Federal Protective Service: Progress Made but Improved Schedule and Cost Estimate Needed to Complete Transition
Released: 2011-08-15T00:00:00

Letter

Background

FPS was established in 1971 as the uniformed protection force of GSA government-occupied facilities. The mission of FPS is to render federal properties safe and secure for federal employees, officials, and visitors in a professional and cost-effective manner by deploying a highly trained and multi-disciplined police force. FPS was originally located within GSA’s Public Buildings Service (PBS). As part of PBS, FPS was responsible for providing law enforcement and security services to GSA’s tenants and the public at federal buildings nationwide.

The Homeland Security Act of 2002 established DHS to prevent and mitigate the damage from terrorist attacks within the United States, which includes terrorism directed at federal facilities. Under the act, FPS was transferred from the GSA to DHS. DHS later placed it within ICE. The President’s fiscal year 2010 budget requested the transfer of FPS from ICE to NPPD. Language in the budget request stated that FPS responsibilities, such as providing physical security and policing of federal buildings, establishing building security policy, and ensuring compliance, are outside the scope of ICE’s immigration and customs enforcement mission and are better aligned with NPPD’s mission. The transfer of FPS to NPPD became effective when the fiscal year 2010 DHS appropriations act was signed into law on October 28, 2009. Figure 1 shows FPS’s move within DHS from ICE to NPPD.

To accomplish its mission, in 2011 FPS has a total budget authority of about $1 billion, currently employs 1,225 federal staff, and about 13,000 contract guard staff to secure over 9,000 GSA owned or leased facilities. FPS conducts law enforcement activities as well as risk assessments to reduce facility vulnerability to criminal and terrorist threats and helps to ensure that facilities are secure and occupants are safe.

For the transition, FPS, NPPD, ICE, and DHS headquarters components formed a Senior Working Group, co-chaired by the Senior Counselor to the Under Secretary of NPPD, the ICE Deputy Assistant Secretary for Management, and the FPS Director. DHS developed a transition plan, the August 2009 FPS-NPPD Transition Plan, which describes DHS’s overall transition planning process and milestones for completing the transition, among other things. The plan shifted FPS’s mission and responsibility for all of its mission-support functions, with the exception of financial accounting services and firearms and tactical training, from ICE to NPPD or other DHS components. While FPS has its own law enforcement personnel to perform its mission responsibilities, it does not perform all of its mission-support functions such as payroll, travel services, and contracting. For this reason, FPS has traditionally relied on GSA and ICE to carry out these functions. For example, while under GSA, FPS’s contracting functions were handled by the contracting component of GSA’s Public Buildings Service, and under ICE, by its Office of Acquisition.

The transition plan noted that most transition tasks would be completed by October 2010. In addition, the transition plan noted staff-level working groups were formed that consisted of subject matter experts from each of the agencies, FPS, NPPD, and ICE, to plan in detail the transfer of FPS’s mission and each mission-support function. The working groups were tasked with planning, tracking issues related to the FPS transition, and reporting progress on the transition. Initially, 16 working groups were formed to carry out the transition in 18 mission-support functions, as reflected in figure 2.

According to the transition plan, until the transition is complete, ICE is to continue to provide necessary management and operational services through continued agreements in support of FPS or until individual MOAs, MOUs, or SLAs are concluded with NPPD and other DHS headquarters components. For example, for fiscal year 2010, FPS and NPPD signed 12 SLAs with ICE, covering services such as training and development, security management, and IT services, 1 MOA for legal services, and 1 MOU for financial services. These agreements were meant to ensure that there were no lapses in services while mission-support functions were being transferred to either NPPD or DHS headquarters components.

DHS Transferred FPS’s Mission and Most Support Functions to NPPD, but Could Benefit from a Revised Schedule and Cost Estimate for Transferring IT Services

FPS’s Facility Protection Mission Has Transferred to NPPD without Disruption

In October 2009, FPS’s facility protection mission transferred and its reporting channels were shifted from ICE to NPPD. The Under Secretary of NPPD—through delegation from the Secretary of Homeland Security— assumed operational control of FPS and its mission from ICE with the enactment of the fiscal year 2010 DHS appropriations act. Similarly, the Under Secretary delegated the authority and responsibility to the Director of FPS to continue FPS’s physical security and law enforcement services mission, consistent with the law enforcement authority for the protection of federal property. Upon its transition to NPPD, FPS became a component within the directorate. Figure 3 shows the location of FPS within NPPD’s organizational structure.

According to FPS headquarters and regional officials we interviewed, the transition of FPS’s mission from ICE to NPPD occurred without degradation to the mission, and there has been minimal, if any, disruption to FPS’s field operations. Moreover, the regional officials said that the transition has not had an impact on the way FPS performs its mission on a daily basis. FPS officials stated that FPS continued to lead DHS’s security and law enforcement services at more than 9,000 GSA facilities nationwide, and its operational activities, such as conducting facility security assessments, conducting criminal investigations, and responding to critical incidents, continued uninterrupted during and after the transition.

NPPD Has Experienced Delays in Assuming Some FPS Mission-Support Functions

Since taking operational control of FPS in October 2009, NPPD and other DHS components have assumed responsibility for 13 of 18 FPS mission- support functions, but the transfer of the remaining 5 mission-support functions from ICE to NPPD or other DHS components has been delayed. In August 2009, DHS reported to Congress that the transition would be completed by October 2010 and estimated it would cost $14.6 million. However, DHS now reports that the transfer of 4 functions will not be completed until the end of fiscal year 2011 or start of fiscal year 2012 and one of these functions will not be transferred until October 2012. For the delayed functions, ICE continues to provide mission support to FPS, and new or revised SLAs were developed to articulate the continuing time frames and services that ICE would provide to FPS. The 18 mission- support functions and their transfer status are presented in table 1.

According to DHS officials responsible for executing the FPS transition, the transfer of the 5 mission-support functions will take longer than originally reported to Congress due to a number of factors, including unanticipated costs associated with building the infrastructure within NPPD and other DHS components to support areas such as IT services. As reflected in table 2, the delays in the transition schedule for the delayed mission-support functions range from almost 1 to 2 years. DHS officials explained that the transfer of four mission-support functions— business continuity and emergency preparedness, personnel security, facilities, and Equal Employment Opportunity (EEO)—are on track to transfer by the end of fiscal year 2011 or start of fiscal year 2012. Specifically, DHS officials explained the following  All activities for the transfer of business continuity and emergency preparedness have been completed but are waiting on NPPD to complete the building of a continuity of operations site, which according to NPPD officials, will be complete by October 2011.  NPPD has moved a Senior Executive Service (SES)-level director into position, and is in the process of establishing an Office of Compliance and Security, which will provide compliance investigations, program review, personnel security, interior physical security, information security, and special security program services throughout NPPD. According to the Acting Director of the Office of Compliance and Security, the goal is to establish this office by October 2011.  NPPD has hired three of the five positions that were created to support FPS facilities management. These personnel, according to the officials, are working with ICE to transfer projects and all of them are expected to transfer by the end of fiscal year 2011.  The only activity required for the transfer of EEO services is to hire staff needed to support FPS within NPPD, which should be completed by the end of fiscal year 2011.

While DHS has successfully transferred FPS’s mission and the majority of its mission-support functions, deficiencies in the transition schedule for the transfer of IT services could limit DHS’s ability to ensure the timely transition of this important function. DHS’s transition plan called for working groups to develop comprehensive project management plans (i.e., detailed schedules) with detailed tasks and end dates for the individual mission-support functions to ensure critical path activities were identified, managed, and resourced. DHS did not develop these schedules for all the mission-support functions since, according to DHS officials, in some cases the transfer of a function was relatively easy and did not need a schedule, such as public affairs and legislative affairs. However, the transfer of FPS’s nationwide IT infrastructure and field support is more complex. Because of the complexity of transferring IT services, DHS developed a detailed schedule to manage the transfer of IT services, as called for in the transition plan.

As we have previously reported, the success of fielding any program depends in part on having a reliable schedule that defines, among other things, when work activities will occur, how long they will take, and how they are related to one another. As such, the schedule not only provides a road map for systematic execution of a program, but also provides a means by which to gauge progress, identify and address potential problems, and promote accountability. Among other things, best practices and related federal guidance cited in our cost estimation guide call for a program schedule to be program-wide in scope, meaning that it should include the integrated breakdown of the work to be performed, and expressly identify and define relationships and dependencies among work elements and the constraints affecting the start and completion of work elements. Table 3 presents a summary of best practices we have identified for applying a schedule as part of program management.

Our analysis of the IT schedule found that it did not reflect our best practices for scheduling, as seen in table 4.

We shared the results of our analysis with responsible DHS IT transition officials, who stated that they have taken note of the deficiencies and are taking steps to improve the schedule using the scheduling practices. According to these officials, they plan to work closely with staff in another NPPD component agency with the expertise necessary to improve the IT transition schedule. Nevertheless, if the schedule does not fully and accurately reflect the project, it will not serve as an appropriate basis for analysis and may result in unreliable completion dates, time extension requests, and delays. With regard to the transfer of the IT services function, it would be difficult for DHS to accurately predict the completion date for the IT transition without a more reliable schedule. Moreover, completing projects within projected time frames helps ensure agencies do not incur additional costs, which is especially important in a fiscally constrained environment. Ultimately, incorporating scheduling best practices into the IT transition schedule could help DHS better manage the completion of the transition and help provide reasonable assurance that the transfer is complete within its projected timeframe.

Incorporating Cost Estimating Best Practices in the IT Transition Cost Estimate Could Enhance the Reliability of, and Better Inform, Decisions about the Cost to Complete the Transition

According to best practices for cost estimates, in addition to a reliable schedule, a reliable cost estimate is critical to the success of any program. A reliable cost estimate provides the basis for informed investment decision making, realistic budget formulation and program resourcing, meaningful progress measurement, proactive course correction when warranted, and accountability for results. Such an estimate is important for any agency, but especially an agency like FPS that is solely fee funded and has faced projected shortfalls in fee collections to cover operational costs.

Federal financial accounting standards state that reliable information on the costs of federal programs and activities is crucial for effective management of government operations and recommend that full costs of programs or activities be reported so that decision makers have information necessary to make informed decisions on resources for programs, activities, and outputs, and to help ensure that they get expected and efficient results. Drawing from federal cost-estimating organizations and industry, our cost estimation best practices list four characteristics of a high-quality and reliable cost estimate that management can use for making informed decisions—comprehensive, well-documented, accurate, and credible. In July 2008, the DHS Under Secretary for Management signed a memorandum stating DHS will standardize its cost-estimating process by using the best practices we identified.

To implement the FPS transition, DHS, in 2009, estimated it would cost $14.6 million to complete the transition of FPS from ICE to NPPD. DHS’s estimate provided for costs into three categories—personnel, financial management, and IT services. In 2011, the department revised the estimate for each of the three categories, which totaled $18.5 million. At the time of our review, FPS had spent about $1.9 million of its operating revenue for transition-related expenses. Table 5 reflects estimated and actual costs for personnel, financial management services, and IT services associated with the FPS transition.

DHS has successfully transferred the majority of mission-support functions, which includes oversight of financial management services, and, according to DHS officials, is on track to hire most of the remaining new personnel by the beginning of fiscal year 2012 to provide services previously provided by ICE. However, DHS has not yet transferred IT services and does not expect to complete the transfer until October 2012. Having a reliable and valid cost estimate is important for enabling managers to make informed decisions and facilitate tracking progress against estimates to effectively manage the transfer of IT services. While DHS committed to using GAO’s best practices in preparing cost estimates in July 2008, our analysis of the cost estimate for the transfer of IT services found that it only partially met one of the four characteristics of a reliable cost estimate and minimally met the other three, as table 6 illustrates.

DHS officials stated that there are no plans to revise the IT transition estimate. According to DHS officials, rather than revising the estimate, the department plans to report actual costs once the transition is complete. However, incorporating cost estimating best practices into the IT transition cost estimate could provide an improved basis for remaining IT transition investment decisions and could facilitate tracking of actual costs against estimates, both of which are fundamental to effectively managing the transfer of IT services.

Transition May Provide Opportunity to Address Previously Identified FPS Challenges, but It Is Too Early to Tell Its Impact

Since 2007, we have reported that FPS faces significant challenges with protecting federal facilities, and in response, FPS has started to take steps to address some of them. For example, our July 2009 and April 2010 reports on FPS’s contract guard program identified a number of challenges that the agency faces in managing its contract guard program, including ensuring that the 15,000 guards that are responsible for helping to protect federal facilities have the required training and certification to be deployed at a federal facility. In response to our July 2009 report, FPS took a number of immediate actions with respect to contract guard management, including increasing the number of guard inspections it conducts at federal facilities in some metropolitan areas and revising its guard training. Further, in our April 2010 report, we recommended, among other things, that the Secretary of Homeland Security direct the Under Secretary of NPPD and the Director of FPS to develop a mechanism to routinely monitor guards at federal facilities outside metropolitan areas and provide building-specific and scenario-based training and guidance to its contract guards. As of August 2010, FPS was in the process of implementing this recommendation.

Additionally, in July 2009 we reported that FPS did not have a strategic human capital plan to guide its current and future workforce planning efforts. Among other things, we recommended that FPS develop and implement a long-term strategic human capital plan that will enable the agency to recruit, develop, and retain a qualified workforce. DHS concurred with our recommendation and is taking action to address it. In June 2008, we reported on FPS’s funding challenges, and the adverse implications its actions taken to address them had on its staff, such as low morale among staff, increased attrition, and the loss of institutional knowledge. We recommended that FPS evaluate whether its use of a fee-based system or alternative funding mechanism was the most appropriate manner to fund the agency. FPS concurred with our recommendation; however, as of May 2011, FPS had not begun such an analysis. Finally, in our 2009 High-Risk Series, and again in 2011, we designated federal real property as a high-risk area, in part, because FPS has made limited progress and continues to face challenges in securing real property.

If successfully managed, the transfer of FPS to NPPD could provide DHS the opportunity to better advance progress towards addressing FPS’s challenges. The Under Secretary of NPPD and the former FPS Director, in written statements for the November 2009 congressional hearing on the FPS transfer, noted that the transition to NPPD would better leverage and align infrastructure protection resources and competencies to maximize their value. Further, the transition plan noted that the transfer would improve the mission effectiveness of both FPS and NPPD. According to NPPD officials, the agency has undertaken actions that serve as a foundation for integrating FPS into NPPD.

First, NPPD officials explained that efforts undertaken by the senior working group and the staff working groups have served to move the transition forward, and integrate the FPS organization into the larger NPPD structure. These officials explained that FPS has been established as a component within NPPD, thereby aligning FPS’s infrastructure protection mission within NPPD’s critical infrastructure protection mission. As noted in the transition plan, NPPD chairs the operations of the Interagency Security Committee, a group that includes the physical security leads for all major federal agencies and whose key responsibility is the establishment of governmentwide security policies for federal facilities. As further noted in the transition plan, these missions are complementary and mutually supportive, and the alignment resulting from the transfer improves and advances the mission effectiveness of both FPS and NPPD.

Second, NPPD officials stated that FPS has begun to develop a new strategic plan to align FPS’s activities and resources to support NPPD mission-related outcomes. Our work has shown that in successful organizations, strategic planning is used to determine and reach agreement on the fundamental results the organization seeks to achieve, the goals and measures it will set to assess programs, and the resources and strategies needed to achieve its goals. Third, NPPD officials noted that NPPD has monthly meetings with FPS to review open GAO recommendations and is assisting FPS in closing out these recommendations. For example, in consultation with NPPD, FPS is developing a human capital strategic plan. A human capital strategic plan, flowing out of a new strategic plan, could help facilitate efforts to address previously identified challenges. Further, as we have previously reported, strategic human capital planning that is integrated with broader organizational strategic planning is critical to ensuring agencies have the talent they need for future challenges.

Finally, according to the Senior Counselor to the Under Secretary of NPPD, NPPD has established a Field Force Integration Working Group among a set of five other integration working groups to pursue integration activities across the new and larger NPPD, and across DHS as a whole. In addition, the Senior Counselor noted that the purpose of the group is to examine capabilities and resources from across the NPPD components to gain efficiencies and economies of scale in support of all NPPD field operations. The official further noted that the FPS’s workforce and regional structure is by far the largest and most established of the NPPD components. FPS’s field structure and capabilities will be used as comparative models and resources as NPPD works toward continued integration of its operating entities. While these are encouraging steps, it is too early to tell if these planned actions will help address the challenges we have previously identified.

Conclusions

With its critical role in protecting federal facilities against the threat of terrorism and other criminal activity, it is important that FPS’s transfer to NPPD and its related integration are successful. DHS has implemented a number of scheduling and cost estimating best practices in the FPS transition and has successfully transferred 13 of the 18 mission support functions. Nevertheless, DHS could better manage the transfer of the IT services mission-support function, and help inform DHS, NPPD, FPS, and congressional investment decision making. Establishing a reliable schedule and incorporating cost estimation best practices in the estimate for the transfer of IT services could help provide DHS enhanced assurance that this delayed function will be transferred in accordance with its projected time frames.

Recommendations for Executive Action

To help ensure that DHS and Congress have reliable, accurate information on the timeframes and costs of transferring FPS from ICE to NPPD, we recommend that the Secretary of Homeland Security direct the Under Secretary for NPPD, in consultation with the Director of FPS and the Director of ICE, to improve the schedule for transferring IT services, in accordance with the transition plan, and to reflect scheduling best practices, and  update the IT transition cost estimate, in accordance with cost- estimating best practices.

Agency Comments

We received written comments on a draft of this report from DHS. DHS concurred with our recommendations and stated that it is currently taking actions to implement them. With respect to improving the schedule for transferring IT services, DHS indicated that NPPD held working sessions with subject matter experts from DHS, ICE, and FPS Chief Information Officer (CIO) teams to capture all transition activities in greater detail and identify areas for implementation of best practices into schedule updates. DHS also noted that NPPD consulted with NPPD/United States Visitor and Immigrant Status Indicator Technology (US-VISIT) and adopted recommendations for schedule improvements, leveraging US-VISIT’s lessons learned toward better alignment with GAO best practices, acquisition of scheduling expertise, and acquisition of specific software tools, among other things. Regarding updating the IT transition cost estimate, DHS noted that NPPD is researching and resolving cost- estimating deficiencies identified in the GAO report in collaboration with the DHS CIO. The department also noted that NPPD plans to identify an alternative network design solution that may reduce transition cost, and will refine the cost estimate after discussing network design discussions with subject matter experts and incorporating cost-estimating best practices. Written comments from DHS are reprinted in appendix II.

As agreed with your office, unless you publicly announce the contents of the report, we plan no further distribution for 30 days from the report date. At that time, we will send copies of this report to the Secretary of Homeland Security, the Under Secretary of the National Protection and Programs Directorate, the Director of the Federal Protective Service, the Director of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and appropriate congressional committees. In addition, this report will be available at no charge on the GAO web site at http://www.gao.gov.

If you or your staff have any questions about this report, please contact David C. Maurer at (202) 512-9627 or maurerd@gao.gov. Contact points for our Offices of Congressional Relations and Public Affairs may be found on the last page of this report. Key contributors to this report are listed in appendix III.

Appendix I: Objectives, Scope, and Methodology

We examined the transition of the Federal Protective Service (FPS) from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to the National Protection and Programs Directorate (NPPD). We address the following questions: (1) to what extent has the FPS transition been implemented and what related challenges, if any, did FPS and NPPD face in implementing the transition and (2) to what extent will the transition help address previously identified challenges to protecting federal facilities?

To determine the extent to which the FPS transition has been implemented and what challenges, if any, FPS and NPPD faced in implementing the transition, we reviewed documents related to the transition, including the August 2009 FPS-NPPD Transition Plan, all transition plan updates, DHS delegations of authority related to the execution and administration of FPS, and Memorandum of Agreement, Memorandum of Understanding, and all service level agreements signed among FPS, NPPD, and ICE. We interviewed FPS officials directly affected by the transition—including the FPS Deputy Director and Chief of Staff headquartered in Washington, D.C., and in each of 6 of FPS’s 11 regional offices, the Regional Director, Deputy Director for Operations, and Mission Support Chief. We chose these offices on the basis of geographical dispersion. They included: the Northwest/Arctic Region (Federal Way, Washington); the Greater Southwest Region (Grand Prairie, Texas); the Heartland Region (Kansas City, Missouri); the Great Lakes Region (Chicago, Illinois); the National Capital Region (Washington, D.C.); and the New England Region (Boston, Massachusetts). Among other things, we asked questions about their experiences regarding the transition of FPS’s mission and mission- support functions from ICE to NPPD. While the results of these interviews provided examples of FPS officials’ experiences and perspectives, they cannot be generalized beyond those we interviewed because we did not use statistical sampling techniques in selecting the regional offices, headquarters officials, and regional staff.

Additionally, we met with members of the transition senior working group, including the NPPD Senior Counselor to the Under Secretary and the FPS Director, as well as interviewed members of all 16 staff-level working groups to discuss the extent to which FPS’s 18 mission-support functions had transferred from ICE to NPPD. The working groups included officials from FPS, NPPD, ICE, and in some groups, DHS headquarters. We compared the FPS information technology (IT) transition schedule, the IT transition cost estimate, and related documents to the practices in our Cost Estimating and Assessment Guide. We focused on the IT mission- support function because it required a significant commitment of resources, oversight, and time by DHS to complete the transition. For the IT transition schedule and the cost estimate, we scored each best practice as either being Not met—DHS provided no evidence that satisfies any of the criterion; Minimally met—DHS provided evidence that satisfies a small portion of the criterion; Partially met—DHS provided evidence that satisfies about half of the criterion; Substantially met—DHS provided evidence that satisfies a large portion of the criterion; and Met— DHS provided complete evidence that satisfies the entire criterion. We provided the results of our schedule and cost analyses to DHS officials and met with them to confirm the results. Based on the interviews and additional documentation provided by DHS officials, we updated the results of our analyses, as needed.

We reviewed financial documentation provided by all three components reflecting transition costs such as salaries, benefits, and expenses for new personnel hired to support the FPS transition, financial management services provided by ICE, and IT deployment. To assess the reliability of this documentation, we (1) performed electronic testing for obvious errors in accuracy and completeness; (2) compared the data with other sources of information, such as payroll reports to payroll data, cost data from the ICE Office of Financial Management and documentation from the Intra- Governmental Payment and Collection (IPAC) system; and (3) interviewed agency officials knowledgeable about financial management and budgeting at all three agencies to discuss transition-related expenses incurred at the time of our review, and to identify any data problems. When we found discrepancies (such as data entry errors) we brought them to the officials’ attention and worked with them to correct discrepancies before concluding our analysis. We found the cost data to be sufficiently reliable for the purposes of this review.

To determine the extent to which the transition will help address previously identified challenges to protect federal facilities, we reviewed prior GAO reports and testimonies related to FPS’s facility protection efforts, and spoke with NPPD officials about FPS’s ongoing challenges in this regard. We also reviewed and analyzed documentation, such as the transition plan, testimony from key senior leaders in NPPD and FPS provided for a hearing on the FPS transition, FPS’s strategic plan, and NPPD’s strategic activities report. Finally, we interviewed the Senior Counselor to the Under Secretary of NPPD, and FPS Deputy Director for Operations and Chief of Staff, and discussed actions underway or planned to further integrate FPS into NPPD.

We conducted this performance audit from October 2010 through July 2011 in accordance with generally accepted government auditing standards. Those standards require that we plan and perform the audit to obtain sufficient, appropriate evidence to provide a reasonable basis for our findings and conclusions based on our audit objectives. We believe that the evidence obtained provides a reasonable basis for our findings and conclusions based on our audit objectives.

Appendix II: Comments from the Department of Homeland Security

Appendix III: GAO Contact and Staff Acknowledgments

GAO Contact

Staff Acknowledgments

In addition to the contact named above, Sandra Burrell, Assistant Director, and Valerie Kasindi, Analyst-in-Charge, managed this assignment. Don Kiggins made significant contributions to the work. Gary Mountjoy provided expertise on IT issues and Jack Warner provided expertise on financial management issues. Tracey King provided legal support. Michele Fejfar assisted with design and methodology and Karen Richey provided expertise on cost estimation and scheduling best practices. Katherine Davis provided assistance in report preparation and Robert Robinson developed the report’s graphics.