DHS’s mission is to lead the unified national effort to secure America by preventing and deterring terrorist attacks and protecting against and responding to threats and hazards to the nation, among other things. Created in 2002, DHS merged 22 agencies and offices that specialized in one or more aspects of homeland security. The intent behind the merger that created DHS was to improve coordination, communication, and information sharing among these multiple federal agencies. Each of these agencies is responsible for specific homeland security missions and for coordinating related efforts with its sibling components, as well as external entities. Figure 1 shows a simplified and partial DHS organizational structure. Within the department’s Management Directorate, headed by the Under Secretary for Management (USM), are the OCHCO and OCIO. The OCHCO is responsible for department-wide human capital policy and development, planning, and implementation of human capital initiatives. The OCIO is responsible for departmental IT policies, processes, and standards, and ensuring that IT acquisitions comply with DHS IT management processes, among other things. DHS acquires IT and other capabilities that are intended to improve its ability to execute its mission. DHS classifies these acquisition programs into three levels that determine the extent and scope of required project and program management, the level of reporting requirements, and the acquisition decision authority. Specifically, DHS policy defines acquisition programs as follows: Level 1 major acquisition programs are expected to cost $1 billion or more over their life cycles. Level 2 major acquisition programs are expected to cost at least $300 million over their life cycles. Special interest programs, without regard to the established dollar thresholds, are designated as Level 1 or Level 2 programs. For example, a program may be raised to a higher acquisition level if its importance to DHS’s strategic and performance plans is disproportionate to its size or it has high executive visibility. Level 3 programs are those with life-cycle cost estimates less than $300 million and are considered non-major. As outlined in DHS’s Acquisition Management Directive 102-01, DHS’s Chief Acquisition Officer—the USM—is responsible for the management and oversight of the department’s acquisition policies and procedures. The Deputy Secretary, USM, and Component Acquisition Executives are the acquisition decision authorities for DHS’s acquisition programs. For Level 1 programs, the acquisition decision authority may be either the Deputy Secretary or USM; for level 2 programs, the acquisition decision authority may be either the USM or a Component Acquisition Executive; and for Level 3 programs, a Component Acquisition Executive is the acquisition decision authority. As of March 2015, the department had 72 major acquisition programs and 42 non-major acquisition programs. In 2003, we designated the transformation of DHS as high risk because it had to transform 22 agencies—several with major management challenges—into one department. We emphasized that failure to effectively address DHS’s management and mission risks could have serious consequences for U.S. national and economic security. In 2007 and 2009, in reporting on DHS’s progress in addressing the high- risk area since its creation, we found that DHS had made more progress in implementing its range of missions than its management functions— such as in the areas of IT and human capital—and that continued work was needed to address an array of programmatic and management challenges. Since then, DHS had continued to make important progress in strengthening and integrating its management functions; however, significant work remained for DHS to improve in these areas. For example, As of September 2015, DHS had taken steps to identify current and future human capital needs, including the size of the workforce, its deployment across the department and components, and the knowledge, skills, abilities, and diversity needed; however, DHS had yet to fully implement its workforce planning model that was intended to allow the department to plan for its current and future organizational and workforce needs. In February 2015, we reported that while DHS established a human capital strategic plan in 2011 and made progress in implementing it, the department had considerable work ahead to improve employee morale, which has decreased each year since 2011. For example, the Office of Personnel Management’s 2014 Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey data showed that DHS’s scores continued to decrease in all four dimensions of the survey’s index for human capital accountability and assessment. While the department had made progress in implementing its IT Strategic Human Capital Plan for fiscal years 2010 through 2012, in January 2015 DHS shifted its IT paradigm from acquiring assets to acquiring services, and acting as a service broker (e.g., an intermediary between the purchaser of a service and the seller of that service). According to DHS officials in May 2015, this paradigm change will require a major transition in the skill sets of DHS’s IT workforce, as well as the hiring, training, and managing of those new skill sets; as such, this effort will need to be closely managed in order to succeed. Moreover, as of September 2014, DHS faced challenges in integrating employee training management across all the components, including centralizing training and consolidating training data into one system. According to DHS officials, the department planned to address these limitations through the development and deployment of HRIT’s PALMS program. Since DHS was created, the department’s human resources environment has included fragmented systems, duplicative and paper-based processes, and little uniformity of data management practices. According to DHS, these limitations in its human resources environment are compromising the department’s ability to effectively and efficiently carry out its mission. For example, While it is imperative that DHS responds quickly to emergencies, catastrophic events, and threats, and deploys appropriately trained, certified, and skilled personnel during these events, according to DHS, the department’s hiring process involves numerous systems and multiple hand-offs which result in extra work and prolonged hiring. This inefficient process is one factor that could have contributed to the skill and workforce gaps that we have previously identified. For example, in April 2015, we reported that 21 of the 22 major acquisition programs we reviewed faced shortfalls in their program office workforce in fiscal year 2014. According to DHS, the department does not have information on all of its employees, which reduces its abilities to strategically manage its workforce and best deploy people in support of Homeland Security missions. According to DHS, reporting and analyzing enterprise human capital data are currently time-consuming, labor-intensive, and challenging because the department’s data management largely consists of disconnected, standalone systems, with multiple data sources for the same content. As one example, we reported in 2014 that DHS could not provide complete information on how much it had spent on administratively uncontrollable overtime to its personnel from fiscal years 2008 through 2014. Specifically, certain components could not provide information such as duty location or payments for certain years. To address these issues, in 2003, DHS initiated the HRIT investment, which is intended to consolidate, integrate, and modernize the department’s and its components’ human resources IT infrastructure. These components include U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center (FLETC), U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), the U.S. Coast Guard (USCG), and the U.S. Secret Service. HRIT is managed by DHS’s Human Capital Business Systems unit, which is within OCHCO and has overall responsibility for HRIT. Additionally, OCIO plays a key supporting role in the implementation of HRIT by reviewing headquarters’ and components’ human resources investments, identifying redundancies and efficiencies, and delivering and maintaining enterprise IT systems. From 2003 to 2010, DHS made limited progress on the HRIT investment, as reported by DHS’s Inspector General. This was due to, among other things, limited coordination with and commitment from DHS’s components. To address this problem, in 2010 the DHS Deputy Secretary issued a memorandum emphasizing that DHS’s wide variety of human resources processes and IT systems inhibited the ability to unify DHS and negatively impacted operating costs. The memorandum stated that, without an enterprise operating model, support for DHS’s core mission was at risk and valuable workforce management information remained difficult to acquire across the department. Accordingly, the Deputy Secretary stated that DHS could no longer sustain a component-centric approach when acquiring or enhancing human resources systems, and prohibited component spending on enhancements to existing human resources systems or acquisitions of new solutions, unless those expenditures were approved by OCHCO or OCIO. The memorandum also directed these offices to develop a department-wide human resources architecture. In 2011, in response to the Deputy Secretary’s direction, DHS completed an effort called the Human Capital Segment Architecture, which, according to DHS, defined the department’s current (or as-is) state of human capital management processes, technology, data, and relevant personnel. Further, from this current state, the department developed a comprehensive future state (or target state) and a document referred to as the Human Capital Segment Architecture blueprint that redefined the HRIT investment’s scope and implementation time frames. As part of this effort, DHS conducted a system inventory and determined that it had 422 human resources systems and applications, many of which were single- use solutions developed to respond to a small need or links to enable disparate systems to work together. DHS reported that these numerous, antiquated, and fragmented systems inhibited its ability to perform basic workforce management functions necessary to support mission critical programs. To address this issue, the blueprint articulated that HRIT would be comprised of 15 strategic improvement opportunity areas (e.g., enabling seamless, efficient, and transparent end-to-end hiring) and outlined 77 associated projects (e.g., deploying a department-wide hiring system, establishing an integrated data repository and reporting mechanism, and developing a centralized learning center for all personnel action processing information) to implement these 15 opportunities. Each opportunity area includes from 1 to 10 associated projects.