At the end of its first year, a contract to help DHS recruit border patrol agents has processed just two accepted job offers and the contractor is “nowhere near” satisfying its 7,500-person hiring goal over the next five years, a management alert IG report has said.
The contract was part of the agency’s effort to reach administration goals to increase staffing in the face of long-standing difficulties in recruiting through its own processes. Start-up costs in the first year were nearly $14 million and there are four option years potentially bringing the total worth to nearly $300 million.
However, the report said even with the limited results so far, the contractor ended up relying heavily on the CBP’s resources and the agency agreed to credit the contractor with a small number of additional hires that the CBP itself processed.
The NTEU union said the money “would have been better spent to pay the salaries of as many new office of field operations employees – recruited and processed by DHS’s and CBP’s existing personnel – as possible, as well as for recruitment, relocation and retention and other incentives.” Rep. Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., ranking member of the House Homeland Security Committee, expressed similar thoughts.
In a separate report, the IG said that the DHS capability to train new law enforcement officers “is already overextended” and that achieving the planned growth in officers “may impede consistency and lead to a degradation in training and standards. As a result, trainees will be less prepared for their assigned field environment, potentially impeding mission achievability and increasing safety risk to themselves, other law enforcement officers, and anyone within their enforcement authority.”
