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Thursday, March 6, 2008; A01

DHS Strains As Goals, Mandates Go

Unmet
By Spencer S. Hsu
Washington Post Staff Writer

Stumping for President Bush's ill-fated

immigration overhaul in 2006, Homeland
Security Secretary Michael Chertoff vowed
that his department would wrest "operational
control" of the nation's borders away from
human and drug traffickers within five years.
That projection was based on the prospect of
tough new enforcement measures as well as a
temporary-worker program meant to stanch
the flow of illegal immigrants, including the
most ambitious use of surveillance technology
ever tried on the U.S.-Mexico border.
Two years later, the legislative overhaul has Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff
been shelved, development of the "virtual defends slowing some of the department's programs
fence" has been delayed, and its designers are
going back to the drawing board. Completion of its first phase has been put off until
as late as 2011, congressional investigators say. The possibility of this outcome was
flagged early on by internal and external watchdogs, who warned of unrealistically
tight deadlines, vague direction to contractors, harsh operating conditions and tough
requirements of Border Patrol end-users.
The virtual fence is not the first major contractor-led technology effort to be
ineffective, incomplete or too expensive to sustain since the Department of
Homeland Security was formed five years ago this month. Former officials, private-
sector partners and independent analysts say the evolving 208,000-worker, $38
billion agency remains hindered by a crisis-of-the-moment environment, in which the
rush to fulfill each new mandate or meet every threat undermines its ability to hold a
strategic course and deliver promised results.
Among a slew of high-profile projects that have gone astray, DHS has struggled to
field next-generation explosive-detection "puffer devices" at airports and has
projected it could take $22 billion and 16 more years to deploy advanced baggage-
screening systems in airports.
It scaled back and indefinitely delayed the "exit" half of a $10 billion, biometric
entry-exit system to track foreign visitors using digital fingerprints and photographs,
citing technological and cost problems. Homeland Security also faces a congressional
mandate after the Dubai Ports World controversy to scan 100 percent of U.S.-bound
shipping containers overseas, while scientific and logistical problems have hampered
a $1.2 billion effort to field highly effective nuclear detection devices.
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To be sure, the department's managers in its first half-decade have labored hard to
oversee 22 rivalrous components. They have improved aviation security and forged a
more unified strategy for improving border security and using intelligence.
DHS spokesman Russ Knocke noted that Chertoff this week requested a
comprehensive review of airport screening policies to increase efficiency and
eliminate outdated steps, and that the department has begun tracking exiting
visitors at airports and expects more progress soon at land borders. DHS also moved
faster than required to launch experimental scanning efforts at several overseas
ports.
Still, the ever-growing list of troubled programs
illustrates the extent to which each new crisis -- from
the 2001 terrorist attacks to Hurricane Katrina to the
Dubai ports scare to the Bush administration's push for
comprehensive immigration policy revisions -- has
forced DHS leaders to launch costly initiatives with
broadly defined goals that wind up missing their
targets.
"You felt the pressures. You see the threats. You see
the political needs and you think, 'We need to make
sure it's the best we can do to solve this problem as
soon as we can.' And that's a constant problem with the
department," said C. Stewart Verdery Jr., assistant
secretary of policy for border and transportation
security from 2003 to 2005, who now is a private
consultant.
If the Pentagon is the bureaucratic equivalent of
Washington's biggest, hardest-to-turn battleship, "DHS
is like a speedboat and it keeps turning . . . constantly
shifting gears," Verdery said. "If you told people five
years ago there was going to be a billion dollars for a
fence, people would have laughed at you."
Department veterans complain that its contract-
management system is weak, and that it still has
trouble working with experts both inside and outside
government to set rigorous, enforceable requirements
on contractors.
"You have management issues, political pressure, the
complexity of what is arguably a very tough thing to do,
all within an unreasonable deadline and it's kind of the
old adage -- we can hurry up and do it fast, or we can
take a little bit longer and do it right," said George W.
Foresman, DHS assistant secretary for preparedness
from 2005 to 2007. "External pressures on DHS made
this a hurry-up-and-do-it-fast."
Chertoff disputed congressional investigators' findings
based on DHS work schedules indicating that
completion of the first phase of the virtual fence may
be delayed up to three years, including a planned
expansion of the tower system to another stretch in
Arizona -- 37 miles near Yuma -- and a span near El
Paso.
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Instead, he said that technical problems discovered in a 28-mile pilot project south of
Tucson caused only a half-year delay, produced "functionally workable" tools that are
helping agents now, and are only a small part of a broad deployment of other ground,
aerial and mobile sensors.
But contractor Boeing Corp., which received about $18 million for its work, is being
paid an additional $60 million to replace the program's key component and original
goal, better software to link sensors and users. Boeing will also test and integrate
equipment in laboratories instead of the field and will work more closely with Border
Patrol agents, DHS and company officials said.
When DHS announced the fence contract in September 2006 and called for an
operational pilot by June 2007, Chertoff said that "we're not interested in performing
science experiments on the border," and he emphasized the need for proven
technology. "A common complaint about government is there's a lot of lofty rhetoric,
but there's no metrics, there's no holding to deadlines, and the achievement always
falls short of what the original proposal is. Well, we're very mindful of that," he said.
In May 2006, however, then-Rep. Martin O. Sabo (Minn.), ranking Democrat on the
House Appropriations homeland security subcommittee, had warned Chertoff in a
letter that DHS's contract solicitation did not set a price tag for providing up to "6,000
miles of secure U.S. border" and failed to define its measure of success for controlling
the border -- a benchmark for which DHS acknowledges it still has no wholly
satisfactory definition.
"The only conclusion I can reach is that the SBINET solicitation is a public relations
document," Sabo said in his letter. "It provides the Administration with the cover to
say that you are doing something to secure the borders."
DHS and its precursors had already been stung by two earlier U.S. border
surveillance programs, spending $429 million between 1998 and 2005 and reaping a
warning system triggered by insects, horses and weather, DHS's inspector general
reported in December 2005. Border Patrol agents eventually ignored 60 percent of
the sensor alerts, while 90 percent of the rest were false alarms and only 1 percent
led to arrests.
Sen. Judd Gregg (R-N.H.), a former chairman of the Senate Appropriations homeland
security subcommittee, this week called the pilot fence -- known as Project 28 -- a
good-news, bad-news story: It did not work as expected, he said, but its cost was
curbed by DHS leaders. Funding a virtual fence was politically necessary for Bush's
immigration overhaul to advance, Gregg said, but "I think everyone presumed that
once we funded it, it would work." He added: "I don't know where we go from here."
DHS officials are scheduled to testify before the House spending panel today about
whether the agency's December 2006 projection that it could secure the border by
2011 with technology, physical fencing and vehicle barriers for $7.6 billion will
change. Rep. Hal Rogers (R-Ky.), former chairman and now the panel's ranking
minority member, called "delays and excuses within the Secure Border Initiative . . .
unacceptable. We need to know when it will work, how much it will cost and what we
are paying for."
Michael P. Jackson, deputy secretary from 2005 until October 2007, said Americans
must learn to allow DHS to balance risks against resources, whether in controlling the
border, securing inbound sea cargo or tightening airport security.
"People keep demanding with each new homeland security challenge, 'Fix this today,'
" Jackson said. "DHS is not funded to address every one, there's not time to do every
one, and some of the increased effort needed to eliminate all risk for a given problem
ends up . . . wasting time, focus and dollars."
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Staff researcher Madonna Lebling contributed to this report