Chris Currie

The Department of Homeland Security has launched an employee and family readiness council that senior leaders believe are addressing workforce engagement challenges.

FEMA is short nearly 2,000 temporary reserve employees, but acting agency Administrator Peter Gaynor insisted this year’s hurricane season won’t be a repeat of 2017.

The St. Elizabeths campus now houses senior DHS management officials, but the ongoing project still serves as a reminder that the agency faces an uphill battle when it comes to functioning like a unified agency – an issue it’s faced since its creation more than 15 years ago.

At the moment, the Department of Homeland Security has so many top management openings it looks like Swiss cheese.

FEMA has a limited view into the allegations of misconduct that come from the agency’s employees, because it lacks both the case management system and the written disciplinary policies to address misconduct from its cohort of temporary workers.

Five years have passed since a small earthquake occurred near Washington. It took several years to get the Washington Monument fixed. But hundreds of federally owned or leased office buildings are in areas throughout the country ith a high potential for serious earthquakes.

The Homeland Security Department said it will reorganize the National Protection and Programs Directorate. The Government Accountability Office said the agency should consider four key areas as they plan the re-organization at NPPD. Chris Currie, director of homeland security and justice issues at GAO, testified at a House Homeland Security subcommittee hearing about those four key areas. He told In Depth with Francis Rose the GAO’s High Risk list is the backdrop for what DHS should consider.

A major focus for the National Protection and Programs Directorate reorganization is unifying the directorate’s physical and cyber infrastructures.

After six years, the Department of Homeland Security decided in April to abandon its strategy to upgrade biological weapon detection equipment in large U.S. cities. But there is no backup plan so far, and the current system won’t last much longer. To date, DHS says it has actually expended only $61 million on Biowatch 3, and officials told the House Homeland Security Committee on Tuesday that they are moving quickly to come up with a new acquisition plan.