If Congress were my dear departed Mom, and I were the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), there would be purgatory to pay if I brought home a report card like DHS produced in 2007. To put it another way, If the President were Sister Donavita, my eighth grade parochial-school nun, and she issued me the 2007 DHS report card, I would have been (metaphorically) bloodied and bowed before I left her class, and my Mom would still provide (not quite so metaphorical) wooden-spoon discipline when I got home.
Regrettably, however, disciplinary standards of the past do not persist in the present. DHS Employee Morale a grade of “F,”Port Security a “C-/D+,” Management & Organization, and Critical Infrastructure, both “Incompletes,” and Chief Privacy Officer, an overly generous “B-,” despite revolving-door leadership and an average three-year ranking of last place among all federal entities in “privacy trust” score, according to the Ponemon Institute’s report (2007 Privacy Trust Study of the United States Government).
Why do we tolerate this abysmal lack of protection?