The Department of Homeland Security is preparing to cast hundreds of employees from its headquarters, with goals including artificial intelligence experts and the DHS user experience department.
Many sources familiar with DHS ‘ program said Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem’s goal is to cut the department’s Management Directorate by almost 50 %. They said DHS administration has directed control agencies to identify employees that they don’t consider” important” or “essential” to the mission in line with the Trump administration’s governmentwide workforce breaks.
The Management serves as a core operational aid hub for all DHS parts. The department oversees department-wide accounting, IT, biometric systems and obtaining, among other assistance areas. Its groups include the chief financial officer, the chief information officer and the general procurement officer.
Budget files show the department employs about 3, 900 full-time relative, or FTE, personnel.
” The idea is to get lean, get back to a time when managing and office parts were small and leaner”, one people familiar with the ideas said.
Another cause said DHS will do the cuts by initial re-opening the “deferred departure program” to administration staff “imminently”. The source said DHS next plans to offer eligible employees a voluntary early retirement solution. DHS may even offer volunteer separation incentive payments.
DHS may then start a reduction in force to further reduce personnel, the source said.
” We are determined to reduce state waste that has been happening for years at the expense of the American taxpayer”, a DHS official said in a statement shared by the department’s press office. ” Across DHS, we will be eliminating non-mission critical positions and bureaucratic hurdles that undermine our mission to secure the homeland. Secretary Noem is determined to return DHS to its core mission of keeping America safe”.
Sources confirmed the cuts are specifically targeting two Biden-era initiatives: the DHS AI Corps and the department’s CX directorate.
DHS amid a governmentwide push to recruit AI experts and ensure agencies use AI responsibly. Corps members serve in the DHS CIO’s office, but are farmed out across the department to work on AI use cases. A source said the AI Corps had risen to 47 employees earlier this year.
Meanwhile, DHS Like the AI Corps, the directorate serves a central hub, in this case for human-centered design and other CX expertise. Its work has focused on streamlining and modernizing DHS ‘ public services, including immigration forms and disaster response paperwork. Officials have said DHS interacts with the public more than any other federal agency, with customer-facing components including the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the Transportation Security Agency, and U. S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.
The CX directorate also includes the that leads DHS’s accessibility and language services. Agencies are required by law to ensure their information and communications technology is accessible for people with disabilities.
Dana Chisnell, who recently stepped down as head of the CX directorate, said its staff includes about 40 federal employees and 30 contractors. She said the directorate’s budget is about$ 10 million a year.
Chisnell said the CX directorate’s work to eliminate 30 million paperwork “burden hours” over the last two years has saved the government roughly$ 2.1 billion.
” This group of people delivers amazing value”, Chisnell said. ” Killing CX is obviously not about cost savings or efficiency”.
Multiple sources familiar with the planned cuts said both the AI Corps and the CX directorate have done good work, but are being tied to the Biden administration and specific executive orders that Trump has since repealed.
” That’s been part of the agenda — erase anything good that the Biden administration did”, one source said. ” The second guideline seems to be, cut anything that’s not legally required”.
So far under Trump, DHS has not cut staff at the rate of other agencies. Many of its components were told their employees couldn’t take the initial “fork in the road” offer. In early February, DHS laid off just over 400 probationary employees — out of a total of 260, 000 staff across the department — but most have since been reinstated under federal court orders.
More recently, however, DHS instituted reductions-in-force for Noem has also called for eliminating FEMA and downsizing components like the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency.
DHS also now has several more political appointees in place to oversee the management cuts, including recently confirmed Deputy Secretary Troy Edgar. President Donald Trump also recently nominated Karen Evans, a former federal CIO and more recently a senior executive at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, to serve as under secretary for management.
” The first time around, we did this with a scalpel — now, it’s a flamethrower for anything it isn’t’ mission essential,'” a source said.
DHS is also reviewing contracts at the Management Directorate. One of the sources said approximately 1, 400 contracts are being reviewed by DHS, the Department of Government Efficiency and the General Services Administration. DHS has also started posting some contract cancellations
” If you can’t tie yourself directly to a critical function that is essential to the mission, then they’re looking to eliminate it”, the source said.
( With additional reporting by Jason Miller )
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