United States Department of Homeland Security

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"DHS" redirects here. For other uses, see DHS (disambiguation).

**Dept. of Homeland Security**

Established:	November 25, 2002
Activated:	January 24, 2003
Secretary:	Michael Chertoff
Deputy Secretary:	Michael P. Jackson
Budget:	$36.5 billion (2004)
Employees:	184,000 (2005)

The United States Department of Homeland Security (DHS), commonly known as Homeland Security, is a Cabinet department of the Federal Government of the United States with the responsibility of protecting the territory of the United States from terrorist attacks and responding to natural disasters.

Whereas the Department of Defense is charged with military actions abroad, the Department of Homeland Security works in the civilian sphere to protect the United States within, at, and outside its borders. Its goal is to prepare for, prevent, and respond to domestic emergencies, particularly terrorism.

With approximately 184,000 employees, DHS is the third largest cabinet department in the U.S. federal government after the Department of Defense and Department of Veterans Affairs. Homeland security policy is coordinated at the White House by the Homeland Security Council, with Frances Townsend as the Homeland Security Advisor. Other agencies with significant homeland security responsibilities include the Department of Health and Human Services, the Department of Justice, and the Department of Energy.

1 Initial Homeland Security Efforts after 9/11
2 Creation of the Department of Homeland Security
3 Organization
4 Headquarters
5 Grants
6 Ready.gov
7 Criticism
8 Trivia
9 See also
10 References
11 External links

[edit] Initial Homeland Security Efforts after 9/11

On September 20, 2001, in response to the September 11, 2001 attacks, President George W. Bush announced the establishment of an Office of Homeland Security (OHS) to coordinate "homeland security" efforts, to be headed by Governor Tom Ridge with the title of Assistant to the President for Homeland Security. The name is reminiscent of the British WW2-era Department of Home Security. The official announcement stated:

The mission of the Office will be to develop and coordinate the implementation of a comprehensive national strategy to secure the United States from terrorist threats or attacks. The Office will coordinate the executive branch's efforts to detect, prepare for, prevent, protect against, respond to, and recover from terrorist attacks within the United States.[1]

Former Pennsylvania Governor Tom Ridge took up his duties as OHS director on October 8, 2001.

The Homeland Security Advisory System scale

On March 12, 2002, the Homeland Security Advisory System (HSAS), a color-coded terrorism risk advisory scale, was created as a Presidential Directive to provide a "comprehensive and effective means to disseminate information regarding the risk of terrorist acts to Federal, State, and local authorities and to the American people." Many procedures at government facilities are keyed off of the alert level; for example a facility may search all entering vehicles when the alert is above a certain level. Since January 2003, it has been administered in coordination with the DHS; it has also been the target of frequent jokes and ridicule on the part of the administration's detractors about its perceived ineffectiveness. After resigning, Tom Ridge stated that he didn't always agree with the threat level adjustments pushed by other government agencies.

In January 2003, the office was merged into the Department of Homeland Security and the White House Homeland Security Council, both of which were created by the Homeland Security Act of 2002. The Homeland Security Council, similar in nature to the National Security Council, retains a policy coordination and advisory role and is led by the Assistant to the President for Homeland Security.

[edit] Creation of the Department of Homeland Security

The department was established on November 25, 2002, by the Homeland Security Act of 2002. After months of discussion about employee rights and benefits and "rider" portions of the bill, it was signed into law by U.S. President George W. Bush. It was intended to consolidate U.S. executive branch organizations related to "homeland security" into a single cabinet agency. Ridge was named secretary on January 24, 2003 and began naming his chief deputies. DHS officially began operations on January 24, 2003, but most of the department's component agencies were not transferred into the new Department until March 1.

It was the largest government reorganization in 50 years (since the United States Department of Defense was created).

After establishing the basic structure of DHS and working to integrate its components and get the department functioning, Ridge announced his resignation on November 30, 2004, following the re-election of President Bush. Bush initially nominated former NYPD commissioner Bernard Kerik as his successor, but on December 10, Kerik withdrew his nomination citing personal reasons and saying it "would not be in the best interests" of the country for him to pursue the post. On January 11, 2005, President Bush nominated federal judge Michael Chertoff to succeed Ridge. Chertoff was confirmed on February 15, 2005, by a vote of 98–0 in the U.S. Senate. He was sworn in the same day.

President George W. Bush signs the Homeland Security Appropriations Act of 2004.

Controversy about adoption centered on whether the FBI and the CIA should be incorporated in part or in whole (both were not). The bill itself was also controversial for the presence of unrelated riders, as well as eliminating some standard civil service and labor protections from employees of the department. President Bush wanted the right to fire an employee within Homeland Security immediately for security reasons, for incompetence, or insubordination. Then-Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle wanted an appeals process that could take up to 18 months or as little as one month. A federal court injunction has blocked many aspects of the new personnel system as they relate to employee pay and discipline. Plans to proceed with the performance management aspects of the system are continuing.

[edit] Organization

DHS Organizational Chart

Directorates

Under Secretary for Preparedness
- Chief Medical Officer
- Assistant Secretary for Cyber & Telecommunications
- Assistant Secretary for Grants & Training
- Assistant Secretary for Infrastructure Protection
- Administrator of the U.S. Fire Administration
- Director of the Office of National Capital Region Coordination
- Center for Faith-Based and Community Initiatives
Under Secretary for Science & Technology
Under Secretary for Management
- Chief Administrative Services Officer
- Chief Financial Officer
- Chief Human Capital Officer
- Chief Information Officer
- Chief Procurement Officer
- Chief Security Officer
Under Secretary for Federal Emergency Management/Federal Emergency Management Agency
- Deputy Director of FEMA
- General Counsel
- Director of Operations
  - Deputy Director of Operations
- Director of Response
- Director of Recovery
- Director of the Mitigation Division/Federal Insurance Administrator
- Director, Office of Equal Rights
- Chief Information Officer
- Director of Strategic Planning & Evaluation
- Deputy Director for Gulf Coast Recovery
- Regional Directors
Assistant Secretary for Policy
- Deputy Assistant Secretary, Office of Policy Development
- Assistant Secretary, Office of International Affairs
- Assistant Secretary, Office of the Private Sector
- Assistant Secretary, Office of Strategic Plans
- Director, Office of Immigration Statistics
- Special Advisor, Asylum & Refugee Affairs
Assistant Secretary, Office of Intelligence and Analysis/Chief Intelligence Officer - appears to be the head of what used to be the Information Analysis and Infrastructure Protection Directorate, formed on the creation of the Homeland Security Department to analyse intelligence pertaining to homeland security.
Director, Domestic Nuclear Detection Office
Director, Office of Operations Coordination
Director, Office of Counternarcotics Enforcement

Major Agencies

Assistant Secretary for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement
Assistant Secretary for the Transportation Security Administration
Commissioner of U.S. Customs and Border Protection
Director of the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services
Director of the United States Secret Service
Director of the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center
Commandant of the United States Coast Guard (in times of war the Coast Guard reverts to control of the Pentagon as a branch of the Navy)

As part of the reorganization within the department, on March 1, 2004 the National Incident Management System (NIMS) was created. The idea behind was to provide a consistent nationwide approach for Federal, State. local and tribal governments. Under Homeland Security Presidential Directive (HSPD)-5 all Federal departments were required to adopt the NIMS and to use it in their individual domestic incident management and emergency prevention, preparedness, response, recovery, and mitigation program and activities. A few months later in December 2004 the National Response Plan (NRP) was created, in an attempt to align Federal coordination structures, capabilities, and resources into a unified, all-discipline, and all-hazards approach to domestic incident management. The NRP was built on the template of the NIMS.

[edit] Headquarters

Since its inception, the Department has had its temporary headquarters in Washington, D.C.'s Nebraska Avenue Complex, a naval facility.[2] No permanent headquarters location has been chosen yet, though rumors have circulated that the Federal government will construct a new headquarters for the Department near the old General Hospital complex in Southeast Washington. [3]

[edit] Grants

DHS provides grants through a variety of programs to states, localities, first responders, and universities.

CREATE - Center for Risk and Economic Analysis of Terrorism Events - the first university center of excellence funded by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, is an interdisciplinary national research center based at the University of Southern California. The Center comprises a team of experts from across the country, including partnerships with New York University and the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

[edit] Ready.gov

Ready.gov program logo

Soon after the formation of Department of Homeland Security, the Martin Agency of Richmond, Virginia provided pro bono work to create "Ready.gov", a readiness website. The site and materials were conceived as early as March 2002 but were launched in February of 2003, just before the launch of the Iraq War [4] [5] [6]. One of the first announcements that garnered widespread public attention to this campaign was one by Tom Ridge in which he stated that in the case of a chemical attack, citizens should use duct tape and plastic sheeting to build a homemade bunker, or "sheltering in place" [7] [8] to protect themselves. As a result, the sales of duct tape skyrocketed and DHS received criticism that they were being too alarmist. [9] [10]

[edit] Criticism

See also: Hurricane Katrina

The Department of Homeland Security has been dogged by pesistent criticism over excessive bureaucracy, waste, and ineffectiveness. In 2003, the department came under fire after the media revealed that Laura Callahan, Deputy Chief Information Officer at DHS with responsibilities for sensitive national security databases, had in fact obtained her advanced computer science degrees through a diploma mill in a small town in Wyoming. The department was blamed for up to $2 billion of waste and fraud after audits by the Government Accountability Office revealed widespread misuse of government credit cards by DHS employees, with purchases including beer brewing kits, $70,000 of plastic dog booties that were later deemed unusable, boats purchased at double the retail price many of which later could not be found, and iPods ostensibly for use in "data storage". [11][12][13][14]

The department's initial response to Hurricane Katrina was castigated by its critics as inadequate, a charge later acknowledged by the Bush administration. Following the discovery by British authorities in August 2006 of a plot to destroy commercial airliners using liquid explosives, it was revealed that DHS had consistently failed to spend research and development money on new airport screening methods, and that funds for explosive detection equipment were re-routed by the Bush Administration to cover budget shortfalls elsewhere. In August 2006, a bipartisan group of Senators on the Appropriations Committee described the Sciences & Technology Directorate, the research arm of DHS, as a "rudderless ship without a clear way to get back on course".[15]

[edit] Trivia

According to a report published by the Department of Homeland Security, most cases of stolen identities are the result of password guessing.^{[citation needed]}

[edit] See also

[edit] References

Analysis. Analysis for the Homeland Security Act of 2002. Retrieved on 2006-04-06.
Media Resources. Department of Homeland Security Media Resources. Retrieved on 2006-04-06.

[edit] External links

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