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 says in a recent teleconference with reporters and bloggers.
“We can view things through the organizational spectrum like CBP and ask the question, 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,” he says.
DHS released the BUR earlier this month after first delivering it to Congress on July 1. The new document represents the second phase in a three step process that began with the release in February 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 QHSR lays out five core mission areas: preventing terrorism and enhancing security; securing and managing the borders; enforcing and administering immigration laws; safeguarding and security cyberspace; and ensuring resilience to disasters.
Programmatics
In an Annex D of the BUR, DHS lists the major FYHSP programmatic activities within each core mission area, the acquisitions and investments under each activity, and which agency that activity is aligned with. For example, within the preventing terrorism and enhancing security mission, aviation security and surface transportation security are two of 16 activities listed, both being aligned with TSA.
Major acquisitions and investments within the 16 preventing terrorism and enhancing security programmatic activities include electronic baggage screening, passenger screening, Advanced Spectroscopic Portal program, and even the Cargo Advanced Automated Radiography System, which DHS altered two years ago due to technology challenges, among others (TR2, July 9, 2008).
Under the securing and managing the borders mission area, FYHSP programmatic activities include Air and Marine, drug interdiction, US-VISIT, Border Security Fencing, Infrastructure and Technology, and others. Specific programs include the Secure Border Initiative Net, License Plate Reader, Secure Freight Initiative, various Coast Guard programs and more.
While a number of important programs are listed in the Annex, there are few details. DHS says that it will breakout additional detail on its programs and activities in the FY ’12 budget request next February, which will be accompanied by the FYHSP.
Initial Reactions
The initial reaction from Congress and industry to the BUR has been that the report is wanting in detail such as programmatic and organizational specifics necessary to advance the goals of the QHSR. Michael Kelly, the director of Homeland Security for Battelle, tells TR2 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.”
The BUR process began last November as the QHSR was being finalized and focuses on three questions. First, how can DHS strengthen its performance in each mission area? Second, how should DHS operations and management be improved? And finally, how can DHS better account for the resources entrusted to it?
“The BUR will serve as a roadmap for these questions,” Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano says in a letter accompanying the review.
The BUR has come under criticism from some in Congress for lacking specifics on programs and organizational details. Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.), chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, criticizes the report for not being the “‘deep dive’ that Congress was promised,” adding that it “seems to miss the mark’ in helping DHS better address its management and organizational needs.
Sen. Susan Collins (R-Me.), the ranking member on the Senate Homeland Security Committee, says the BUR also falls short on providing programmatic and organizational specifics to advance the goals set forth in the QHSR.
Kelly says that he basically agrees with the congressional remarks. There’s nothing new in the way of major acquisitions and investments, he says. “All of those we’ve seen and heard about for a while.”
While lacking in detail, Kelly says that with the BUR DHS appears to be laying the groundwork for a more substantive FYHSP compared to its prior budget requests. 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.
Heyman says 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 such as 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 describes 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 4 years,” he adds.