Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly on Tuesday said again that he plans to continue his predecessor’s work to streamline and unify the Department of Homeland Security functions and operations, adding that he will put the effort on “steroids.”
Following President Donald Trump’s recent executive order for federal agencies to look for efficiencies, Kelly said Deputy DHS Secretary Elaine Duke will be responsible for leading this review at the department and will report out in six months.
Jeh Johnson, who served as then-President Barack Obama’s DHS secretary for the last three years of the administration, began the Unity of Effort initiative to get various operational components to work better together and to eliminate unnecessary redundancies.
Speaking at George Washington University in his first major policy address since becoming the DHS chief in January, Kelly said “you never have enough money,” which is why the department needs to continue to look for ways to be more efficient. The efficiency review will look for areas where there is duplication of efforts, such as in acquisition functions, he said.
“It’s amazing,” Kelly told the audience, the different pay-scales and acquisition processes that exist across DHS, joking that “Elaine, the number two, is going to fix all that in six months or less.”
Kelly also said that there needs to be a new way of looking at budgeting and thinking about security that melds the “away” and “home” games, that is, defense and security spending intended for agencies such as the Defense Department and CIA, representing the away game, and DHS, which takes care of securing the homeland.
“So, I think in terms of going forward, we have to think in terms of security and non-security as opposed to defense and over there,” Kelly said. He warned that as the Islamic State and its caliphate disintegrates, and becomes more decentralized, this presents a “greater risk” to the U.S. homeland.
He lauded the Coast Guard for doing a “phenomenal” job across its many responsibilities, whether its intercepting drugs in the maritime environment, search and rescue operations of mariners in distress, and bolstering its efforts for Arctic operations. Everything the Coast Guard does is part of the “security equation,” Kelly said, adding that “we should think in terms of security, not defense.”