March 6, 2008

A summary of daily news relevant to the federal workforce produced by the Partnership for Public Service.

1. Submit Your Nominations Today for the 2008 Service to America Medals: Less Than One Week Remaining!
2. DHS Strains As Goals, Mandates Go Unmet
3. Coast Guard is Pressed to Meet Security Demands, GAO says
4. Op-ed Homeland Security's Struggle

Submit Your Nominations Today for the 2008 Service to America Medals: Less Than One Week Remaining!

The Partnership for Public Service
 
Do you know an extraordinary federal employee who is doing remarkable work on behalf of our country? There is one month remaining to help them receive the recognition they deserve and a chance to win up to $10,000 by nominating them for the 2008 Service to America Medals (Sammies).
 
With your help, the Sammies put a compelling human face on government service and seek to inspire a new generation of Americans to serve.
 
The awards include cash prizes from $3,000 to $10,000 in the following categories:

• Federal Employee of the Year
• Career Achievement (requires 20+ years of government service)
• Call to Service (age 35 or younger, and 5 years or less of government service)
• Citizen Services
• Homeland Security
• Justice and Law Enforcement
• National Security and International Affairs
• Science and Environment

Click here to download the 2008 nominations flyer. Nominations must be submitted online at http://www.servicetoamericamedals.org/ by March 10, 2008 (extended deadline).

For more information, please send an email to awards@ourpublicservice.org or call Kristin Esham at 202-775-9111.

 

DHS Strains As Goals, Mandates Go Unmet

The Washington Post
By Spencer S. Hsu

Stumping for President Bush's ill-fated immigration overhaul in 2006, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff vowed that his department would wrest "operational control" of the nation's borders away from human and drug traffickers within five years.

That projection was based on the prospect of tough new enforcement measures as well as a temporary-worker program meant to stanch the flow of illegal immigrants, including the most ambitious use of surveillance technology ever tried on the U.S.-Mexico border.

Two years later, the legislative overhaul has been shelved, development of the "virtual fence" has been delayed, and its designers are going back to the drawing board. Completion of its first phase has been put off until as late as 2011, congressional investigators say. The possibility of this outcome was flagged early on by internal and external watchdogs, who warned of unrealistically tight deadlines, vague direction to contractors, harsh operating conditions and tough requirements of Border Patrol end-users.

The virtual fence is not the first major contractor-led technology effort to be ineffective, incomplete or too expensive to sustain since the Department of Homeland Security was formed five years ago this month. Former officials, private-sector partners and independent analysts say the evolving 208,000-worker, $38 billion agency remains hindered by a crisis-of-the-moment environment, in which the rush to fulfill each new mandate or meet every threat undermines its ability to hold a strategic course and deliver promised results.

Among a slew of high-profile projects that have gone astray, DHS has struggled to field next-generation explosive-detection "puffer devices" at airports and has projected it could take $22 billion and 16 more years to deploy advanced baggage-screening systems in airports.

It scaled back and indefinitely delayed the "exit" half of a $10 billion, biometric entry-exit system to track foreign visitors using digital fingerprints and photographs, citing technological and cost problems. Homeland Security also faces a congressional mandate after the Dubai Ports World controversy to scan 100 percent of U.S.-bound shipping containers overseas, while scientific and logistical problems have hampered a $1.2 billion effort to field highly effective nuclear detection devices.

To be sure, the department's managers in its first half-decade have labored hard to oversee 22 rivalrous components. They have improved aviation security and forged a more unified strategy for improving border security and using intelligence.

DHS spokesman Russ Knocke noted that Chertoff this week requested a comprehensive review of airport screening policies to increase efficiency and eliminate outdated steps, and that the department has begun tracking exiting visitors at airports and expects more progress soon at land borders. DHS also moved faster than required to launch experimental scanning efforts at several overseas ports.

Still, the ever-growing list of troubled programs illustrates the extent to which each new crisis -- from the 2001 terrorist attacks to Hurricane Katrina to the Dubai ports scare to the Bush administration's push for comprehensive immigration policy revisions -- has forced DHS leaders to launch costly initiatives with broadly defined goals that wind up missing their targets.

"You felt the pressures. You see the threats. You see the political needs and you think, 'We need to make sure it's the best we can do to solve this problem as soon as we can.' And that's a constant problem with the department," said C. Stewart Verdery Jr., assistant secretary of policy for border and transportation security from 2003 to 2005, who now is a private consultant.

If the Pentagon is the bureaucratic equivalent of Washington's biggest, hardest-to-turn battleship, "DHS is like a speedboat and it keeps turning . . . constantly shifting gears," Verdery said. "If you told people five years ago there was going to be a billion dollars for a fence, people would have laughed at you."

Department veterans complain that its contract-management system is weak, and that it still has trouble working with experts both inside and outside government to set rigorous, enforceable requirements on contractors.

Click here to read the entire article. 

Coast Guard is Pressed to Meet Security Demands, GAO says

Congress Daily
By Michael Posner

The Coast Guard, hampered by an aging fleet and manpower problems, faces challenges in meeting its homeland security demands as well as its traditional role of maritime safety, Government Accountability Office officials told a House appropriations panel Wednesday.

Coast Guard Commandant Thad Allen acknowledged at a hearing of the House Homeland Security Appropriations Subcommittee his service has "significant challenges."

GAO noted the Coast Guard has mounting anti-terrorist demands for vessel escorts, security patrols of infrastructure and inspection of maritime facilities at home and abroad as well as non-homeland security requirements.

"In several cases, the Coast Guard has not been able to keep up with these security demands in that it is not meeting its own requirements for vessel escorts and other security activities at some ports," said John Hutton, director of GAO's acquisition and management section, and Stephen Caldwell, GAO's director of homeland security and justice, in a joint report. The ports were not identified.

Homeland Security Appropriations Subcommittee Chairman David Price, D-N.C., praised the fiscal 2009 budget's extra $65 million that Congress approved last year for increased port security, environmental protection and marine safety. But he said money is not the only problem facing the Coast Guard, problems that include "financial management inertia," contract management problems, and the age of the fleet.

The Coast Guard's Deepwater Program, a fleet and aircraft modernization initiative, remains behind schedule.

"Our readiness is continually challenged by our reliance on outdated, rapidly aging assets, systems and shore infrastructure," Allen said.

In particular, Allen said he did not have the manpower and ships for protection of tankers arriving to fill liquefied natural gas terminals at various ports. "No, we do not have the resources" to inspect those terminals, Allen told Rep. Nita Lowey, D-N.Y.

The GAO officials also said Coast Guard units will need to significantly expand workloads to meet LNG security. Allen called for a national discussion for protection from other hazardous products, not just LNG.

Members of both parties praised Allen for Coast Guard achievements last year that included saving 5,000 lives and intercepting nearly $5 billion in cocaine.

Op-ed: Homeland Security's Struggle

The Washington Post
By David Ignatius

The Department of Homeland Security celebrates its fifth birthday this week, and hopefully not with a bang. This has to be the only agency in government whose biggest achievement is when nothing happens.

Michael Chertoff, who runs the agency, may have the most underappreciated job in Washington. Other agencies have grand buildings and proud traditions. DHS has a ramshackle, hand-me-down headquarters that looks like a budget motel. The offices are modest, the carpets ratty; the security staff at the gate wastes time shuffling cumbersome paper forms.

Five years on, the department is very much a work in progress -- still struggling to mesh the 22 agencies that were combined to create a sprawling security establishment with about 208,000 employees. Critics say it remains more a collection of bureaucratic parts than a unitary Cabinet department.

Homeland Security illustrates a paradox of how Washington operates. Its work is quite literally a matter of life and death for the nation. But despite that intrinsic importance, it is low on the capital's totem pole. What attention it gets from Congress and the media is mostly second-guessing when something goes wrong. It is a crucial nexis of public-sector management in an administration that mistrusts and devalues the public sector.

I asked Chertoff the other day to reflect on what lessons he has learned about government in his three years running the agency. The conversation focused not on the policy issues surrounding terrorism but on the process issues of making a big, lumpy government bureaucracy work. Chertoff surprised me with his candor in describing the obstacles that make it hard to manage a government agency effectively.

The federal government "is an inherently conservative system, built to prevent sudden change," explained Chertoff. That Washington culture of inertia was a special problem for an agency that was created essentially from scratch after a searing national crisis. Each of the new department's components had its own congressional overseers who didn't want to give up jurisdiction, with the result that, by Chertoff's count, the department's budget today is overseen by 86 congressional committees and subcommittees.

"It's very hard to set priorities," Chertoff said. "You spend a lot of time fending off people who have one specific thing they want to get done and don't care about the larger mission."

Chertoff described three mind-sets that get in the way of making good decisions. The first he called "anecdotalism" -- meaning the ability of a few noisy or litigious people with a "sob story" to block government actions that are in the interest of everyone else. "Yes, someone may get hurt in some way, so the argument becomes, let's not do it." He noted the protests of shopkeepers near the borders that their businesses will suffer because of new rules that require secure documentation for all travelers, even those coming for a few hours of shopping.

A second impediment is the universal problem of "not in my back yard." Here, he cited the example of a landowner in the Southwest who sued to block a border fence -- not across his property but a neighbor's -- because it might push illegal immigrants onto his land.

A third obstacle is "not in my term of office," which Chertoff defined as "the unwillingness of political leaders to make an investment now when the benefits won't accrue until later." One example was the failure over many decades to spend the money to repair New Orleans's system of levees. Chertoff's agency got hammered for its slow and poorly planned response to Hurricane Katrina, and rightly so, but he has a point that the larger failure was the refusal to spend the money that could have prevented the disaster. A new example is spending money to cope with public-health disasters that may not occur for 20 years.

Observed Chertoff: "The model is: Don't do anything until there's a catastrophe. When there's a catastrophe, find someone to punish. Then move on."

The way out of this morass of public-sector management, Chertoff argues, is to set good priorities, do what you think is right and take the heat from people who are angry about it. "If you become paralyzed and try to make everyone happy, you will certainly not progress to the goal -- and will end up making everyone unhappy."

Chertoff has made his share of mistakes as homeland security chief. But I think he's right about the larger problem of serving the public interest in a town dominated by special interests. Government officials have to have skin as thick as buffalo hide to survive the pressure. And then we wonder why so few top-notch people want to serve in Washington.