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Homeland security has 1 of 12 federal employees { August 25 2003 } Original Source Link: (May no longer be active)
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DHS has 1 in 12 federal employees
Monday, August 25, 2003
By Ann McFeatters, Post-Gazette National Bureau
WASHINGTON -- The six-month-old Department of Homeland Security has 40 percent of its 160,000 employees working as "watchers" at airports at average salaries of $29,000 but also pays 324 funeral directors, 128 pharmacists, 55 general anthropologists, 41 fingerprint specialists and 30 chaplains.
In the first public examination of the makeup of the new department, which constituted the largest reorganization of government since World War II, a research group at Syracuse University found that the fledgling bureaucracy already has at least one full-time employee in one of every five of the nation's 3,146 counties.
The Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC), a data gathering, data research and data distribution project at Syracuse, said that DHS, one of 15 Cabinet-level departments, now employs one of every 12 workers in the federal government.
Most of the employees have come from other government agencies merged into the new department. The Bush administration was adamant that the new department not dramatically increase the size of government and merged employees from Customs Service, Immigration and Naturalization Service, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the U.S. Coast Guard and the New Transportation Security Administration. Nonetheless, since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the federal government employs 4.5 percent more civilian employees, including 69,266 new airport security personnel.
The flow chart of the new department is monstrous, but TRAC claims that basically, despite name changes, most of the reorganization is "modest or non-existent.'' Many departments simply transferred en masse to be put under the DHS umbrella.
For example, the DHS annual budget is $36 billion, but only $24 billion was earmarked for homeland security with the rest going to agencies such as Customs to carry out their traditional responsibilities, according to the TRAC study. That accounts, for example, for why the department has 324 funeral directors, who have been hired by the government for years for disaster relief.
Under DHS, the five sub-groups are border and transportation security, emergency preparedness and response, science and technology, information analysis, and infrastructure protection and management.
But the biggest job of the department, by far, is airport screening.
While the new department officially has 300 occupational specialties, eight out of 10 fall under eight occupations and those are all what are called watchers or investigators, including 8,997 criminal investigators and 641 intelligence officers. Almost all the watchers, also known as airport screeners, are at 430 locations, leaving the other half of DHS watchers "with a great deal of ground to cover,'' according to TRAC.
Even though there have been new concerns about terrorists coming into the United States from Canada, 7,815 border guards are located between the United States and Mexico and only 515 along the border with Canada, the TRAC report states.
Only 8.6 percent of DHS employees work in Washington, D.C.
Salaries at DHS range from $135,994 for administrative law judges and $68,673 for criminal investigators to $29,195 for technicians who ask passengers to remove their shoes and who examine carry-on luggage at airports.
Democrats in Congress, most notably Sen. Robert Byrd, D-W.Va., have continued to criticize the new department because they contend whistle blowers are not protected and much of the department's information is exempted from the Freedom of Information Act. Jurisdiction over the department by various committees also remains a problem, they say.
Two other new studies on homeland security, done by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Association of School Resource Officers, say the nation is still unprepared to respond to another 9/11-type of attack.
But the Bush administration says that in Homeland Security's most recent test, the blackout that engulfed the Northeast and Midwest, the department mobilized swiftly and with few hitches and determined within 45 minutes there was no terrorist threat.
Political scientists say they are not surprised by how the bureaucracy and development of the new department has evolved so far but that because it is a new infrastructure building on old ones, they will be fascinated for years by how it changes in response to a threat of terrorism not likely to disappear.
Copyright ©1997-2002 PG Publishing Co., Inc. All Rights Reserved.
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