Act: “It basically supercharged some of the very narrow tools [government officials] had to investigate.”

The second category consists of what Cohn labels “secret interpretations” of the Patriot Act that Americans didn’t expect. She points to Section 215, which permits the government to get information from telecommunications companies. “What we did not know at the time is that they had interpreted this to let them basically demand everybody’s phone records from the telecommunications companies.” She considers that “mass spying.”

The third category involves surveillance programs conducted without any type of public authorization. “This is where the government was tapping into the internet backbone of our telecommunications and making a copy of it and having that copy go to the [National Security Agency],” she said. After journalists and whistleblowers exposed the program, Congress effectively legalized it in Section 702 of a bill called the FISA Amendments Act of 2008. Congress also granted “retroactive immunity” to all the phone companies that had given data to the government, Cohn said. The FISA Amendments Act must be renewed periodically, meaning it is often at the center of policy debates.

Over the last two decades, Congress and courts have imposed meaningful reforms to scale back collection of phone records. Cohn is happy with these steps but thinks they don’t go nearly far enough.

Schanzer of FDD added that, since AI has supercharged intelligence gathering, “an assessment of the way that we collect intelligence at home and abroad with the advent of AI is probably overdue.”

Cohn said the government is still collecting “massive” amounts of information, though the full extent is not public—and that isn’t going to change anytime soon. “They’re very resistant to releasing information about how much it is or what they’re doing with it,” she added.

Despite that opacity, Schanzer cautiously supports the Patriot Act overall. “I’m not going to tell you that everything about it is awesome and beneficial,” he said. “What I will say is that, if your yardstick is, ‘Did we allow for attacks to take place?’ it looks like we have the right set of tools to prevent them.”

Expansion of the size of government

In the aftermath of 9/11, the U.S. government undertook the largest reorganization of the federal bureaucracy since World War II. Congress passed the Homeland Security Act in 2002, creating the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).

When DHS was established, the government transferred in about 180,000 employees from 22 existing agencies. Today, DHS has about 260,000 employees and includes a broad variety of agencies including the Secret Service, the Coast Guard, the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA). For 2027, the Trump administration requested a budget of $118.39 billion for DHS.

Cato’s Justin Logan compares DHS to a “Swiss army knife,” meaning it can be used in a variety of ways. That’s partly “because of the rushed way that it was set up,” he said. Over the past 25 years, DHS has morphed into one of the most divisive cabinet departments. “If you don’t like the president’s priorities, the chances are DHS is going to have fingerprints on whatever that policy may be,” Logan said.

Schanzer acknowledges DHS is “not perfect by any stretch,” but he notes it’s “a young bureaucracy relative to all the others.” As challenges arise, “we should address them, but I certainly don’t regret the creation of DHS, despite its ups and downs,” he said.

Cumbersome airport screenings

The establishment of the TSA is a less significant event compared to the War on Terror. But the TSA does affect millions of ordinary Americans on a regular basis. Prior to 9/11, airport security was outsourced to private contractors and screening was far less exacting.

The TSA is part of DHS. That means it sometimes gets swept up in the agency’s political controversies. Earlier this year, congressional Democrats refused to renew funding for DHS due to concerns over the Trump administration’s immigration policy enforcement. TSA workers went over a month without pay, leading to staffing shortages. As a result, wait times at some major airports exceeded 4 hours, the longest in history.

Logan argues an important change to air travel security was hardening cockpit doors to prevent hijackers from gaining access as they did on 9/11. But other changes imposed significant inconvenience on travelers with little to no evidence they actually prevent terrorism.

Moreover, placing security in the hands of the government leaves no room for private organizations to experiment with less burdensome modes of protection. “You can’t say, ‘My airline is going to do business differently.’ It’s not an option,” Logan noted.

While the TSA likely imposes unnecessary inconvenience, Schanzer believes “there are core elements of what TSA does that I think we’re all probably better off for it.”

History teaches that once a government policy is established, it rarely gets rolled back. The TSA is no exception. Since 2001, passengers have been required to take off their footwear for security screening. That’s because after 9/11 a terrorist named Richard Reid boarded a flight with explosives in his shoes. The Trump administration finally ended that requirement in 2025.

“It’s very difficult to win back even small basic privileges or freedoms once the government takes them away from you,” Logan said.