The Government Accountability Office (GAO) has written to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to outline 42 open recommendations that the watchdog says it should prioritize.
The recommendations relate to emergency preparedness, border and transportation security, infrastructure, cybersecurity and IT, chemical security, countering violent extremism, and domestic intelligence and information sharing. Ten of these are additional priority recommendations for DHS, identified by GAO in June 2023.
Some of the recommendations date back several years, such as the 2012 call for the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of the process for disaster declarations. GAO recommended that FEMA “develop and implement a methodology that provides a more comprehensive assessment of a jurisdiction’s capability to respond to and recover from a disaster without federal assistance”, with which the agency concurred. FEMA proposed updating the estimated cost of assistance via the federal rulemaking process. However, as of March 2023, GAO found the agency has not issued a final rule updating the estimated cost of assistance nor does it intend to take additional actions to implement the recommendation.
GAO said DHS has however implemented 14 priority recommendations over the past year, leading to improvements in National Flood Insurance Program management, disaster recovery response, noncitizen processing at the southwest border, U.S. Coast Guard asset management, biometrics, cybersecurity and IT management, among other areas.
For example, following GAO’s recommendation, DHS’s Office of Biometric Identity Management established a process to help ensure bidirectional traceability of requirements for the Homeland Advanced Recognition Technology program. As of January 2023, the office had demonstrated that it had implemented this process and was maintaining improved traceability between higher-level and lower-level system requirements.
