there are battles ongoing within DHS

In the military we called it “unity of effort.” Getting everyone on the same page and pulling on the rope in the same direction. It is good leadership and it is good management that makes that happen. Putting the right people in the right positions with the necessary skill set and I’d add “mind set” to be a team player.

The article below delves into different “factions” within the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) each operating with different personal agendas and goals and techniques. When that happens the folks lower down the totem pole in the organization can get pulled and pushed in different directions.

In the end, what you can deduce from the article is a failure of leadership at the top of the organization. Some of the points being called out below illustrate someone operating outside of the chain of command and reaching down to give instructions to people who are not under their authority.

These types of internal squabbles will continue until someone puts the hammer down and re-establishes control of the department.

Here’s the article from The Atlantic [note: my comments are in brackets]:

“The Atlantic’s Michael Scherer and Nick Miroff: “Battles Are Raging Inside the Department of Homeland Security” (press link). Their reporting is based on interviews with 12 people familiar with tensions inside DHS, including senior administration officials. Trump has said over the years that he welcomes and even encourages rivalries in his administration, and delights in watching aides compete to please him. But for the past year, Michael and Nick report, the president has allowed a rift to widen within the team tasked with delivering on the mass-deportation plan that is his most important domestic-policy initiative. That has led to months of acrimony and left many veteran officials at DHS—including those who support the president’s deportation goals—astonished at the dysfunction.

The two factions consist of Tom Homan and Rodney Scott on one side, and Kristi Noem and Corey Lewandowski on the other. While the divide is not ideological, Homan and Scott want to do the work without the social-media trolling and the show-me-your-papers approach to fishing for deportees in American cities. 

Excerpts from their reporting follow—from The Atlantic:

– Scott sent an email to senior officials at CBP on Monday reminding them that he was in charge of the agency and that they report to him, according to two people familiar with the document. Yesterday, the DHS general counsel James Percival notified CBP employees to disregard the email because it had not gone through legal review, the people told us.

– “Memes don’t win the media narrative. Professionalism does,” a veteran official critical of Noem and her team told us. Another former DHS official told us that Trump’s mass-deportation goals have been held back in the process. “Look at the whole thing playing out in Minnesota,” the former official said. “A lot of the controversy and negative optics could have been avoided—and are avoided in other locations—if not for Corey and the secretary.”

– Allies of Homan [who now directs operations in Minnesota and reports directly to the President and not the DHS Secretary] and Scott believe that a reckoning may be coming. “Lewandowski messed up by going to war with Rodney Scott and deploying Bovino [the Border Patrol guy recently sent packing out of Minnesota] to the interior,” one senior DHS official told us. “There is no one at DHS with higher credentials than Scott, and sidelining him for petty reasons distracts from POTUS missions.”

– Critics of Scott who spoke with us argue that he lacks the focus and drive to achieve the president’s priorities, spends too much time in meetings that don’t end in decisions, and is failing to do enough to drive the president’s top priority of finishing the border wall. They say that he had little involvement in the CBP deployment to Minnesota and other cities, and did not visit the state to meet with commanders on the ground until this week. “He is not a team player,” one Homeland Security official told us of Scott. “I really think Rodney is kind of on an island.”

– In a memo sent on January 6, described to us by four people familiar with its contents, Scott asked senior leadership at CBP to report to his office any contact they had with “special government employees”—a request that many interpreted as an effort to curtail the influence of Lewandowski. Within hours, the DHS general counsel James Percival had objected to the memo, as had the White House counsel’s office. A White House official told us that the involvement of the White House counsel followed a normal practice of engaging with general counsels at government departments on “issues of common concern.” Despite the pushback, Scott’s office issued a second memo later that day to senior CBP officials: They should log any communications with officials outside the agency, including senior DHS and White House officials. Both memos were ultimately rescinded after legal pushback from DHS and the White House counsel, these people told us. Scott’s fumbled attempts to curtail outside influence on his agency raised further concerns at DHS headquarters about his leadership. “You don’t get to this level where you jump on your horse and play cowboy like that,” one person familiar with the events told us.

Find their full report at The Atlantic: “Battles Are Raging Inside the Department of Homeland Security.”