The Department Of Homeland Security (DHS)

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The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is charged with the securing the United States from multiple threats that can come in various forms. With 22 departments that have different mission to undertake, every department was lobbying for their mission sets to be the highest priority for security of the homeland according to their own risk management assessment completed by them. When it came time for DHS to allocate money to each group, departments would use their own risk management assessment to lobby for various types of resources. Presidential Preparedness Directive 8 emphasized the importance of a national risk assessment to the process of setting DHS priorities. DHS seeing that the protecting the homeland from not only terror attacks …show more content…

Using principles of risk management can help policymakers reach informed decisions regarding the best ways to prioritize investments in security programs so that these investments target the areas of greatest need. (!) The DHS had to establish a risk management framework to help the department target its investments in security programs and disaster recovery based on risk. For DHS to have an effective way of conducting risk management, they had to develop a means for every agency to conduct risk management. DHS created the Risk Steering Committee who vision was to enable individual elements, groups of elements, or the entire homeland security enterprise to simultaneously and effectively assess, analyze, and manage risk from multiple perspectives across the homeland security mission space (National Research Council, 2010). One of their first tasking they took on to get the department on the same page was to establish a common vocabulary in dealing with risk management. The DHS Risk Steering Committee developed the Risk Lexicon, which made a common, unambiguous set of official terms and definitions to ease and improve the communication of risk-related issues for DHS (National Research Council, 2010). It facilitates consistency and uniformity in the usage of reporting risk-related information for the department and allots the Risk Steering Committee to set the priorities by evaluating the

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