Department of Homeland Security, Deputy Secretary of Homeland Security

Department/Agency: Department of Homeland Security

Position:

Deputy Secretary of Homeland Security

Executive Schedule: Executive Level II - Presidential Appointment with Senate Confirmation

Major Responsibilities:

Chief operating officer of Department of Homeland Security
Manage day to day operations of the newest Cabinet department with more than 208,000 employees and a $48.5 billion budget
Help safeguard homeland security and coordinate the roles of DHS’s law enforcement, border patrol, immigration, emergency response arms
Coordinate federal response to man-made and natural disasters

Key Competencies and Preferred Qualifications:

Manage the complex department created to protect the United States and its citizens after the September 11, 2001, terror attacks

Insight:

The Department of Homeland Security commemorated its fifth anniversary in 2008 with a striking red, white and blue logo built around the number 5, but the post-9/11 task of knitting together 22 disparate agencies with 208,000 employees remained very much a work in progress. The Coast Guard was facing long delays and overruns in its efforts to rebuild its fleet of ships and aircrafts, the Federal Emergency Management Agency was tested again by Hurricane Ike, and costly radar towers along the Mexican border have yet to prove workable. Making the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) work is still a “monumental challenge,” as Senator Daniel Akaka (D-HI) told Paul Schneider at his confirmation hearing to become the DHS deputy secretary for the final seven months of the Bush administration.

Schneider, a career civil servant and nuclear engineer by training, already had served as acting deputy secretary and under secretary for management after stints as the top acquisition officer for the U.S. Navy and the National Security Agency. In easily winning confirmation, Schneider listed as his top priority for the short-term appointment preparing for the transition at homeland security – the first ever after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, that led to the creating of the 15^th Cabinet department.

DHS was knit together from 22 disparate agencies, most involved in law enforcement activities, including the Coast Guard, Secret Service, Border Patrol, Immigrations and Customs Enforcement and the new Transportation Security Administration that handles airport screening. The department is still growing rapidly in both staff and budget; President Bush’s request for $51 billion for fiscal 2009 was 62 percent higher than DHS was created in 2003. The department’s mission is to protect the American public from “dangerous people” and “dangerous things,” as Secretary Michael Chertoff put it, including hurricanes and natural disasters and man-made threats such as nuclear weapons and even IEDs – improvised electronic devices – wielded by terrorists.

Retired Coast Guard Admiral James Loy, who was deputy secretary of DHS from 2003 to 2005, told The Council for Excellence in Government that he regarded the three biggest challenges facing the next deputy secretary as the steep learning curve of DHS issues, fragmented congressional oversight, and the need to collaborate with other departments, state and local government, and international and private sector players on homeland security issues. Loy said he was surprised by “the constant demand” for coordination and collaboration with these other players.

Asked what he regarded as the essential skills and background for the job, Loy responded:

Skills and competencies of collaboration
Conflict resolution re backroom opportunities for efficiency (in information technology, human resources, acquisition, procurement, etc.
Familiarity with budget challenges (given the commitment to economic recovery)
Capability to overcome national complacency

Loy said the deputy secretary must deal with the challenges of keeping homeland security a national priority at a time when the country is preoccupied with economic recovery and by the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. He or she also needs to press for a more workable system of congressional oversight, and to strike an investment balance between policy and science and technology. Loy, who had previously served as deputy under secretary of transportation.

Michael P. Jackson, a seasoned executive in both the public and private sectors who succeeded Loy in 2005 and served two years as DHS secretary, said he regarded the position “as one of the five or six most difficult assignments in government.” Jackson said it was inspiring to work alongside “so many people who wake up and do hard things every day,” from rescuing people at sea to keeping air travelers safe to helping victims of hurricanes. “It may be a difficult and demanding job, but the emotional satisfaction you get by being colleague to so many people like that is just an unbelievable gift. So whoever gets it is both lucky and cursed in the same breath,” he said.

Jackson said the biggest challenge at DHS is building a cohesive department that can strengthen the country’s capacity to protect against and prevent major terrorist attacks. “The second big challenge is to invest your time, money and precious resources around the things that matter most, to figure out what they are and be disciplined about making substantial investments that really do something,” he said. “The third thing is understanding that almost all this defensive work and also the recovery work in case of an attack hinges around being able to work effectively with the private sector, to make people more alert to risk, to help them figure out how to protect and prevent attacks, and how to respond and recover.”

There is no one preferred background that readies someone for this job, Jackson said. “What you really need is a strong leader and an engaged manager, someone who can inspire and support the team that is going to do the work of the department; someone who has a nimble enough intellect to multitask across this whole very complex array of responsibilities and … (can help) prioritize what the department is going to do. … You’re going to have to learn and draw upon others. No one woman or man is going to have the totality of experience that they are going to have to absorb in a rapid period of time.”

“It’s also clear that in the list of qualities you really must have a certain amount of physical and intellectual stamina,” he added.

Chertoff, Schneider and the Bush administration had hoped to build a new headquarters for DHS and the Coast Guard on the site of the old St. Elizabeth’s Hospital, the federal mental facility that housed the insane, from poet Ezra Pound to would-be assassin John Hinckley Jr. Congress initially balked at the price tag, but efforts were still underway to get the relocation project funded. Schneider told the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs that DHS’s current facilities were such a “dump” that it was hurting morale and making it hard to hire intelligence analysts. “We’re bursting at the seams …. We have a hard time getting the talent,” he said. It isn’t just that the private sector offers pay 30 percent higher, he added, but that analysts at the CIA and NSA get to work in state-of-the-art facilities on campus-like compounds.

The department has come in for criticism about its color-coded security alerts and former Secretary of Homeland Security Tom Ridge’s advice to the public to buy duct tape and plastic sheeting to protect their homes against chemical attack. More recently some have questioned the utility of building the fences along the Mexican border that Congress has ordered. But Chertoff says both U.S. borders now are more secure, with 287 miles of fencing in place along the U.S.-Mexico border, and the Border Patrol doubled in size to 18,000 and more on the way. The department has let $2 billion in contracts for high tech, radar watchtowers, although that so-called SBInet (Secure Border Initiative) has encountered delays. Congress has put off until June 2009 plans to require Americans to produce passports at border crossings with Canada. ICE raids at meat-packing plants have resulted in the arrests of hundreds of undocumented workers and generated more controversy for DHS. Senator Claire McCaskill (D-MO), at Schneider’s confirmation hearing, criticized the raids and said that instead of going after “the little fishes,” ICE should jail those who employ undocumented immigrants. The department also has been roundly criticized in the news media for the quality of health care provided those in its detention facilities. Schneider defended ICE and said the news reports were “riddled with inaccuracies.”

Chertoff and Schneider both looked to the Department of Defense and its Joint Chief of Staffs as a model for how DHS can gets its various law enforcement arms to work together to better protect the American people. Chertoff spoke frequently about the importance of inculcating a “one DHS” philosophy. Schneider said that as acting deputy, he encouraged the creation of an operations directorate along the model of the Joint Chiefs of Staff’s J-3 Operations Directorate, which translates into action all the Joint Staff's planning, policies, intelligence, manpower, communications and logistics functions. Schneider said one of his top concerns remained filling vacancies at DHS, hiring enough analysts and getting them security clearances and the training they need to help keep the country safe.

Key Relationships – Within the Department or Agency:

Directors and deputies of DHS’s seven operational components: Coast Guard, Secret Service, Immigration Customs Enforcement, Customs and Border Protection, Citizenship and Immigration Services, Transportation Security Administration, and Federal Emergency Management Agency
General Counsel
Under Secretary for Information Analysis and Infrastructure Protection
Under Secretary for Management
Under Secretary for Science and Technology
Assistant Secretary for Policy

Key Relationships – Within the Government:

Director and deputy director of the White House Homeland Security Council
National Security Council
Deputy Secretary of Defense
Deputy Secretary of Justice
Deputy Secretary of State
Deputy Secretary of Treasury

Key Relationships – Outside the Government:

Leaders of state and local government
Leaders of key private sector industries including aviation

Nomination Referred to:

Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Government Affairs

Current Position Profile:

1. Jane Lute (Confirmed: April 3, 2009). Former Assistant Secretary-General, United Nations; Former Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer, The United Nations Foundation. Senior Public Policy Fellow, Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.

Recent Position Profiles:

2. Paul A. Schneider (2008-2009). Career civil servant and former defense and aerospace industry consultant. Promoted from under secretary for management. Former deputy assistant secretary of the Navy and top acquisition officer for the Navy and the National Security Agency (NSA). Began government career as nuclear engineer at Portsmouth Naval Shipyard. Joined industry on retirement, but came out of retirement to work for the NSA after 9/11.

3. Michael P. Jackson, Ph.D. (2005-2007). Former deputy secretary of transportation; helped set up Transportation Security Administration. Former Lockheed Martin and American Trucking Associations executive. Education Department official in Reagan administration and White House aide in first Bush administration. Ph.D. in government.

4. Admiral James M. Loy, USCG (Ret.) (2003-2005). Former commandant of the Coast Guard and former deputy under secretary of transportation. After leaving government, joined the Cohen Group, a strategic consulting firm.

5. Gordon R. England (2003). Longtime aerospace industry senior executive. Navy secretary before and after brief service as first deputy secretary of homeland security.