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An advisory council to the Homeland Security Department issued recommendations Thursday aimed at ensuring homeland security operations and programs are not compromised during the transition to a new presidential administration later this year, including a list of actions Congress should take.

"There will be a change of administration no matter which political party prevails," said William Webster, chairman of the Homeland Security Advisory Council and former CIA director. "This will be the first time that DHS has been required to meet the challenges of a presidential transition," a report from the council's administration transition task force said.

"Due to the critical nature of its mission ... it is important that DHS take action now to ensure a seamless and agile transition to new leadership and optimization of the new leadership's ability to assume operational control of the department."

Glenda Hood, who chaired the task force, noted that terrorist attacks occurred around governmental transitions in Spain in 2004 and in the United Kingdom last summer. She said the task force believes the most vulnerable time for the United States is 30 days before the upcoming presidential change and 60 days after the transition. Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said his leadership team will examine the report and its recommendations.

The report makes recommendations in the areas of threat awareness, leadership, congressional oversight, policy, operations, succession and training. On congressional oversight, the report recommended that the Senate form a select bipartisan group from existing oversight committees to expedite confirmation of all presidential appointments to national security positions in the Homeland Security Department.

The report also said Congress should implement an unfulfilled recommendation by the 9/11 Commission to consolidate congressional oversight of the department. Homeland Security officials say they now report to 86 different House and Senate committees and subcommittees. Chertoff told the council Thursday that one of the biggest problems with congressional oversight is that different committees have competing agendas. "We get a lot of conflicting congressional direction as opposed to consistent congressional direction," he said. The report also recommends that Congress pass the department's fiscal 2009 appropriations bill "much sooner" than it did the fiscal 2008 bill, which was rolled into an omnibus spending bill that was enacted only a few weeks ago.

"Congress should also review the department's fiscal 2008 budget to ensure sufficient resources are available and allocated for transition activities," the report added. "This must include pre-election and post-election transition crisis management exercises."

The report adds that Congress should work with the current and incoming administrations to reduce the number of senior positions at the department filled by presidential appointees.

COMMENTS

• Anyone with an ounce of awareness has seen how many people withhold their names when they post here. That in itself is indicative of the fact that they fear retaliation for their thoughts. In a presidential transition, the highest ranking non-appointee personnel will take over, they'll get bigger heads than they already have, and us peons will just hunker down like we already do and do as we're told. Then we'll come on GovExec and complain about it. Seriously, until the cronyism, elitist attitudes, and paranoid-reactionist theories (use of fear to control the masses) at the top are nipped in the bud, DHS will never change -- regardless of Presidential presence. Withheld Posted February 2, 2008 8:54 AM
• DHS management should be held accountable, but that can be done without having to spend most of their time testifying before multiple Congressional committees with overlapping jurisdictions over DHS, who repeatedly ask the same questions over and over again, in order to make a splash in the press and show the constituents back home what a great job they're doing! Nobody is saying that DHS management should be exempt from oversight, but they should be able to actually manage this agency, and try to fix it's many problems, instead of spending an inordinate amount of time before Congress. Bob Posted January 15, 2008 11:51 AM
• Dear No Boby, seeing how they have yet to prove they can prevent bombs and guns coming on board they need to be micro managed. All I have ever seen any screener do is aleniate the public dan ketter Posted January 11, 2008 4:05 PM