WHINSEC: A $10 Million School, a New Name, and a Closed...

Somewhere at Fort Moore in Columbus, Georgia, a mid-career officer from a Western Hemisphere partner nation is sitting through a block of instruction that his government did not design and cannot skip. By law, every student who passes through this school gets at least eight hours on human rights, the rule of law, due process, and civilian control of the military. The school is the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation, WHINSEC for short, and it is the institution the U.S. Army built in 2001 on the exact site, and out of the exact controversy, of the old U.S. Army School of the Americas. It is a small line item. The Department of Defense asked for about 10.45 million dollars to run it in fiscal year 2026. The argument over whether that money buys a school that spreads democratic norms or launders a bad reputation has been running for a quarter century, and both sides have a point.

What it is and why it exists

WHINSEC opened on January 17, 2001. It replaced the School of the Americas, which had trained Latin American military, police, and civilian security personnel since 1946 and had, by the late 1990s, become one of the most protested military installations in the country. Congress did not quietly rebrand the old school. It wrote a new one into law. The FY2001 National Defense Authorization Act (P.L. 106-398) created WHINSEC and, in the words of the Congressional Research Service, required it to promote democratic values, respect for human rights, and civilian control of the military, with a mandatory human rights and democracy component in every course. That statutory mission is the whole point of the redesign. The old school had no such requirement written into its charter. The new one cannot legally operate without it.

The school sits inside the Army's professional military education system. It runs resident courses in Spanish and English for students from Organization of American States countries, covering everything from cadet leadership to counterdrug operations to peacekeeping. Between roughly 1,400 and 1,800 resident students pass through in a typical year. WHINSEC reports graduating 781 students from more than a dozen countries in FY2025. Over its long life, counting the School of the Americas years, the institution says it has trained more than 60,000 personnel since 1946.

The people and the mechanism

The Army does not just staff WHINSEC. It owns the program as the Department of Defense's designated component. The authority for that designation is statutory. The school is codified at 10 U.S.C. 343, and section 343(a)(2) says plainly that "The Secretary may designate the Secretary of a military department as the Department of Defense executive agent for carrying out the responsibilities of the Secretary of Defense under this section." That is a permissive Executive Agent provision, not a standalone directive with a number stamped on it, and the current statute no longer names the Army specifically the way the older 10 U.S.C. 2166 language once did. The Army's role is confirmed a different way: the FY2026 budget book's organization table places WHINSEC squarely under the Department of the Army, funded from Army accounts. The DoD does maintain a public Executive Agent registry at dod-executiveagent.osd.mil, and it is the right place to look for the formal designation, but a WHINSEC entry there could not be independently confirmed for this piece because the site returned an error on repeated attempts. So the honest statement is this. The Army runs WHINSEC as the designated component under a genuine statutory Executive Agent provision, and the budget document is the cleanest primary proof of that arrangement.

The statute at 10 U.S.C. 343 has its own paper trail. It entered the code as 10 U.S.C. 2166 when P.L. 106-398 became law on October 30, 2000, and it was renumbered to 343 by the FY2017 NDAA (P.L. 114-328) in the December 2016 Title 10 reorganization. Same school, same rules, new address in the code.

Oversight is built into the design. An independent Board of Visitors, which by law and practice includes members of Congress, a State Department representative, and academics, reviews the curriculum each year for compliance with U.S. law and for the human rights emphasis Congress demanded. That board is the mechanism supporters point to when they argue the school polices itself. It is also, as we will see, the mechanism critics say cannot see far enough to police the outcomes that actually matter.

The money, and the fiscal year attached to it

WHINSEC is cheap by Pentagon standards, and the primary source is unusually clean about it. The FY2026 DoD Security Cooperation Justification Book, published by the Office of the Secretary of Defense in June 2025, shows WHINSEC at 10,450 thousand dollars, about 10.45 million, requested for FY2026. That is money projected, not yet appropriated. The same book shows 10,660 thousand dollars, about 10.66 million, enacted for FY2025. That is money Congress actually provided. The request-versus-enacted distinction matters, because a request is a plan and an enacted figure is a fact, and the two are close but not identical here.

One nuance keeps the accounting honest. WHINSEC is not its own appropriations line. It is funded 100 percent through Army Operation and Maintenance, and the budget book makes that unmistakable. In the fiscal breakdown by organization, the full 10,450 sits in the O&M column, with dashes across procurement, research and development, military personnel, military construction, and every other category. The fiscal breakdown by authority names it directly, "10 USC Sec 343 Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation 10,450." So "enacted" for WHINSEC is really a program-level allocation inside a much larger Army O&M appropriation, which is exactly how the source presents it. (The budget document itself is now hosted at comptroller.war.gov, a reminder that the department was renamed the Department of War in 2025, though the accounts and the school are the same.)

For scale, look back. GAO found that the predecessor School of the Americas averaged 1,371 students a year from 1984 to 1993, declining to 745 by 1995, and cost about 2.6 million dollars in Army O&M in FY1995. Adjust for inflation and add a heavier modern human rights curriculum, and roughly 10 million dollars a year for a school of this size is not an outlier. Whatever WHINSEC is, it is not an expensive program. The fight over it was never really about the dollars.

The honest critique: accountability, not dollar waste

The strongest case against WHINSEC is not that it wastes money. It is that no one has ever been able to prove what the money buys, and some of what the old school produced was ugly. GAO's 1996 review of the School of the Americas (NSIAD-96-178) laid out cost, courses, and student demographics in detail, and then said the quiet part directly: it did not and could not measure the school's effectiveness, and it did not track what graduates did after they went home. A training program that cannot demonstrate its own outcomes is a standing invitation to doubt.

The doubt is not abstract. In September 1996 the Pentagon released training manuals used at the school from 1982 to 1991 that discussed coercion, including execution, torture, and blackmail. A 1997 DoD Inspector General review concluded that "repeated mistakes" in the oversight of the material produced the objectionable content, but found no deliberate policy to violate U.S. rules. That is a mixed finding by design, and both camps read it their way. And the roster of who attended is genuinely alarming in places. Critics have documented graduates tied to serious abuses, including 48 of 69 Salvadoran officers cited by the UN Truth Commission and 19 of the 27 implicated in the 1989 murders of six Jesuit priests, their housekeeper, and her daughter, plus more than 100 Colombian officers.

Then the transparency closed. For roughly 40 years the names of students and instructors were public. After activists used the 2004 roster to flag trainees implicated in abuses, the DoD stopped releasing the names, and in 2016 a federal appeals court ruled the government does not have to disclose foreign trainees' identities. Whatever the security logic, the practical effect is that the one dataset the public used to check the school against real-world outcomes is now shut. You cannot audit a graduate list you are not allowed to see. That is the core of the modern accountability critique. Not that WHINSEC is expensive, but that it asks to be trusted while making independent verification harder than it was in 1996.

The honest defense: a cheap institution rebuilt around human rights

Now the other side, stated as fairly. For about 10 million dollars a year, the United States operates a functioning, professionally staffed school that was deliberately reconstructed in 2001 with a human rights mission written into statute. That is not spin. It is in the law and in the CRS analysis. Every student receives at least eight hours on human rights, the rule of law, due process, civilian control of the military, and the role of the armed forces in a democracy. An independent Board of Visitors reviews the curriculum every year against U.S. law. Those are real institutional guardrails that the pre-2001 School of the Americas simply did not have.

Defenders also insist on proportion. Of more than 60,000 people trained across the school's history, only a small fraction were ever credibly accused of abuses. The manuals scandal, on the IG's own reading, was the product of mistakes rather than a deliberate curriculum of torture, and the abuses committed by some graduates happened in spite of the training rather than because of it. Supporters frame WHINSEC as a low-cost instrument of soft power, a place where officers from across the hemisphere build relationships, absorb American norms about civilian control, and carry both home. If the goal is to spread the habits of democratic militaries at scale, a 10 million dollar school with a captive audience of foreign officers is an efficient way to try.

Reading the ledger

Both readings survive the evidence, and neither cancels the other. On the ledger's left side: a small, honestly budgeted institution, 10.45 million dollars requested for FY2026 against 10.66 million enacted for FY2025, funded entirely from Army Operation and Maintenance, rebuilt around a human rights mandate its predecessor lacked, watched by a statutory Board of Visitors. On the right side: a program whose effectiveness has never been measured, whose predecessor's manuals once described torture, whose alumni rolls include men named by truth commissions, and whose student roster the government fought in court to keep secret. The dollars are not the scandal, and they never were. The scandal, to the extent one remains, is accountability. WHINSEC is at once one of the cheapest schools the Army runs and one of the hardest to independently grade, because the very information that would let an outsider grade it, the list of who was trained and what they did next, is the information the department decided to stop sharing. A reader can conclude that the 2001 reforms fixed the school, or that they fixed the paperwork while closing the window, and the public record honestly supports either verdict.

Fact-check notes and sources

The FY2026 request of about 10.45 million dollars (money projected, not yet appropriated) and the FY2025 enacted level of about 10.66 million dollars (appropriated), funded 100 percent through Army Operation and Maintenance and codified at 10 U.S.C. 343, come directly from the primary budget document, where WHINSEC appears in the educational activities table, its own narrative table, the fiscal breakdown by authority, and the fiscal breakdown by organization. DoD FY2026 Security Cooperation Justification Book.
The statutory basis, WHINSEC's 2001 creation, the mandatory human rights instruction of at least eight hours, and the Board of Visitors oversight are drawn from CRS. The Executive Agent authority is the permissive provision at 10 U.S.C. 343(a)(2), not a standalone numbered directive; a WHINSEC entry in the DoD Executive Agent registry could not be independently confirmed for this piece because the registry site returned an error, so the Army's role is anchored to the budget book's organization table instead. CRS RS20892; 10 U.S. Code 343 (Cornell LII).
Historical scale and the accountability gap come from GAO's 1996 review, which put the School of the Americas at an average of 1,371 students a year from 1984 to 1993 (down to 745 by 1995) and about 2.6 million dollars in Army O&M in FY1995, and which stated it did not measure the school's effectiveness or track graduate outcomes. GAO NSIAD-96-178.
The more than 60,000 personnel trained since 1946, the graduates tied to abuses (including 48 of 69 Salvadoran officers named by the UN Truth Commission and 19 of 27 implicated in the 1989 Jesuit murders), and the 1996 manuals used from 1982 to 1991 with the 1997 IG finding of "repeated mistakes" but no deliberate policy, are documented by CRS. These graduate-abuse tallies are figures drawn from truth-commission and advocacy reporting, not a Pentagon count. CRS RL30532.
The closure of the student and instructor roster after the 2004 list was used by activists, and the 2016 federal appeals court ruling that the government need not disclose foreign trainees' identities, are reported by the Associated Press via Army Times. Army Times / AP (Sept. 30, 2016).

This post is informational and journalistic, drawn from public records, and is not legal, financial, or policy advice, with all dollar figures attributed to their stated fiscal year.

WHINSEC: A $10 Million School, a New Name, and a Closed Roster