Background March 31, 2004 The Honorable Christopher Shays Committee on Government Reform Dear Mr. Chairman: Terrorist attacks, both before and after September 11, 2001, have increased congressional concerns regarding the complexity, funding, and oversight of federal programs designed to combat terrorism and ensure homeland security. Over the last several years, hundreds of recommendations have been made by national commissions and GAO to further improve our nation's strategic planning and program development in homeland security. As requested, we reviewed the reports of selected congressionally chartered commissions and GAO, identified their strategic recommendations, and organized them by critical mission area and topic area. This report will be a useful reference document for this and other congressional committees for identifying strategic recommendations that may be important in implementing the critical missions identified in the National Strategy for Homeland Security. Congress, because of concerns over terrorism, chartered three commissions to examine terrorist threats and the government's response to such threats, as well as to make recommendations to federal, state, local, and private sector organizations. These national commissions included the Bremer Commission (also known as the National Commission on Terrorism, chaired by Ambassador Paul Bremer), the Gilmore Commission (also known as the Advisory Panel to Assess Domestic Response Capabilities for Terrorism Involving Weapons of Mass Destruction, chaired by Governor James S. Gilmore, III), and the HartRudman Commission (also known as the U.S. Commission on National Security/21st Century, chaired by former Senators Gary Hart and Warren B. Rudman). Congress has also requested GAO to conduct several evaluations of various homeland security programs. These commissions and GAO made a number of strategic recommendations related to combating terrorism and homeland security. Scope and We obtained the commission recommendations directly from the reports issued by the three commissions-the one Bremer report, four Gilmore reports,' and the three Hart-Rudman reports. While a number of other organizations have also made relevant recommendations, we limited our work to these three commissions because they were chartered by Congress specifically to deal with the issues of combating terrorism and homeland security. We obtained the GAO recommendations from a selected review of our products issued from July 1997 to October 2003. We included those commission and GAO recommendations that met the following criteria:2 We then organized the commission and GAO recommendations by the six 'As agreed with subcommittee staff, the fifth Gilmore commission report was excluded because of time constraints. 2The strategic commission recommendations considered derived from a review of more than 200 recommendations from the eight commission reports; the strategic GAO recommendations considered derived from a review of more than 400 GAO recommendations, from 180 reports, during the 6-year time frame. Results placed it under catastrophic attacks). In those instances where there was no single, most relevant category, we grouped recommendations into multiple critical mission areas. Other commission and GAO recommendations did not neatly fit into any critical mission area. We then categorized the recommendations within each critical mission area by subtopic so as to provide the reader with a further refinement of the recommendation classification. We did not determine in this report whether the commission and GAO recommendations were implemented. However, we have received a congressional request to provide a status update on the implementation of key GAO recommendations directed to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and/or the 22 legacy agencies that became part of the department. We ensured the accuracy of our work by having two reviewers independently verify the verbatim usage of commission and GAO recommendations in the tables. We conducted our work between September 2003 and March 2004 in accordance with generally accepted government auditing standards. We did not seek comments from the commissions and DHS because we were simply compiling and categorizing recommendations taken directly from previously published congressionally chartered commission reports and previously published GAO products that included agency comments, as applicable. 3 Overall, we categorized 114 strategic commission recommendations and 59 strategic GAO recommendations under the six distinct critical mission areas (see apps. I-VI). The recommendations proposed, across the six critical mission areas, could generally be aligned under these topic headings (in no hierarchical order): Many of these recommendations were developed before the effective date of agency transfers to the new Department of Homeland Security (DHS) in March 2003. Thus, recommendations made to the agencies that were subsequently transferred to DHS or to the Office of Homeland Security might now be more applicable to DHS. Legislative and executive branch actions taken with respect to the creation and development of DHS might also have satisfied certain federal reorganization recommendations. |