August 31, 2020

The Department of Homeland Security is broken. Here’s what it needs in a boss.

By Paul Rosenzweig and Carrie Cordero

Before both parties had finished their conventions, speculation had already begun about the nature of the Cabinet in the next administration. Oddly, much of that speculation ignores the Department of Homeland Security. Perhaps it’s because nobody really wants the job. And now, President Trump has indicated his intent to nominate the current acting secretary, Chad Wolf, to the position in which the Government Accountability Office says he has been illegitimately serving. The Senate may need to evaluate the qualifications and suitability of a DHS secretary sooner than we thought.

The span of responsibility for DHS may well be the broadest of any single Cabinet department — and, thus, the scope of experience we look for in the secretary is equally broad.

In reality, that may be the hardest Cabinet job to fill. To be sure, other executive leadership jobs are difficult. But most of them require specific expertise and set of qualifications or skills. The attorney general needs to know many aspects of the law, but in the end, he or she is just a lawyer. Likewise, the secretary of state has to understand the motivations of more than 190 other nations around the globe, but diplomacy is his or her provenance. The director of national intelligence, by statute, is required to have extensive national security expertise.

Read the full article in The Washington Post.

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