The Government Performance and Results Modernization Act of 2010 requires federal agencies to
publish their strategic plan on their public websites. The agency strategic plan is expected to cover, at a
minimum, a period of four years. The strategic plan is required to contain a comprehensive mission
statement that encompasses the major functions and operations of the agency. Additionally, the
agency should post outcome oriented goals and objectives for the agency’s major functions and
operations that contain specific descriptions of selected goals, which embody the government’s
priorities; how those priorities are to be achieved, and the resources necessary to achieve those specific
goals on the Performance.gov website.
On June 18, 2002 President George W. Bush proposed to create the Department of Homeland Security
(DHS). DHS was established by Executive order 13267 on June 20, 2002. DHS is young compared to
other government agencies and the personnel responsible for performance measures are still
learning the various roles and responsibilities of the agency.
DHS was established by combining 22 different federal agencies. Some of the better known agencies
that make up DHS are U.S Customs and Border Protection, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement,
U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, Transportation Security Administration, Federal Emergency
Management Agency (FEMA), Office of Cyber-security and Communications, U.S. Coast Guard, and the
Secret Service.
The Department of Homeland Security’s Performance Improvement Officer (PIO) is a political
appointee who has many collateral duties. The PIO has a deputy and staff dedicated solely to
performance metrics. The PIO staff is a team of seven people including the deputy. This team
receives the agency’s strategic plan and develops the plan’s performance measures. The DHS
Deputy PIO has an extensive background in performance management having worked in the
performance arena at other federal agencies for many years.
Currently, DHS senior leadership is not completely committed to performance management
improvement, but they are very interested in performance management information disseminated
by the Deputy PIO. The former PIO/Deputy Secretary of DHS was very committed to, and involved
with, instituting performance management initiatives at DHS, but that Deputy Secretary left the
agency in 2013. The current DHS PIO has a very good performance background but is unfamiliar
with federal government procedures. A Critical Role at a Critical Time – A Survey of Performance
Improvement Officers by Grant Thornton’s Partnership for Public Service section suggests that
agency PIOs would benefit from receiving a formal orientation that could make their learning curve
smaller.
A challenge concerning DHS performance measurements is determining appropriate measures for
some of its agencies and properly analyzing and/or evaluating the measures provided by the
agencies. DHS is still learning about how to track performance in some of its agencies. For
instance, one of their internal questions is: what are the performance measures for some of the
individual activities their agencies are responsible for such as: cyber-security, energy security and
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assurance, national infrastructure and protection, and science and technology? The Secret Service,
for example, is a high performance agency, but law enforcement data is typically not as analytical as
data from other areas of the government.
The DHS performance measures vary by agency. FEMA tracks its performance better than some of
the other DHS agencies because the FEMA administrator is very involved with setting its
performance standards. However, FEMA can only report on the federal portion of its performance;
while the state and local municipalities are responsible for reporting their own performance
measurement data. The extensiveness of the reported state and local data is dependent on the
importance of performance measures in individual municipalities.
DHS has a good working relationship with OMB examiners on the “Management” side of OMB.
They understand many of DHS’s concerns and have been willing to work with DHS on their
performance issues.
According to A Critical Role at a Critical Time, many PIOs of federal agencies reported in 2010 and
2011 that they did not think that The Executive Office of the President and Congress used the
performance data provided by agencies effectively. Additionally, one rampant fear, probably
shared by many government agencies, is if an agency does not meet its performance goals they will
lose resources for programs that are not considered to be successful.
DHS PIO staff analyzes the performance measures for the agency. Their perspective is that they will
know if they are meeting their internal performance expectations by evaluating their measurement
data.
The best way to achieve an efficient and effective federal government is for each agency to
understand how it contributes to the accomplishment of the federal government’s priorities while
at the same time, taking responsibility for their performance.
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