Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson was asked a relatively simple and straightforward question today, and his answer was anything but.

“Are we safer now than when you started?” Congressman Donald Payne, Jr. asked during a House hearing.

After a long pause, Johnson responded, “Good question.”

Then he launched into a stem-winder of an answer.

“I think that the environment has changed fundamentally from where it was three, four years ago,” the secretary said.

“My first our years in this administration in the Department of Defense, I was giving the legal sign off on a lot of targeted lethal force at terrorist organizations, overseas, to prevent them from exporting terrorism to our homeland.

“And I think we did a pretty good job of degrading a lot of the threats that we saw at the time. We continue to do that in places like Iraq and Syria.

“Now, we have to deal with terrorist-inspired attacks. People who live here, who were born here, who are recruited, inspired by terrorist organizations through social media and that is a challenging environment and that can happen with little or no notice to our intelligence community, to our law enforcement community, which requires, in my judgement, a very different kind of approach, not just militarily, not just law enforcement, but through our CVE (Countering Violent Extremism) efforts, through public awareness, public vigilance,” Johnson said.

“I said in my opening remarks, that the prospect of another attack by a self-radicalized actor, someone inspired by terrorist organizations, is the thing that most keeps me up at night.

“So in that respect, that is a new threat that we weren’t dealing with on a regular basis as recently as 4, 5, 7 years ago,” Johnson said.

“It’s something I hope that in the executive branch and in Congress we will continue to dedicate ourselves to combating,” he said.

For those keeping score: Despite calling it a “good question,” he never did answer the question.