US Homeland Security Lacks Strategy to Cope With Threats, Vulnerabilities

The US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has failed to prioritize the most urgent hazards it needs to address, and is failing to develop longer-term strategies to deal with the problem, a Government Accountability Office (GAO) report said.

WASHINGTON (Sputnik) — Without sufficient documentation, the QHSR risk results cannot easily be validated or the assumptions tested, hindering DHS's ability to improve future assessments, the GAO warned.

"The DHS assessed risk for the second Quadrennial Homeland Security Review (QHSR)… and consequences; however, DHS did not document how its various analyses were synthesized to generate results, thus limiting the reproducibility and defensibility of the results," the report stated on Friday.

Also, the QHSR describes homeland security hazards, but does not rank those hazards or provide prioritized strategies to address them, the report added.