Budget Tangles

The Homeland Security Department is in an enviable financial position. While most departments have little, if any, more money to work with this year than they did last, Homeland Security has an additional $1.9 billion to spend on discretionary programs, a 7 percent increase over the $27.2 billion it received in fiscal 2004. And if Congress approves the $41.1 billion fiscal 2006 DHS budget unveiled by President Bush in early February, the growth will continue.

Skeptics contend that DHS is struggling to get by. When the budget request was released, Sen. Joseph Lieberman, D-Conn., said, "The Coast Guard is being stretched to do ever more for our homeland defense at a time when its fleet is virtually crumbling into the ocean." But the Coast Guard would get a 2006 increase of more than 9 percent in the Bush budget. At an oversight hearing in late January, Lieberman argued that Homeland Security also needs more money to secure the nation's borders, ports and rail systems and to prepare for a potential biological attack. But at the same hearing in late January, Sen. Ted Stevens, R-Alaska, signaled he would welcome more restraint: "I would urge you to review your situation from the point of view of how we can get the job done better with the money that's there now."

There's little way to know whether the department could do more with existing levels of funding, as Stevens suggested, or whether it needs additional resources. Homeland Security has yet to complete the comprehensive risk assessment necessary to focus its resources where they are most needed. Indeed, the Government Accountability Office flagged the problem in its 2005 list of "high-risk" federal management challenges. What's more, where threats have been identified, the department isn't measuring the extent to which they have been mitigated.

In pursuit of greater efficiency, DHS officials recently proposed consolidating programs to screen cargo, airport workers, truckers, port employees, foreign visitors and immigrants into one office within the Transportation Security directorate. The plan-detailed in the department's 2006 budget request-would bring eight programs (many of them currently administered by the Transportation Security Administration) under one roof.

The 2006 budget also proposes to create an office of policy, planning and international affairs, headed by either an undersecretary or assistant secretary. Washington think tanks the Heritage Foundation and the Center for Strategic and International Studies have said such a change as vital if the department is to set long-term priorities.

DHS also must make sure that once priorities are set, money gets to the right place. Administrative tangles already have caused misallocation of funds. When the Immigration and Naturalization Service and the Customs Service were morphed into Homeland Security's bureaus of Customs and Border Protection, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and the Citizenship and Immigration Services directorate, chunks of money were misplaced. The mix-up left ICE short by millions of dollars in fiscal 2004. Limited resources forced ICE's Detention and Removal Operations to release illegal immigrants detained for minor criminal offenses.

ICE recovered $500 million it was owed for fiscal 2004, but its budget problems are far from solved. A recent review by consulting firm Grant Thornton pro-jects a shortfall of a "couple hundred million" this year, says Andrew Maner, DHS chief financial officer. He's working to recover that money.

Meanwhile, ICE remains under a hiring freeze and has significantly curtailed training, placing classes at the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center on hold for all divisions except the Federal Air Marshal Service and the Federal Protective Service. Mission-critical training continues at field offices and via a satellite TV network.