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Homeland Security Gaps

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Department of Homeland Security: Gaps and Fixes The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) had a colorful 14-year history. Many will say that the DHS has created a hulking bureaucracy and has placed or lumped together a great deal of departments that do not have any related functions. DHS currently suffers from a great deal of structural issues, but the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the Transportation Safety Administration, and the Immigration and Customs Enforcement are in dire need of Presidential attention. Federal Emergency Management Agency Division of Responsibility First, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) is another conglomeration of several different agencies and organizations. There is a trend that started in …show more content…

More and more authorities continue to be taken away and have been spread across many agencies within DHS. “FEMA no longer manages a comprehensive emergency management program of mitigation, preparedness, response and recovery and the agency function that President Carter and the Governors envisioned in 1979 no longer exists” (FEMA, 2013). The sole focus has turned to terrorism disaster preparedness and FEMA has become somewhat dismantled and lost its ability to provide the command and control that it had prior to the move to DHS. This will prove to be a major flaw and will again, show the failure of FEMA in the next occurrence of natural disaster the United States faces. There are other agencies within the DHS that need to be scrutinized as …show more content…

The TSA suffers from the very same issues that have plagued the Veterans Administration for years, the problem is government employees. Once someone becomes a government employee and they have served beyond the probation period, trying to remove them it is like treating terminal cancer; you can try to treat it, but it will not go away. Replace senior federal leadership with professionals that have not been part of the problem from the start. “Employees know they work for “the government” and know their employment is guaranteed for life; with a few rare exceptions. They also know that the people who they provide services to are not who they work for” (Satterfield, 2015). This includes leadership as well, everyone within the federal government, that is a government employee, knows that it takes a great deal for an individual to be removed from government service. Ineffective leadership should not be tolerated within the TSA, but then again, it should not be tolerated with any organization. The FEMA and TSA are not the only DHS agency that must be restructured, there are others that come to

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