Reducing the Cost and Risk of Major Acquisitions at the Department of Homeland Security.

摘要

Formed a decade ago, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is a young organization that is still developing methods for integrating management functions and coordinating policies across its many component agencies and offices. This management challenge is compounded by many factors, such as the diversity and maturity of the established policies and procedures that individual components had before joining DHS; the relatively small DHS headquarters staff; a heavy reliance on contractors, who account for half of the DHS workforce; and an overabundance of oversight committees in Congress that results in conflicting guidance to DHS and its components, thereby weakening headquarter's efforts to assert management or oversight responsibilities. The result is that it is difficult to enact and enforce policies at DHS that are not supported by the leadership of each component. These challenges conspire to undermine efforts by DHS headquarters to improve acquisition practices and management controls over the many major acquisition programs under way across the department. Major acquisitions at DHS are defined as those with life-cycle costs above $300 million, though more than half of such programs (43 of 77 in 2011) have expected life-cycle costs over $1 billion. The result has been unacceptably high numbers of major acquisitions being canceled, taking too long, costing much more than planned, or delivering less-useful capabilities than originally proposed. The objective of this paper is to articulate this challenge, identify the sources of key problems, and suggest ways that DHS can mitigate those problems and improve the performance of its acquisition process. The paper is intended to help improve DHS acquisition management and oversight by providing a common problem definition, conceptual framework, and recommendations that DHS headquarters and component acquisition officials, as well as Congress, can use to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of DHS acquisitions.