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Since 2017, DHS has continued to make progress in meeting its Digital Accountability and Transparency Act of 2014 (DATA Act) reporting requirements, but challenges remain.  To enable more effective tracking of Federal spending, DHS must continue to take action to accurately align its budgetary data with the President’s budget, reduce award misalignments across DATA Act files, improve the timeliness of financial assistance reporting, implement and use government-wide data standards, and address risks to data quality.  Without these actions, DHS will continue to experience challenges in meeting its goal of achieving the highest possible data quality for submission to USAspending.gov.  We made five recommendations to help strengthen DHS’ controls for ensuring complete, accurate, and timely spending data.  The Department concurred with all five recommendations. 

The DHS Chief Information Officer (CIO) and most component CIOs had conducted strategic planning efforts to help prioritize legacy Information Technology (IT) systems and infrastructure to better accomplish mission goals.  However, due to a lack of standard guidance and funding, not all components have complied with or fully embraced Department-wide IT modernization initiatives to adopt cloud-based computing, and to consolidate data centers.  Meanwhile, DHS continues to rely on deficient and outdated IT systems to perform mission-critical operations.  Additionally, DHS has not yet leveraged the Modernizing Government Technology Act mandate to accelerate ongoing IT modernization efforts, as DHS and its components questioned whether the benefits of the Act outweighed the additional effort needed to use the resources provided under the Act.  Until DHS addresses these issues, it will continue to face significant challenges to accomplish mission operations efficiently and effectively.  We made three recommendations for the DHS OCIO to develop guidance for implementing cloud technology and migrating legacy IT systems to the cloud, coordinate with components to develop and finalize a data center migration approach, and establish a process to assign risk ratings for major legacy IT investments.  The Department concurred with all three recommendations.

DHS generally met deadlines for responding to simple Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests, it did not do so for most complex requests.  A significant increase in requests received, coupled with resource constraints, limited DHS’ ability to meet production timelines under FOIA, creating a litigation risk for the Department.  Additionally, DHS has not always fully documented its search efforts, making it difficult for the Department to defend the reasonableness of the searches undertaken.  With respect to responding to congressional requests, we determined DHS has established a timeliness goal of 15 business days or less; however, on average, it took DHS nearly twice as long to provide substantive responses to Congress, with some requests going unanswered for up to 450 business days.  Further, DHS redacted personal information in its responses to congressional committee chairs even when disclosure of the information was statutorily permissible.  This was a descriptive report and contained no recommendations.  In its response, DHS acknowledged FOIA backlogs remain a problem, despite increasing requests processed.  DHS stated its process responding to congressional requests varies greatly and that its redactions are appropriate.

According to the Securing Our Agriculture and Food Act (SAFA), the program should provide oversight, lead policy initiatives, and coordinate with DHS components and Federal agencies.  However, the Countering Weapons of Mass Destruction Office (CWMD) has not yet carried out a program to meet SAFA’s requirements.  This occurred because CWMD believes it does not have clearly defined authority from the Secretary to carry out the requirements of the SAFA.  In addition, since its establishment in December 2017, CWMD has not prioritized SAFA requirements but instead has focused its resources on other mission areas.  As a result, CWMD has limited awareness of DHS’ ongoing efforts and cannot ensure it is adequately prepared to respond to a terrorist attack against the Nation’s food, agriculture, or veterinary systems.  We made three recommendations to DHS’ CWMD to improve oversight, policy initiatives, and coordination of the Department’s efforts to protect the Nation’s food, agriculture, and veterinary systems. 

DHS’ capability to counter illicit Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) activity remains limited.  The Office of Strategy, Policy, and Plans did not execute a uniform department-wide approach, which prevented components authorized to conduct counter-UAS operations from expanding their capabilities.  This occurred because the Office of Policy did not obtain funding as directed by the Secretary to expand DHS’ counter-UAS capability.  We made four recommendations to improve the Department’s management and implementation of counter-UAS activities.  The Office of Strategy, Policy, and Plans concurred with all four of our recommendations.      

Two years since enactment, DHS and its components have mostly complied with SAVE Act requirements.  The SAVE Act requires the Office of the Chief Readiness Support Officer (OCRSO), as delegated by DHS, to collect and review components’ vehicle use data, including their analyses of the data and plans for achieving the right types and sizes of vehicles to meet mission needs.  Most components developed their plans as required.  However, only two of the 12 components we reviewed fully met requirements to analyze and document vehicle use and cost data to help them achieve the right type and size of fleet vehicles to meet their missions.  This occurred because DHS did not require components to include data analyses in their OCRSO-reviewed submissions, as mandated by the SAVE Act.  Had ORSCO thoroughly evaluated component submissions, it would have identified that components did not fully comply with SAVE Act requirements.  DHS concurred with all four recommendations that, when implemented, should improve the Department’s oversight over its vehicle fleets.