How many congressional committees can dance on DHS?
A startling article buried in Government Executive shines a bright light on one of the major problems facing the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). It is just as if Gulliver was alive and struggling in Lilliput tied down by a thousand threads of swarming Lilliputians.
The DHS reportedly is subject to 86 congressional committees and subcommittees. Even the Department of Defense only has to answer to “36 congressional committees or subcommittees, with more than 80 percent of oversight falling to six of those.” The devastation in time and focus is appalling.
“Congress has protected its prerogatives and privileges at the expense of oversight,” said Rep. Mike Rogers, R-Ala., at a forum on Wednesday sponsored by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative Washington think tank. Since the start of the 110th Congress, Homeland Security officials have testified at 359 hearings and conducted 4,300 briefings for congressional committees — most for committees other than the House and Senate homeland security panels.
Imagine having 86 bosses! And that doesn’t include answering to the media and taxpayers — also constituents with a strong interest and a certain amount of control in the long run over DHS operations.
Besides threatening the mission of DHS these oversight excesses easily cost taxpayers millions of dollars when the time to produce these reports, prepare for the hearings and testifying are taken into consideration.
In 2007, Homeland Security was required to provide more than 530 reports to Congress. “Easily well over 100 reports annually require an average of more than 300 man hours to produce,” Chertoff wrote, with many others consuming “a bare minimum of 100 hours prior to transmittal.” And that doesn’t include the time spent responding to several hundred audits and investigations conducted by the Government Accountability Office since 2004.
It’s time Congress takes a look at their own operation and trims back some of the egos involved to allow DHS to spend more time keeping us safe rather than time on the hot seat testifying in front of Congressional committees.
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