Month: September 2014

News, Opinion

Let’s Talk About DHS

by Jeff Neal4 Comments on Let’s Talk About DHS

 

DHS Seal

 

The Department of Homeland Security has been in the news recently regarding leadership vacancies. DHS being in the news is not news – the Department is in the news virtually every day. When I was Chief Human Capital Officer for DHS I got sick of reading the stories about DHS – everyone wants to write about the negatives and almost no one writes about the positives. Does DHS have morale issues? Yes. Does it have turnover issues? Yes, but not as bad as it might appear. Does DHS have issues with organization and command and control? Yes. Those and other issues lead some people to conclude DHS never should have been created and should be done away with. If that happened, the work DHS does would have to be done somewhere else. Regardless of how they are delivered, we need the services of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the Border Patrol, Customs, immigration and citizenship services, and the aviation security services of TSA.  That means doing away with DHS would result in a massive government reorganization that would most likely be even messier than the one that created DHS.

I am never surprised when people say the solution to a problem is to reorganize. I am also never surprised when the reorganization fails to solve the problem. Reorganization can be a solution when organizational constructs are the source of a problem – otherwise they solve nothing. Many of the issues DHS faces are the result of the reorganization that created DHS. When the Homeland Security Act was passed, it was in response to post-September 11 fear. I will leave it to others to judge whether that was the best solution or not. What I do know is that the stand-up of DHS in 2003 was done in haste and without adequate planning. In a perfect world, Secretary Tom Ridge would have been appointed, given a transition planning team and adequate resources, and would have had a year or more to plan an orderly stand-up. He did not have that luxury, so the department was assembled on the fly. Given the circumstances under which they had to work, the people who stood up DHS did a remarkable job. They built a functioning department quickly and without any major disasters. In the years since, DHS has successfully executed a massive buildup to double the size of the Border Patrol, consolidated countless systems, dealt with H1N1 and terrorist threats, responded to the BP oil spill, made tremendous strides in improving management integration within the Department, arrested more than 12,000 child sex tourists, predators and child pornographers, deported record numbers of undocumented immigrants (increasing the number from 88,000 in 2008 to almost 200,000 in 2010), responded to dozens of natural disasters, and innumerable other accomplishments that few people hear about. Here are a few more of those accomplishments (sourced from the 2015 DHS Budget in Brief):

  • The Department of Homeland Security has dedicated historic levels of personnel, technology, and infrastructure to border security to reduce the flow of illegal immigrants and illicit contraband while fostering legal trade and travel across both our North and Southwest borders and at our air and sea ports of entry. Every day, DHS personnel pre-screen 6 million air travelers, screen 1.8 million passengers and their baggage for explosives and prohibited items, patrol 4.5 million square miles of U.S. waterways, and screen 100 percent of cargo and vehicles entering the country from Mexico and Canada.
  • Annually, DHS personnel naturalize three quarters of a million new citizens, assist over 500 thousand employers in determining the eligibility of their employees to work in the U.S., process 168 million visa and border crossing card holders, and process more than 300 million travelers entering the U.S. by land, sea, and air. DHS secures $2.4 trillion dollars of trade, and enforces U.S. laws that protect health and safety, welcome legitimate travelers, and facilitates the flow of goods and services essential to our Nation’s economy.
  • Customs and Border Protection (CBP) processed $2.38 trillion in trade and nearly 25 million cargo containers through our nation’s POEs.
  • In FY 2013, CBP officers conducted more than 24,000 seizures due to intellectual property rights violations and prevented $1.7 billion in counterfeit goods from entering the U.S. economy, representing a 38-percent increase in value over FY 2012.
  • CBPOs and Border Patrol agents seized nearly 4.4 million pounds of narcotics, a 2-percent increase from FY 2012, and more than $106.0 million in unreported currency.
  • In Fiscal Year (FY) 2013, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) made 40,218 criminal arrests while seizing $1.3 billion in U.S. currency and other monetary instruments, 1.6 million pounds of narcotics and other dangerous drugs, and 58,672 weapons. ICE responded to 1,424,320 alienage inquiries from other Federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies through ICE’s Law Enforcement Support Center.
  • The Transportation Security Administration screened approximately 2 billion carry-on bags at checkpoints and more than 425 million checked bags, preventing approximately 111,000 dangerous prohibited items including explosives, firearms, flammables/irritants, and weapons from being carried onto planes in FY 2013.
  • The United States Coast Guard responded to 17,721 Search and Rescue incidents, saving 3,263 lives and protecting $44 million in property in FY 2013.
  • The Secret Service made 46,132 arrests for counterfeit, cyber crimes, identity theft, access device fraud, mortgage fraud, and protective intelligence cases.

So let’s talk about whether DHS should exist or not. The anti-DHS camp argues DHS  is too big. It is disorganized. It intrudes too much into people’s lives. It is a waste of money. We would be better off if the components of DHS were put back where they came from. The pro-DHS camp says DHS is still coming together as a Department. It needs time to get itself together and operate smoothly and has made tremendous progress in recent years. It provides a means of integrating homeland security efforts in a way that did not exist when the components were spread across multiple Departments. And it is providing services such as those described above that most people are not aware of.

Prior to my appointment as DHS CHCO, I probably leaned more toward the anti-DHS camp. Then I saw what it is like from the inside. My view of DHS changed completely, and now I strongly believe DHS is a valuable and necessary part of the Federal government. I also believe doing away with it would generate far more problems that it would solve, and would make the US less secure. Here are three reasons why:

  • There is little disagreement that there is a strong relationship between many of the missions of DHS, such as customs and border protection, aviation security, immigration enforcement and citizenship services. The intent in creating a single department was to make improve interactions between the people carrying out those missions. You may not hear about that in the news, but DHS has significantly improved how its components interact. As DHS becomes less stovepiped, interactions between the components will improve and its efforts will be far more efficient and effective.
  • A multi-agency reorganization will increase the problems, not solve them. Doing away with DHS would result in reorganizations in the Departments of Treasury, Transportation, Energy, Justice, Agriculture, Defense and Health and Human Services, as well as the General Services Administration. It would cost money, divert attention from the mission, and have no guarantee of improving anything.
  • Congress created DHS – it should help fix it. After spending most of my career in the Department of Defense, I was surprised to find that Congressional oversight of DHS was so disorganized. For much of its mission, Defense works with the House and Senate Armed Services and Appropriations Committees and their subcommittees. That allows Congress to provide oversight in a cohesive and effective way. When the Homeland Security Act was passed, the House and Senate did not assign oversight to the Homeland Security Committees of the House and Senate. They kept it the way it was. That means DHS is overseen by 92 committees and subcommittees and 27 additional caucuses, commissions and groups. On September 11, 2014, former DHS Secretaries Ridge, Chertoff and Napolitano signed a letter urging the House and Senate to do something about the oversight mess, saying “This is a matter of critical importance to national security on which there is broad bipartisan agreement, and it remains the only major recommendation of the 9/11 Commission that ten years later has not been acted upon.” They were being polite. In fact, not only have the House and Senate not acted upon the recommendation, they actually increased the number of committees and subcommittees overseeing DHS. In a separate letter, more than 30 homeland security experts, including the co-Chairs of the 9/11 Commission, made a similar plea. They said “The tangle of overlapping committees leads to political paralysis, increasing the nation’s vulnerability to multiple threats, including cyber-attacks, biohazards, and small boats and planes carrying unknown cargo.” They also pointed out that “During the first year of the 111th Congress, DHS spent approximately 66 work-years just responding to questions from Congress. A significant portion of the millions of dollars it took that year to answer more than 11,000 letters, provide more than 2,000 briefings, and make available 232 witnesses at 166 hearings, could have been better spent directly carrying out DHS’s core mission of ensuring a safer, more secure America.” Putting DHS back where it came from would only make the problem worse.

I am not making the argument that DHS is perfect, but we should give credit where credit is due and recognize the progress DHS has made. We should also think very carefully about using a massive government reorganization to solve the problems of a previous massive government reorganization. We should also resolve to focus on making constructive suggestions for improving DHS rather than constantly trying to tear them down. Being inside DHS, I know that the barrage of criticism has an effect on the workforce. Perhaps morale would improve if DHS were not the target of so much negative press and political rhetoric.

 

News

Do We Need a Million Fewer Federal Employees?

by Jeff Neal10 Comments on Do We Need a Million Fewer Federal Employees?

The Washington Post published an interesting opinion piece on August 29, suggesting the best way to have a better and smaller government is to hire another million Federal employees between now and 2035. The author makes the argument that many Federal programs are operated by state and local government, for-profit contractors and not-for-profit grantees. He also says moving much of that work back to direct performance by Federal employees could reduce cost, generate economies of scale, and result in overall government spending going down. He makes the argument that the number of Federal employees relative to the population of the United States is far lower than it was in 1965. To help make the point that there are too many contractors, the article also says the Department of Homeland Security has more contractors than Federal employees, citing a report from 2010.

DHS Does Not Have 200,000 Contractors

I was Chief Human Capital Officer for DHS in 2010. The Post article was correct when it said DHS reported it had more contractors than Feds. What is missing is that DHS later corrected that number and it actually had less than 100K contractors.

Hire a Million or Fire a Million?

The problem with some of these numbers is that we can make them say whatever we want them to say, based upon our biases and how we analyze and present the data. Using employment data we can argue we should hire a million Feds or that we should fire a million Feds or anything in between. The “hire another million Feds” argument goes like this: We currently have 2,038,000 non-postal Federal employees. The current U.S. population is 316,000,000. That means we have 155 residents per Federal employee. In 1965, we had a population of 193,000,000 and 1,900,000 Federal employees, for a ratio of 102 residents per employee. We have far fewer employees per U.S. resident than we had 49 years ago, so we have shrunk the Federal workforce considerably, at least when in terms of the Fed-to-resident ratio. The Office of Management and Budget cites similar numbers in their Analytical Perspectives on the FY 2013 budget submission, going back to the 1950s, when there were 92 workers for every resident. OMB used the numbers to point out that the Federal workforce is becoming far more highly skilled, but is not growing in real numbers. The Post article argues that the government should hire another million employees by 2035 and transition services back to the government from states, localities, contractors and non-profit grantees. A million new Feds is a nice number and it makes for an interesting headline, but it does not necessarily make good public policy.

Whether we believe the government needs more or fewer people, we should make the case based on the work that needs to be done, the benefits to the taxpayers, and the most efficient way to get it done. The workforce to population comparison does not do that. It takes two data points – population and Federal jobs – links them as top line numbers, then proceeds to argue that the number should be higher today because the ratio has changed. The problem with that is that our nation, our expectations of government, the world, the nature of work, technology, and virtually everything else has changed. Comparing the size of the 1950s or 1960s workforce with the 2014 workforce at a macro level does not tell us anything that we can use to determine if the number is too high, too low, or where it ought to be. When we look at the number of employees, the number of contractors or the number of grantees, we need to dig a lot deeper in the numbers before we make public policy.

The belief that government employment has failed to keep pace with the population is not new. OMB’s Analytical Perspectives addressed the issue directly –

“Fifty years ago, most white-collar Federal employees performed clerical tasks, such as posting Census figures in ledgers and retrieving taxpayer records from file rooms. Today their jobs are vastly different, requiring advanced skills to serve a knowledge-based economy. Professionals such as doctors, engineers, scientists, statisticians, and lawyers now make up a large portion of the Federal workforce. More than half (55 percent) of Federal workers work in the nine highest-paying occupation groups as judges, engineers, scientists, nuclear plant inspectors, etc., compared to about a third (33 percent) of private sector workers in those same nine highest paying occupation groups. In contrast, 45 percent of private sector workers work in the seven lowest-paying occupation groups as cooks, janitors, service workers, clerks, laborers, manufacturing workers, etc. About 26 percent of Federal workers work in those seven lowest-paying occupation groups. Between 1981 and 2011, the proportion of the Federal workforce in clerical occupations fell from 19.4 percent to 5.1 percent of the workforce, and the proportion of blue-collar workers fell from 22.0 percent to 9.7 percent.”

OMB rightly pointed out that the workforce of today is far different from what we had in the 1950s and 1960s. Most readers are probably too young to remember, but in 1965 most offices were full of clerks. In fact, when the Classification Act was passed in 1949, the work force was mostly clerical. A Washington Post article from January 2014 put the number at three quarters of the workforce. (In the 1950s we had about 400,000 blue collar employees, so it is more likely that 3/4 of white collar employees were clerks.)

Where did all of those clerks go?

1950s and 1960s offices were full of clerks doing paperwork. They were pulling paper files from file cabinets. They were processing personnel actions using paper documents and paper official personnel folders. They did bookkeeping (using paper ledgers), they worked at telephone switchboards. And they typed. On typewriters. That work is mostly gone due to automation. People input their own work on the computers sitting on their desks. The idea that we would pay someone to write something with a pen and paper and then hand it off to another person to use a typewriter or word processing software to finish it is a relic of the past. The idea of accounting technicians by the thousands doing double entry bookkeeping in paper ledgers is just as dead. Typewriters and telephone switchboards are museum pieces. The nature of work in the Federal government has changed so radically that comparing top line 1950s and 1960s employment ratios to today tells us nothing. The more accurate comparison of 1950s and 1960s government to 2014 is the white collar nonclerical workforce, because the role of government is defined far more by higher-skilled and higher-paying occupations than by clerical and blue collar jobs.  I say that because most clerical work is done to facilitate other , more substantive, work. Most blue collar work is either maintaining facilities (another example of facilitating other work) or repairing boats, ships and aircraft. If we correct for the number of blue collar and clerical positions in government in the 1950s and 1960s, we get an entirely different view of the ratio of employees to residents. I have included a chart with all the numbers , including the resident to non clerical white collar employee ratio at the end of this post for those folks who want to see details.

In 1955 we had 503 residents per non-clerical white collar employee – today we have 183. The workforce performing substantive government work has grown a lot. As technology moved into government, it displaced clerical workers. The white collar workforce fluctuated over the years, but the number of non-clerical white collar workers has continued to grow. In just the last 5 years, the number of Federal employees started at 2,038,000, rose for a few years, and is now back to 2,038,00, yet the size of the clerical workforce has dropped from 151,000 in 2009 to 123,000 today and the blue collar workforce has dropped from 207,000 to 189,000. Using the comparison of nonclerical white collar work in the past and today, one could make the argument we have a million too many Federal employees. It is an absurd idea, but the idea of laying off a million Feds and cutting the budget more than $108 billion is about as realistic as hiring a million. Neither is going to happen, because neither is based on a realistic analysis of the work that needs to be done, the political environment, our economic conditions, or any of countless other data points that must go into any discussion of the right size of the workforce.

 

The Details

Federal Employment vs Population 2