Nearly a quarter of the senior leadership positions at the Department of Homeland Security are vacant, according to a recent report.
It’s not exactly comforting news, considering a recent intelligence report that al-Qaeda has regained its strength and Homeland Security chief Michael Chertoff’s “gut feeling” that the nation faces a heightened chance of an attack this summer.
In fact, the large number of vacancies raises serious questions about the agency’s ability to protect this country from terrorist threats.
Since that’s the department’s mission, it’s unsettling, to say the least.
The chairman of the House Committee on Homeland Security, Rep. Bennie Thompson, called the vacancies an “enormous security vulnerability.”
The report by a House oversight committee blamed the “gaping hole in department executive resources” in part on what it called the “over-politicization of the top ranks of department management,” particularly in critical national security jobs. As of May 1, the report said, 138 of 575 executive positions at the department remained unfilled.
Chertoff acknowledged that he knows of no specific, credible threat, and the White House quickly followed up on Chertoff’s comments by saying there was “no credible intelligence” to support his statement. Yet, also last week, U.S. intelligence analysts released a new report saying al-Qaeda is at its greatest strength since the 2001 terror attacks.
DHS offices as sensitive as the Nuclear Detection Office, the Office of Operations Coordination, and Customs and Border Protection had 20 percent of their top jobs unfilled.
Why?
One of the department’s explanations is that salaries are not competitive with the private sector. Partisan battles over homeland-security issues also have made some jobs less appealing, The Washington Post reported. Rep. Thompson said management problems that resulted in poor morale are partly to blame.
Michael O’Hanlon, a security expert at the Brookings Institution, said he isn’t worried about vacancies, per se, but about whether the agency has the “right institutional structure.”
“For example, do they have a vibrant internal ‘think tank’ and/or red team capacity? I can’t tell, but I’m skeptical,” he was quoted as saying. Red teams are charged with trying to anticipate terrorists’ plans.
This week’s report comes less than a month after senior DHS officials told Congress that agency computers had experienced more than 800 “cyber security incidents” over a two-year period. Homeland Security is supposed to be the lead agency for fighting cyber threats. Other problems involved “numerous classified data spillages” in which secret information was transmitted or discussed over nonsecure e-mail systems.
These problems, as well as the vacancies, undermine the department’s credibility and heighten the public’s skepticism.
