Afternoon Take: McCaul Continues to Push for DHS Management Overhaul

By CQ Staff

Texas Republican Rep. Michael McCaul made another push Wednesday for his vision of a more accountable Department of Homeland Security, releasing a report cataloguing the department’s procurement mistakes and ushering an overhaul bill through the subcommittee he chairs.

“I have doubts the department can carry out its core mission of protecting the homeland if the problems persist,” McCaul said in a statement. “These issues of corruption, waste, duplication, and abuse of power are all symptomatic of deeply rooted flaws in the department’s management. I am committed to seeing DHS function with efficiency and this is a step forward.”

McCaul’s bill (HR 5913) would create an eight-member panel appointed by the legislative and executive branches to assess the DHS management structure. McCaul has said that the legislation is necessary because of the department’s size and budget and because the Government Accountability Office has ranked it as “high risk.” He also said DHS displays “excessive bureaucracy, waste, ineffectiveness and lack of transparency” that hinders its operations.

The measure is co-sponsored by Rep. William Keating of Massachusetts, the ranking Democrat on McCaul’s Homeland Security Subcommittee on Oversight, Investigation and Management, which approved the measure by voice vote. Prior to the markup, McCaul released a report focused on several problematic acquisition programs at the department, saying that management structure played a part in them.

They included the department’s “virtual fence” Southwest border initiative known as SBInet, which it scrapped in 2010, after department officials made the determination that it was a failure that did not pass a cost-benefit analysis. Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano announced a plan to replace the program with a technology deployment that focused on moving off-the-shelf equipment to the border, instead of coming up with custom solutions.

McCaul’s report cast doubt, however, on that successor program’s chances of working.

The Government Accountability Office “has questioned DHS’s plan because it cannot justify the types of technologies required, how many units they need, what they will ultimately cost, or where to put them,” the report said. “Unless DHS improves its requirements, oversight, and performance metrics for this effort, taxpayer dollars may yet again be put at risk.”

The document was also critical of the Transportation Security Administration’s initial deployment of full-body scanners, citing GAO findings that the agency did not clear its testing regimen for the machines with DHS before it began deployment.