By Calvin Biesecker
Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano on Friday put forth a new program designed to create wide ranging efficiencies throughout her department that are expected to streamline decision making and even save hundreds of millions of dollars.
There is no timeline or total amount of savings and cost avoidance that DHS has pegged to its Efficiency Review Initiative. Rather it’s an ongoing process to continue to identify and enact savings, DHS said.
The Efficiency Review Initiative grew out of an action directive Napolitano issued last month and will focus on six main categories: acquisition management; asset management; real property management; employee credentialing and vetting; hiring and on-boarding; and information technology (Defense Daily, Feb. 18). The initiatives have various timelines–30, 60, 90 and 120 day groupings–for when various actions will begin.
For example, within 30 days, DHS and its components are supposed to begin leveraging their collective buying power in the purchase of office supplies, an initiative that is expected to save between $35 million and $52 million over five years. In FY ’07 DHS spent $100 million on office supplies but only 6 percent of that was acquired through department-wide purchasing agreements.
In the asset management category, DHS plans to better track fuel usage of its vehicle fleet using an electronic tracking system. Moreover, within the next four months, DHS plans to start buying cars powered by hybrid engines and alternative fuels, leading to a 30 percent increase in fuel efficiency with its large vehicles and even higher for its smaller cars.
In other examples, DHS plans to eliminate non-mission critical travel, eliminate the printing of documents that can be sent electronically or posted on line, and consolidate the subscriptions of its professional publications to lower costs.
Napolitano also wants to lower the costs for employee vetting. A background security check for a secret clearance can cost up to $5,500, which is wasted if an automatic disqualifier is found on that potential employee. She wants to find process improvements that can identify those disqualifying factors before the background checks begin.
The action directive for the efficiency review last month created a steering committee led by Marianne Linger of the DHS Office of Management. The committee consists of representatives from all the department’s components as well as a full-time review team that identified over 700 efficiency initiatives underway in the past five years. In addition it also collects ideas for improvements from all of the department’s employees.
The new initiative stems from Napolitano’s tenure as governor of Arizona, during which various initiatives resulted in more than $1 billion in savings.