A Ready and Resilient Workforce for the Department of Homeland Security: Protecting America’s Front Line

The responsibilities of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) range from preventing foreign and domestic terrorist attacks; securing the nation’s borders; safeguarding transportation systems; responding to natural disasters; nuclear detection; and more. Created in 2002 from a merger that rapidly incorporated parts of eight cabinet departments and 22 government agencies, DHS has struggled to integrate its numerous components and their unique cultures. While DHS is very accomplished at performing its many missions, the nature of the DHS work environment is inherently stressful, and employees suffer from low morale.

A Ready and Resilient Workforce for the Department of Homeland Security: Protecting America’s Front Line reviews current workforce resilience efforts, identifies gaps, and provides recommendations for a 5-year strategy to improve DHSTogether, the current DHS workforce resilience program. This report stresses the importance of strong leadership, communication, measurement, and evaluation in the organization and recommends content for a 5-year plan that will promote centralized strategic direction and resource investment to improve readiness and resilience at the department.

While all DHS component agencies share a common mission, each have distinct roles with different stressors attached, making implementation of an organization-wide resilience or wellness program difficult. The recommendations of A Ready and Resilient Workforce for the Department of Homeland Security outline how DHS can focus its efforts on creating a common culture of workforce readiness and resilience, while recognizing the distinct, proud, celebrated cultures of its component agencies.