DHS’s plans to fix problems with its hiring and training for the acquisition workforce might not work

The Homeland Security Department has wrestled with recruiting and retaining acquisition personnel to help service its 22 component agencies since its inception, but a new report noted that while department officials have taken steps to mitigate swelling workloads and trim hiring timelines, those strategies may not be best aligned to their intended goals. 

The Government Accountability Office said in the new report Thursday that while DHS officials have made progress on addressing acquisition oversight concerns that had previously landed it on the watchdog’s High Risk List in 2011, later removed in 2023, interviews with 55 acquisition program managers, contracting officers and contracting officer’s representatives showed that increasing workloads continue to dog the department. 

The program managers, COs and CORs surveyed — who represent U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the Transportation Security Administration, U.S. Customs and Border Protection and the Coast Guard — told the GAO that they often fill multiple roles simultaneously because either a lack of acquisition staff or adequate training. 

Of the 41 personnel that cited workloads as a moderate, great or very great challenge within their agency, 21 said that a more than reasonable overload of tasks was one of the top effects, followed by the need to balance additional responsibilities across multiple programs, with 16 respondents.  

Acquisition officials also said that the length of time to hire new talent remained a challenge for them, with 12 program managers placing it between workload and resource allocation difficulties. 

“For example, several acquisition program managers told us that they can lose numerous potential hires because applicants could not wait for the hiring process; the applicants accepted other offers before the component processed their applications,” the report said. “Most acquisition program managers also mentioned the security clearance process as contributing to long hiring time frames.”

GAO noted that one program manager told it that it could take six months for a new candidate with no clearances to start a new position, which has led to staffing shortages and increasing workloads as a result. 

The department’s Office of Program Accountability and Risk Management — which oversees acquisition program management policy, procedures and guidance processes and tracks acquisition staffing — said in a separate report the hiring process ranged from three to 18 months to complete, with resulting challenges contributing “significant risks to programs.”

The DHS Office of the Chief Procurement Officer and PARM officials have deployed several strategies to help mitigate those challenges, such as programs rotating acquisition professionals across component agencies, detailing them to other assignments to provide development opportunities or address staffing shortages, mentoring and shadowing programs and other efforts. 

The report said that while some acquisition staff found those efforts helpful, especially for career development, others worried that the strategies exacerbated the workforce problems, while some weren’t aware they existed. 

“Based on our analysis, DHS’s mitigation strategies are not well aligned to the challenges facing the acquisition workforce,” GAO said. Our review of the goals of the mitigation efforts that OCPO identified as addressing challenges found that most are professional development programs intended to provide staff with knowledge and skills. These efforts are not clearly aligned with the workforce challenges DHS acquisition staff we spoke with identified as considerable, such as workload or the length of the hiring process.”

The report also pointed out that while DHS collects “various acquisition workforce-related data,” its efforts do not provide it with a comprehensive enough view to help inform its decision-making, including “the size or demographics (e.g., gender, race, ethnicity) of its acquisition workforce.”

“Finally, while DHS officials told us they have begun to improve the accuracy of their acquisition workforce data, DHS has not developed a methodology that would enable the department to identify the individuals that are part of each of its 11 acquisition disciplines,” the report said. “Additionally, DHS has not completed actions to ensure it has accurate, comprehensive data on these personnel to inform its decision-making.”

GAO offered four recommendations, including that DHS assess whether its mitigation strategies are best aligned with its acquisition workforce challenges, that the PARM continue to refine its staffing model and identify what additional data may be needed to help inform it, that it develop a methodology for identifying information about the personnel supporting the 11 DHS-defined acquisition disciplines and that it identifies methods to ensure comprehensive data across those disciplines. 

DHS officials disagreed with the first, third and fourth recommendations, taking issue with GAO’s methodology used to identify the challenges. Officials also pointed to its acquisition certification program, Cornerstone On Demand, as its methodology for identifying the personnel supporting the acquisition disciplines. 

However, GAO noted that the Cornerstone program is a certification and training information data source and “not a methodology for identifying staff that are currently serving in an acquisition discipline.” The watchdog also noted that the current method for identifying the acquisition workforce “may not account for all staff performing acquisition duties.”

DHS also disagreed that it did not have sufficient data to inform its decision-making, adding that it could use resources like data from the Office of the Chief Human Capital Officer and the Office of Personnel Management’s FEDSCOPE to track retention, attrition and diversity metrics. 

GAO noted, however, that the OCHCO can’t provide DHS acquisition workforce demographic data “because of limitations with job series information for acquisition positions” and that the data sources don’t detail acquisition staff outside of the 1102 job series, which covers occupations like contract specialist and contracting officer.  

DHS officials concurred with the second recommendation and outlined steps it planned to take to implement it.