By Calvin Biesecker
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is developing plans to implement the 44 initiatives and enhancements contained in its new Bottom Up Review (BUR) in support of the FY ’12 budget request, Homeland Security Deputy Secretary Jane Holl Lute said yesterday.
“These are initiatives that we believe over the quadrennial speak to areas that would be high priority areas of focus for us in strengthening our ability to carry out the mission sets” outlined by DHS in the Quadrennial Homeland Security Review (QHSR) issued in February, Lute told the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee.
The QHSR is a comprehensive strategic review of homeland security that also outlines five core mission sets. The BUR, which DHS publicly released this month, puts forth 44 initiatives and enhancements that are contained within the five core missions. The initiatives include more integrated information sharing, making DHS the canine center of excellence across the federal government, expanding joint operations and intelligence capabilities and more (Defense Daily, July 13).
Lute bore the brunt of criticism of the BUR from several of the committee members for its vagueness and lack of detail, something members of Congress complained about following the release of the report (Defense Daily, July 12, July 13 and July 19).
Sen. Joseph Lieberman (I/D-Conn.), chairman of the committee, told Lute that he would like DHS to provide the BUR implementation plans to the committee so that it better understands the department’s plans.
“The state of the document now is unsatisfying because it is unclear, because of its lack of detail,” Lieberman said.
Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), the ranking member of the committee, suggested that the next time DHS does its QHSR it mimic more closely how the Defense Department presents its Quadrennial Defense Review. She said the QHSR and BUR don’t compare “to the level of analysis and planning” contained in the QDR.
For example, Collins said that in the QDR and the Navy’s 30-year shipbuilding plan DoD outlines “specific measureable goals such as a 313-ship Navy.” Moreover, she adds, the shipbuilding plan discusses force structure, construction planning, funding assumptions and the risks assumed in the force projections.
The DHS reviews, on the other hand, are “high-level strategy documents that provide little in the way of concrete goals or the actions needed to achieve them.”
Collins pointed to a lack of specifics in the BUR in two particular areas, a plan for detecting nuclear and radiological materials that could be smuggled into the United States and how DHS proposes to deal with the Federal Protective Service following a government investigation two years ago where bomb materials were covertly introduced into 10 federal buildings through secure checkpoints (Defense Daily, July 10, 2009). Collins said that the Government Accountability Office seven years ago called for DHS to create a strategic plan to screen illegal nuclear and radiological materials that could be smuggled across into the country yet all the BUR says is that “DHS will ‘leverage the full range of capabilities and increase its leadership role.’ Those are just buzz words.”
Lute said she personally is heading up a working group that is drafting the strategic plan to reduce the nation’s risk from the threat of nuclear and radiological materials that could be smuggled into the United States.
Collins also brought up the issue of cybersecurity, which is one of the five core missions contained in the QHSR. Collins said that the fact that cybersecurity is prominent in the strategic document runs counter to the fact that the Obama administration is proposing to cut $19 million from the DHS cyber budget in FY ’11 versus the FY ’10 amount.
Collins asked whether the administration would request a higher level of funding for cybersecurity in FY ’12. Lute said “we could,” but said that the administration is taking a closer look at how best to fulfill the mission.
Including cybersecurity as a core homeland security mission was a “surprise” to a number of stakeholders across the country in that they had not considered it to be a part of homeland security, Lute said.
“And so the simple articulation of the mission alone achieved a kind of effect we were hoping to achieve, which is to create a culture of awareness, a culture of responsiveness and engagement on this important and critical mission so as we build out the department’s critical capabilities in this regard, again understanding that we are largely an operational department, we will prioritize what our requirements are in the 2012 budget,” Lute said.