For many Americans, the trials, tribulations and outright failures of the Department of Homeland Security were driven home last fall by the bungled response of its Federal Emergency Management Agency to Hurricane Katrina. But the reasons the department performed so poorly back then are not specific to FEMA or to its hapless former director, Michael Brown. They stem, to a surprising extent, from a single, arbitrary decision made before the department's founding in 2003 by the Bush administration, and driven by the president’s campaign promise to limit the size of government.
As a result, Homeland Security headquarters has never had sufficient resources and staff to perform even routine management tasks, let alone to cope with crises, according to interviews with dozens of former employees and government experts. At the Justice Department, for example, there is one employee in the secretary’s office for every 185 employees. At Homeland Security, the ratio is nearly half that: one in 333.
And even today, insufficient staffing at Homeland Security headquarters continues to cause inefficiency and waste of taxpayers’ dollars. Overextended administrators are unable to adequately monitor government contractors, producing cost overruns; routine managerial duties are farmed out to private companies, increasing the department’s costs, and frustrated administrators are leaving in droves, leading to indecision and confusion.
The fateful decision to limit the headquarters staff was announced to the team working on the new department before the department was set up in early 2003 by Gordon England, then Secretary of the Navy and soon to become the first deputy secretary of Homeland Security, according to Steven I. Cooper, an IT specialist on the transition team who later became Chief Information Officer. (England has since been promoted to Deputy Secretary of Defense, a much bigger job formerly held by Paul D. Wolfowitz, who is now president of the World Bank.) Headcount for Homeland Security’s headquarters staff, England proclaimed, would be capped at 800, according to Cooper. “Gordon just pulled the number out of his head,” he said. Penrose C. Albright, former assistant secretary of Science and Technology and also on the transition team, remembered the decision coming down as: “We’re going to be a lean mean machine.”
England, who did not return calls from News21, was toeing the line of the Bush administration. Forced by public demand to come up with an overarching federal response to Sept. 11, despite its pledge to support smaller government, the administration opted to create the Department of Homeland Security on the cheap.
“The reason to create this department is not to create [sic] the size of government, but to increase its focus and effectiveness,” President Bush said when announcing his belated support for a Department of Homeland Security on June 6, 2002. “The staff of this new department will be largely drawn from the agencies we are combining. By ending duplication and overlap, we will spend less on overhead, and more on protecting America.”
No one reason can account for all the department’s problems, of course, and several aspects of its creation have been questioned. Critics say it was an arbitrary rearrangement of organizational boxes, with too large a mandate. They call the first Secretary, Tom Ridge, a Washington outsider and too nice a guy to be effective. They criticize his successor, Michael Chertoff, as an uninspiring leader who lacks managerial experience – though they admit he’s a smart lawyer. (He was, at minimum, the second choice to replace Ridge, after the nomination of New York police commissioner Bernard Kerik went down in scandal.)
Even so, scant attention has been paid to the critical staffing mistakes made at the department’s creation that continue to haunt it.
The Bush administration has repeatedly touted its willingness to devote resources to homeland security, but there have been only modest budgetary and staffing increases. “I think it’s telling that the budget of the Department of Defense is 10 times that of Homeland Security,” said Clark Kent Ervin, the former inspector general. “There’s this distinction in the minds of people in Washington between securing the nation and securing the homeland. They’re really part and parcel of the same thing.”
Headless Headquarters
To be sure, some government experts and former officials don’t see headquarters understaffing as a big deal. Elaine Kamarck, a Clinton administration official who worked on the “Reinventing Government” project that slimmed down government, said that saying officials complain about staffing levels in government agencies is “like saying the sky is blue.” And Admiral James Loy, who succeeded England as deputy secretary until his resignation last year, said that staffing corrections have since been made through the budget process.
But key former officials and the preponderance of experts say the Bush administration’s staffing decision was a critical mistake – and one that set off a cascade of problems throughout the new department, creating managerial failures in important functions like contracting and oversight and crippling integration efforts as the department absorbed the 22 different federal entities and fragments that were combined to create it.
Susan Richmond, former chief of staff for the undersecretary of management, gave a revealing response when asked whether headquarters was understaffed. “Absolutely,” she said, “and that’s coming from a person who believes in smaller government.” She worked previously at the Justice Department under John Ashcroft and now works at his lobbying firm, the Ashcroft Group. George A. Koenig, former chief of staff for the two general counsels who have served at the department, said: “I’m a Republican, and I believe in small government. … We needed 20 more attorneys.” Ervin, the former inspector general, said that there were just too few procurement officials, and that the department generally needed more resources. “I say that as a Republican also,” he added.
There were scant resources, for example, to support Secretary Ridge – particularly in policy formation. “They created no staff for the secretariat,” said Stephen E. Flynn, a homeland security expert at the Council on Foreign Relations.
Albright, the former assistant secretary of Science and Technology, provides an example of how the lack of headquarters personnel hampered the department’s work. England issued one edict that “mandated a staffing level of six or seven people for the undersecretary’s office, including the secretary and scheduler,” said Albright. “That created a nearly untenable organizational structure.”
And that, he said, meant that the policy and budget functions of the science and technology undersecretary had to be performed out of the assistant secretary’s office. The work might get done, but the people deciding budget and policy had no line-of-reporting authority over the people for whom they were setting the agenda.
Integration Woes
Not only was headquarters understaffed, but the legislation that created the department made no allowance for a team devoted to integrating the department. Senior officials, in effect, had two jobs. One was the huge task of creating a new department – the largest governmental reorganization since the creation of the Department of Defense after World War II and one that was, arguably, far more complex. The other was to ensure that the work of each entity continued to get done.
Maj. Gen. Bruce M. Lawlor, one of five officials who developed the plan for the department, said that the first thing he would do differently would be to add an integration team to the original Homeland Security Department legislation. “In my judgment, we did not recognize the importance of creating the integration structure at the top of the department,” he said.
Don Kettl, a professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania, noted that the department was created so that the different agencies would be able to work in concert with one another. It’s “the whole reason we did this to ourselves,” he said. Integration, therefore, should have been critical.
The staffing decision impaired the integration effort, according to Flynn of the Council on Foreign Relations, and caused the departmental focus on homeland security to be lost. Essentially, the main mission was misplaced. And the agencies weren’t able to work with headquarters, he said. When they asked for policy guidance, and didn’t hear back from headquarters, the field people reverted “back to do doing their core mission,” he said.
The integration team that was created belatedly was staffed with officials from the constituent agencies, which, given the department’s lack of resources, was how headquarters staffed many of its projects. “Anyone who does Bureaucracy 101 knows how that goes,” said Flynn. “Taxing” constituent agencies for staff meant that the department ended up with dead wood or, in the best cases, people whose loyalties lay elsewhere, he said.
Senior officials also tried to speed integration of the department’s back office functions by looking for usable management software systems in specific Homeland Security units and adapting them for the entire department. One prime example backfired: The department farmed out the management of its financial operations to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Although ICE’s system looked good in principle, the agency was plagued by organizational and managerial lapses and budget shortfalls that resulted in the release of 36 percent of the nearly 775,000 immigrants detained in the last three years, according to an Inspector General’s report in April. Subcontracting a central departmental function to one of its most dysfunctional units, Admiral Loy admitted at a Congressional hearing, “is not a very bright thing for us to do.” Worse, the fact that headquarters had to rely on resources at agencies may have produced further problems, by draining resources from them.
Wasteful Consequences
One reason that some of the Republicans charged with running the department worried about understaffing at headquarters was a typically Republican concern: government waste. For example, understaffing the procurement offices – responsible for the department’s purchasing of goods and services, and a significant budget category – led to inadequate oversight of contracts in many cases. Some notable results have been covered by the media, including wasteful spending after Hurricane Katrina (remember the mismanaged contract for $100 million dollars’ worth of ice?), and the abandonment of a $239 million program for unusable border cameras. On July 27, a bipartisan congressional report identified $34 billion worth of Homeland Security contracts cited in government audits that “experienced significant overcharges, wasteful spending, or mismanagement” (see Procurement Predicament.)
In another unintended consequence of understaffing at headquarters, the department increasingly made up for its lack of employees by hiring private-sector contract employees, which some former officials say resulted in higher costs. Although contractors sometimes provided a “specialized skill set,” said Cooper, the former CIO, “if you have a lot of contractors for an extended period of time you’re costing the taxpayers more money.”
Of the top 15 categories of goods and services contracted out by the Homeland Security Department agencies since 2001, four are for support services that might have been performed by civil servants. Close to $9 billion in support services was contracted out between the 2001-06 fiscal years, according to an analysis by News21 of contracting data available on the Federal Procurement Data System – more than $7.5 billion of it since the department was founded.
“They’re pretty thin at the top,” said the University of Pennsylvania’s Kettl. “What I’m most concerned about is building enough high level capacity in the department to do its jobs.”
Turnover Turmoil
Ironically, the early decision to understaff the department’s headquarters, and the managerial turmoil it engendered, has led to a seemingly permanent state of management turnover and understaffing throughout the department. Turnover at the top of the department has been widely reported. Overall, the New York Times estimated that two-thirds of all senior staff left in the department’s first few years, many moving to private sector jobs at companies in homeland-security related businesses (see DHS's Seven Revolving Doors). According to Congressional Quarterly, only three of the more than 20 top managers currently at the department served under Ridge for more than one day. Just since the beginning of March 2006, half a dozen senior officials have left the department, according to a list compiled by the Minority Staff of the House Committee on Homeland Security.
Key vacancies created by the departures of political appointees have also plagued the department. Most widely publicized, but far from unique, was the administration’s trouble in filling the role of head of FEMA after the disasters of Hurricane Katrina. Michael Brown resigned Sept. 12, 2005. Several candidates reportedly turned down the job before R. David Paulison, who served as acting director, was nominated as Brown's successor on May 6, 2006.
Although vacancies are a problem in many federal agencies, Paul Light, an expert on the federal workforce, notes that it’s a particular weakness for a new department with the critical role of national security. Vacancies at the top, he said, mean that tough decisions are avoided while the civil service employees wait for new policy direction from the next appointees.
“It’s a bad time to be having a bad time,” said Light.
Light and others expect the vacancy rate to worsen during the remainder of Bush’s tenure in office, since political appointees are loath to sign up for a short tenure in a lame-duck administration. The vacancy rate among political appointees was as high as 30 percent across government toward the end of the Clinton administration, according to Cal Mackenzie, a professor of American government at Colby College. According to the White House Office of Personnel, the vacancy rate for political appointees across government is no longer available.
Future Homeland Security
Given the leadership turnover likely to take place in the next couple years, the future direction of the department may have to wait until the next administration. The initial Bush decree – that the department wouldn’t challenge his small-government ideology but would still accomplish its mission – has to some extent been abandoned. Chertoff last year created a directorate for policy to beef up leadership at headquarters – a move that has been widely praised. The budget for the chief procurement officer will be nearly doubled in the coming fiscal year, and an additional 150 officers will be added in other procurement units within the department.
Many recent proposals for reforming the department that have been floated on Capitol Hill involve carving pieces out of the department and reinstating them to their former status or making them independent – including FEMA, the Coast Guard and the National Disaster Medical System. This would lead to precisely the kind of duplication and overlap that President Bush vowed to avoid.
If that indeed happens, the ultimate result of the Bush administration’s initial “smaller is better” approach at the department – after years of turmoil and mismanagement – may be a bigger and more complex agglomeration of federal programs than existed before it took office.
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