By Calvin Biesecker
The recently completed Bottom-Up Review (BUR) gives the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) leadership “for the first time ever a powerful tool” to look at its various programs and activities and link them to its missions and functions, according to David Heyman, the assistant secretary for Policy at DHS.
The BUR basically maps the activities that are “below the programmatic level” to the mission areas and functional areas such as screening, domain awareness and preventing terrorism to provide different views for the leadership to assess how missions are being performed and if there are gaps, Heyman said Friday during a teleconference with reporters and bloggers.
“We can view things through the organizational spectrum like Customs and Border Protection and ask the questions, ‘do we in fact have in place the appropriate programs in place, the activities in place to perform the mission; what more can we do? And is it structured in a way that it is optimized for performance,'” Heyman said.
DHS released the BUR last week after first delivering it to Congress (Defense Daily, July 13). The new document represents the second phase in a three-step process that began with the release earlier this year of the Quadrennial Homeland Security Review (QHSR) and ends with the release next February of the Future Years Homeland Security Program (FYHSP) budget.
The QHSR identifies and defines the missions of DHS, the BUR links programs and organizational needs to the mission, and the FYHSP will contain the FY ’12 budget request, funding projections and program needs out to FY ’16.
The initial reaction from Congress and industry to the BUR has been that the report is wanting in detail for programmatic and organizational specifics necessary to advance the goals of the QHSR. Michael Kelly, the director of Homeland Security for Battelle, told Defense Daily that he’s unsure of its usefulness from an industry perspective because it “seems to be a justification to support the QHSR relative to ongoing programs.”
Although the BUR lacks detail, DHS appears to be laying the groundwork for a more substantive FYHSP compared to its prior budget requests, Kelly said. He expects “to find good, solid, actionable information from a business perspective in the FYHSP” for future year’s planning. On the other hand, it will be “disappointing if the FYHSP is also a top-level document,” he said.
A DHS official told Defense Daily that the FYHSP is expected to be released as a For Official Use Only document, meaning it won’t be publicly released.
Heyman said that in discussing various initiatives within the BUR, DHS had to balance between advancing the QHSR and not getting ahead of the president’s budget request, which typically contains more program detail and justification.
“In some places [in the BUR] you have a little more grist on the bone; in some places, perhaps, you have more of our tipping our cards to where we’re going to go, but you’ll see in there basically initiatives and enhancements that will be developed and fleshed out for the president’s budget,” Heyman said.
The BUR contains 44 initiatives and enhancements within the five mission sets DHS put forth in the QHSR. The initiatives include things like creating an integrated departmental information sharing architecture and establishing DHS as a center of excellence for canine training and deployment.
Heyman doesn’t think that when DHS issues its next QHSR in four years that it will be followed by another BUR. He described the process of putting the BUR together as labor intensive. Moreover, “Once you’ve done your sort of strategic realignment and mapping exercise, it’s not something necessarily that you need to do every four years,” he said.
The BUR and QHSR will be the subject of a Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee hearing on Wednesday with DHS Deputy Secretary Jane Holl Lute slated to testify.