Homeland security

A new mission for Homeland Security: managing risk

The DHS isn’t doing its job because it doesn’t know what its job is. Rather than combating terrorism, the department should refocus its mission around combating risks of all kinds.

The Department of Homeland Security is still searching for a coherent mission after it was created as a mishmash of 22 disparate agencies in the rush to respond to the Sept. 11 attacks. Congress and the president created the department with the explicit mission of preventing terrorism, but they included unrelated agencies that needed a home, while other important terrorism- or disaster-related agencies were left out.

Today, the department’s management spends much of its precious time responding to the headline of the day across multiple missions of protecting the border, preparing for natural disasters, and managing airport screeners. Its frontline employees don’t fare any better -- the agency routinely tops the list of worst places to work in government. Fortunately, the department can do better. Public administration scholars have found that one of the best ways to improve job satisfaction is to make missions and goals more clear and less ambiguous.