A Senate committee has approved HR-4567, already passed by the House, to have DHS reassess its overseas operations in light of a 2017 GAO report saying that the department cannot accurately measure their effectiveness because it lacks performance measures and baselines.
The bill would require DHS to craft a “comprehensive multi-year strategy” and report to Congress on any “barriers impeding information sharing and collaboration across DHS components and stakeholder entities to advance its counterterrorism mission,” according to a report from the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee.
The report notes that DHS has some 2,000 employees assigned overseas, about half of them from CBP and the remainder from other DHS components including ICE and TSA. Those employees are there to “interdict potential security threats at the earliest possible point” and are “responsible for sharing information with foreign and domestic partners, and establishing partnerships with foreign allies to prevent the spread of terrorist and other criminal activity to the homeland.”
“While DHS’s overseas functions are critical to achieving its counterterrorism mission and protecting the homeland, questions have been raised about the effectiveness of the programs and the activities supported by the deployment and use of personnel stationed abroad,” it says, citing the GAO report.
While DHS agreed with the report’s findings and formed a working group, without appropriate measures of performance it “cannot assess whether pre-departure programs are achieving their intended goals,” it said.
