Vacancies plague upper management throughout DHS
The largest number of vacancies among eight key DHS units is found in the Federal Emergency Management Agency, where no less than 24 out of 77 executive positions remain unfilled. The highest percentage of vacancies is in the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Policy, where a full 48 percent of positions are unfilled.
On average, 24 percent of the top positions in DHS are vacant.
As next year’s presidential election draws closer, there are growing concerns that this situation may worsen, with an exodus of top management leaving DHS with a mere skeleton crew to oversee its task of protecting the country from terrorist attacks.
DHS spokesmen, responding to those allegations, say that the vacancy rates are misleading because the number of executive positions to be filled grew sharply this past spring. They say that in fact only 12 percent of top positions are currently vacant.
However, Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-MS), chairman of the House Committee on Homeland Security, believes the actual numbers are far higher.
This prompted Thompson to make filling those positions the top item on his Chertoff To-do List, published last month.
That list came in the wake of a detailed report by the majority (Democratic) staff of the Homeland Security Committee, which concluded that "over politicization" of the top rank of DHS management was creating a "heightened vulnerability to terrorist attack."
The report, entitled "Critical Leadership Vacancies Impede United States Department of Homeland Security," called for immediate action to improve agency morale and fill out the top management roster.
The committee, using data submitted by DHS, found that only three components of DHS had top management vacancy rates of less than 10 percent: The Office of the Undersecretary for Science and Technology (9 percent), the U.S. Secret Service (6 percent) and the agency’s Gulf Coast Reconstruction unit (no vacancies).
Indeed, according to recent reports prepared by the Government Accountability Office, the House Committee on Homeland Security and private sector investigations by non-profit organizations and academic institutions, such as Columbia University and Harvard University, the failure to fill top positions poses a serious security threat.
The Columbia University/Harvard University study found that the high vacancy rate was not simply the result of failure to fill positions, or to overcome well-known morale problems within DHS. The joint research team, funded by the Carnegie and Knight Foundations, found that the size of the management team at DHS has been limited by a Bush Administration policy, originally put in place in 2003, to make DHS a test case for its campaign promise to limit the size of government.
A telling fact is that while the Justice Department has one employee in the secretary’s office for every 185 employees in that department overall, the ratio in Homeland Security is nearly half that: one in 333.
DHS Secretary Michael Chertoff has begun to respond to such critical findings. He has spoken at length about the need to improve morale within the agency, to retain good workers and to facilitate recruitment of top management.
Yet some of the secretary’s words may sound familiar, because he voiced similar goals at the outset of his tenure, two years ago.
"I would like our department to develop an internal structure for career development that would make it, first of all, a very attractive place to work and to recruit,[and to] inspire our workforce to do a good job," he said, shortly after assuming his position as secretary of DHS.
What may be different now is that Congress is pressing DHS to carry through with a full program of reforms.
DHS, partly in acknowledgment of that pressure, will hold a Human Capital Strategic Leadership Conference later this month, designed, as an agency announcement put it, "for creating a Department-wide human capital community, including goals, commitments and timelines."
An agency spokesman said "critical decisions" will be made at that conference, "concerning the strategic use of organization resources, both human and monetary, as the agency works to institutionalize the ‘Team DHS’ concept."
Congressional critics like Thompson will be watching to see if those decisions are substantial enough to give Team DHS the leadership it requires.
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