[Senate Report 112-235]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office]


                                                       Calendar No. 540

112th Congress                                                   Report

 2d Session                      SENATE                         112-235
_______________________________________________________________________


                     INTERAGENCY PERSONNEL ROTATION

                              ACT OF 2011

                               __________

                              R E P O R T

                                 of the

                   COMMITTEE ON HOMELAND SECURITY AND

                          GOVERNMENTAL AFFAIRS

                          UNITED STATES SENATE

                              to accompany

                                S. 1268

   TO INCREASE THE EFFICIENCY AND EFFECTIVENESS OF THE GOVERNMENT BY 
 PROVIDING FOR GREATER INTERAGENCY EXPERIENCE AMONG NATIONAL SECURITY 
 AND HOMELAND SECURITY PERSONNEL THROUGH THE DEVELOPMENT OF A NATIONAL 
 SECURITY AND HOMELAND SECURITY HUMAN CAPITAL STRATEGY AND INTERAGENCY 
        ROTATIONAL SERVICE BY EMPLOYEES, AND FOR OTHER PURPOSES




               November 13, 2012.--Ordered to be printed




                                _____

                  U.S. GOVERNMENT PRINTING OFFICE

29-010                    WASHINGTON : 2012
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20402-0001





        COMMITTEE ON HOMELAND SECURITY AND GOVERNMENTAL AFFAIRS

               JOSEPH I. LIEBERMAN, Connecticut, Chairman

CARL LEVIN, Michigan                 SUSAN M. COLLINS, Maine
DANIEL K. AKAKA, Hawaii              TOM COBURN, Oklahoma
THOMAS R. CARPER, Delaware           SCOTT P. BROWN, Massachusetts
MARK L. PRYOR, Arkansas              JOHN McCAIN, Arizona
MARY L. LANDRIEU, Louisiana          RON JOHNSON, Wisconsin
CLAIRE McCASKILL, Missouri           ROB PORTMAN, Ohio
JON TESTER, Montana                  RAND PAUL, Kentucky
MARK BEGICH, Alaska                  JERRY MORAN, Kansas

                  Michael L. Alexander, Staff Director
       Beth M. Grossman, Deputy Staff Director and Chief Counsel
     Gordon N. Lederman, Associate Staff Director and Chief Counsel
                for National Security and Investigations
             Christian J. Beckner, Associate Staff Director
            for Homeland Security Prevention and Protection
               Nicholas A. Rossi, Minority Staff Director
                Mark B. LeDuc, Minority General Counsel
        Eric B. Heighberger, Minority Professional Staff Member
                  Trina Driessnack Tyrer, Chief Clerk









                            C O N T E N T S

                                                                   Page
  I. Purpose and Summary..............................................1
 II. Background and Need for the Legislation..........................1
III. Legislative History.............................................23
 IV. Section-by-Section Analysis.....................................24
  V. Evaluation of Regulatory Impact.................................29
 VI. Congressional Budget Office Cost Estimate.......................29
VII. Changes to Existing Law.........................................30












                                                       Calendar No. 540
112th Congress }                                              {  Report
                                 SENATE
 2d Session    }                                              { 112-235

======================================================================



 
               INTERAGENCY PERSONNEL ROTATION ACT OF 2011

                                _______
                                

               November 13, 2012.--Ordered to be printed

                                _______
                                

Mr. Lieberman, from the Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental 
                    Affairs, submitted the following

                              R E P O R T

                         [To accompany S. 1268]

    The Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental 
Affairs, to which was referred the bill (S. 1268) to increase 
the efficiency and effectiveness of the Government by providing 
for greater interagency experience among national security and 
homeland security personnel through the development of a 
national security and homeland security human capital strategy 
and interagency rotational service by employees, and for other 
purposes, having considered the same, reports favorably thereon 
with an amendment in the nature of a substitute and recommends 
that the bill do pass.

                         I. PURPOSE AND SUMMARY

    One of the most important lessons learned from the tragedy 
of September 11, 2001, is that government agencies tasked with 
maintaining our national security--and the people working for 
them--must continually strive to break down the bureaucratic 
and cultural barriers that can keep them from working together 
effectively and efficiently to achieve their common purpose of 
protecting the United States and its people. The Interagency 
Personnel Rotation Act of 2011 seeks to do just that, by 
facilitating the ability of federal national and homeland 
security workers to rotate through Executive Branch departments 
and agencies other than their own, so that they can forge 
relationships and better understand the workings of other 
agencies and thereby promote a unified government effort in 
this realm.

              II. BACKGROUND AND NEED FOR THE LEGISLATION

    Countering national and homeland security threats of the 
21st Century effectively and efficiently requires the U.S. 
government to integrate the capabilities and efforts of 
multiple Executive Branch departments and agencies into a 
single, unified approach. One important way to achieve this so-
called ``whole of government'' approach is to have government 
personnel rotate through departments or agencies other than 
their own and thereby develop a broader understanding of the 
threats to national and homeland security and the government's 
abilities to counter them. The Department of Defense (DoD) has 
effectively used such rotations to overcome rivalry among the 
Military Services and to foster ``jointness''--that is, a DoD-
wide rather than Service-specific perspective among military 
officers. Rotations are also used commonly in the private 
sector to develop corporate leaders. S. 1268 applies this 
concept to departments and agencies across the Executive Branch 
involved in national and homeland security by creating an 
overall framework for rotations but providing substantial 
discretion to the Executive Branch to implement the framework 
in practice.

A. The need for interagency integration to meet 21st Century threats

    Countering national and homeland security threats of the 
21st Century effectively and efficiently requires seamlessly 
integrating the capabilities and efforts from multiple 
Executive Branch departments and agencies.\1\ The Obama 
Administration recognized this imperative in its National 
Security Strategy of 2010, which called for ``strengthening 
national capacity'' through a ``whole-of-government approach'' 
and stated that ``to succeed, we must update, balance, and 
integrate all of the tools of American power.''\2\ The 
heightened need for interagency integration has been recognized 
by various Congressional committees\3\ and current and former 
senior national and homeland security officials.\4\
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    \1\See Catherine Dale, Nina M. Serafino, and Pat Towell, Organizing 
the U.S. Government for National Security: Overview of the Interagency 
Reform Debates, CRS Report RL34455, December 16, 2008, available at 
http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/natsec/RL34455.pdf.
    \2\White House, National Security Strategy (2010).
    \3\This Committee (and ultimately the whole Congress) recognized 
the need to apply all instruments of national power in an integrated 
manner to counter terrorism when it authored the Intelligence Reform 
and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004 (P.L. 108-458, (2004)).
    \4\See, e.g., General Peter Pace, USMC, Vice Chairman Joint Chiefs 
of Staff, ``Extemporaneous Remarks as delivered to the Marine Corps 
Association/ Naval Institute's Forum 2004,'' September 7, 2004, 
available at http://www.jcs.mil/vice_chairman/speeches/
MCANavalInstitute FORUM2004.html; Catherine Dale, National Security 
Professionals and Interagency Reform: Proposals, Recent Experience, and 
Issues for Congress, CRS Report RL34565, September 26, 2011.
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    The basic national and homeland security architecture of 
the Executive Branch dates back to the National Security Act of 
1947, which created the National Security Council (NSC), the 
Director of Central Intelligence, and what eventually became 
DoD.\5\ The NSC is composed primarily of cabinet secretaries 
and is responsible for advising the President. Although the NSC 
provided some level of coordination, the departments and 
agencies engaged in national and homeland security confronted 
20th Century threats with relative autonomy from each other. In 
contrast, national and homeland security threats of the 21st 
Century intertwine traditional security areas such as defense, 
diplomacy, and intelligence to a far greater degree and thus 
require greater integration among the relevant departments and 
agencies. In addition, 21st Century threats involve areas that 
previously were not within the national security community such 
as energy, finance, economics, public health, and law 
enforcement--plus the area of ``homeland security.'' In other 
words, new agencies that were previously not at the ``national 
security table''--such as the Departments of Treasury, Health 
and Human Services, Energy, and Commerce--now have national and 
homeland security functions. Moreover, the Department of 
Homeland Security (DHS) did not exist prior to the tragic 
attacks of September 11, 2001. Thus, integration is needed 
between the traditional security departments and agencies and 
these new participants.
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    \5\The National Security Act of 1947, P.L. 80-253 (1947).
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    The need for improved interagency integration is heightened 
by five factors. First, nonstate actors such as terrorist 
groups, proliferators, and organized crime are responsible for 
an increasing number of critical national and homeland security 
threats. These actors are aided in their operations by 
globalization--including information technology, 
transportation, and financial mechanisms. Most nonstate actors 
do not operate within defined borders, field uniformed military 
forces, or engage in traditional diplomacy. Countering nonstate 
actors does not fit neatly into the bureaucratic boundaries 
that have separated departments and agencies in the past.
    Second, the stated intention of terrorists to use weapons 
of mass destruction (WMD) against the United States leaves 
little margin for government error. Of course, during the Cold 
War the Soviet Union fielded nuclear weapons capable of 
destroying the United States many times over, but the Soviet 
Union was a more traditional, rational adversary whose actions 
were restrained by the need for self-preservation. In contrast, 
the 9/11 attacks illustrate the intention of adherents to 
violent Islamist extremism to kill large numbers of Americans 
on their home soil in suicide operations, and evidence acquired 
since 9/11 has evinced al Qaeda's desire to acquire WMD. Any 
ineffectiveness in interagency activities to prevent terrorists 
from acquiring WMD can have devastating consequences.
    Third, critical national and homeland security threats 
cross the so-called ``foreign/domestic divide''--that is, the 
divergence of legal authorities, internal regulatory 
compliance, and culture between departments and agencies 
focused on matters outside of U.S. borders versus within U.S. 
borders. Departments and agencies on either side of the 
``foreign/domestic divide'' must collaborate closely.
    Fourth, critical national and homeland security threats 
must be countered in ``Internet time''--such as to counter a 
pandemic, interdict a WMD being smuggled across borders, or 
respond to enemy propaganda within a news cycle.
    And fifth, our government's constrained fiscal situation 
leaves no room for inefficiency, even if the ultimate result of 
interagency activity is effective.
    Examples of critical national and homeland security threats 
of the 21st Century that require significant interagency 
integration include the following:
     Counterterrorism. Countering terrorism requires 
integration at two levels. At the tactical level, entities such 
as the Departments of Defense, Homeland Security, Justice, 
State, and Treasury as well as the Intelligence Community must 
work closely together to identify operatives, find financiers 
and logisticians, prevent attacks, and dismantle networks. At 
the strategic level, departments and agencies must counter 
terrorist ideology in order to prevent and roll-back its spread 
and drain the wellsprings of terrorist operatives, supporters, 
and finances.
     Counterproliferation. Both state and nonstate 
actors are engaged in proliferation and seek to acquire WMD. 
Entities such as the Departments of Defense, Homeland Security, 
Justice, State, and Treasury as well as the Intelligence 
Community must work closely together to identify and protect 
sources of WMD material, identify and engage with scientists 
with relevant expertise, map networks of sellers, buyers, and 
smugglers, and detect and interdict smuggling.
     Counterinsurgency. Close civilian/military 
coordination is necessary for finding and defeating insurgents 
while protecting the larger population and providing the 
economic, educational, and rule-of-law support necessary to 
``win hearts and minds'' and turn the larger population against 
the insurgency. The insurgency following the defeat of Saddam 
Hussein's military during the Iraq War and the insurgency in 
Afghanistan demonstrate the importance of stabilization and 
reconstruction to ensuring the success of U.S. security 
strategy. Accordingly, integration is necessary between DoD and 
civilian departments and agencies involved in stabilization and 
reconstruction--such as the Departments of Agriculture, 
Commerce, Education, Health and Human Services, and Justice.
     Cybersecurity. Cyber threats have the potential to 
disable U.S. military capabilities, harm U.S. critical 
infrastructure, and burden the daily lives of U.S. citizens. 
The U.S. response involves both DoD for military cybersecurity 
and DHS for cybersecurity of civilian departments and agencies. 
Coordination is critical between DoD and DHS for sharing of 
information concerning new threats and defenses, and between 
DHS and other civilian departments and agencies.
     Emergency Management. Responding to a domestic 
natural or man-made disaster requires integration of 
capabilities from across the Executive Branch. For example, 
this Committee has found that poor integration was a cause of 
the federal government's inadequate response to Hurricane 
Katrina in 2005.\6\ This need for integration is even more 
significant in a domestic catastrophic event, which could 
involve disaster conditions so great in magnitude that federal 
coordination of resources and capabilities becomes an absolute 
necessity. The foundational document governing the federal 
government's response activities, called the National Response 
Framework, includes 15 emergency support functions on a range 
of activities vital to an effective coordinated response, such 
as communications, logistics and public health, each with a 
lead federal department and supporting departments and 
agencies.\7\
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    \6\Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs. 
Hurricane Katrina: A Nation Still Unprepared. 109th Cong., 2nd sess., 
S. Rept. 109-322 (2006).
    \7\Department of Homeland Security, National Response Framework 
(2008), available at http://www.fema.gov/pdf/emergency/nrf/nrf-
core.pdf.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
     Public Health. Even more than traditional 
emergency management generally, preparedness for and response 
to a natural or man-made epidemic would require close 
integration among departments and agencies. A pandemic is not 
confined to a single geographic area, and a particularly 
contagious pathogen could spread quickly throughout the United 
States and abroad due to airplane travel. The Department of 
Health and Human Services would have to work closely with 
departments such as DHS and DoD to ensure distribution of 
vaccines and antidotes quickly while public order is 
maintained, and the Department of State would need to 
coordinate with foreign governments.\8\
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    \8\See Homeland Security Presidential Directive 21, Public Health 
and Medical Preparedness.
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B. The role of rotation programs in improving integration

    Prominent U.S. corporations that face the challenge of 
integration across their bureaucratic components often use 
personnel rotations in order to foster cohesion and develop 
future leaders. For example, General Electric implements 
rotational programs for their experienced and entry-level 
employees to promote seeing ``the bigger picture.''\9\ 
International rotations are required for senior-level promotion 
at IBM.\10\ Edward Jones, which has been rated fifth in the 
nation for best places to work, also has incorporated a 
rotational program for entry-level employees, which seeks to 
allow employees to ``network internally and develop a broad 
knowledge of the firm's inner workings.''\11\
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    \9\GE Careers, http://www.ge.com/careers/students/entry-level.html, 
January 4, 2012.
    \10\Interview with Margot Conrad, Partnership for Public Service, 
November 18, 2011.
    \11\Edward Jones Careers, http://careers.edwardjones.com/us/
students/Full-Time Opportunities/HeadquartersRotationalProgram/
index.html, January 27, 2012.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    The paradigmatic use of rotations to achieve greater 
integration in government is the military joint duty system 
mandated by the Goldwater-Nichols DoD Reorganization Act of 
1986.\12\ Prior to that Act, DoD was dominated by strong 
Military Services--the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines--with 
weak coordinating mechanisms across them. A critical theme 
identified by Congress was that officers in each Military 
Service had little understanding of the other Services and 
would approach issues not from the perspective of the corporate 
DoD but rather from their individual Service's perspective. 
There were no incentives for officers to think `jointly' and 
every incentive for officers to prioritize their Service's 
needs. The Joint Chiefs of Staff (composed of the heads of the 
Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines, as well as the Chairman of 
the Joint Chiefs of Staff) had a staff supporting it--called 
the Joint Staff--but that staff was not manned by the Military 
Services' best and brightest officers. Indeed, duty outside of 
one's Military Service was considered detrimental to an 
officer's career, which led the Joint Staff to be populated by 
lesser-quality officers.
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    \12\For a general discussion of the Goldwater-Nichols Act, see 
Gordon Lederman, Reorganizing the Joint Chiefs of Staff: The Goldwater-
Nichols Department of Defense Reorganization Act of 1986 (Greenwood, 
1999), and James Locher III, Victory on the Potomac (Texas A&M 
University Press, 2004).
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    Ultimately, Congress concluded that DoD needed to be 
reorganized. Congress decided that organization mattered and 
that, while good people could overcome bad organization 
temporarily, they could not do so consistently--nor should they 
have to. This theme was echoed by the 9/11 Commission in its 
2004 recommendations for government reorganization to counter 
terrorism--namely, that government organization has a direct 
impact on government performance, and that improved 
organization is an essential ingredient for improving 
performance.\13\
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    \13\The 9/11 Commission Report, National Commission on Terrorist 
Attacks Upon the United States, July 2004, available at http://
www.911commission.gov/report/911Report.pdf.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    Critically, the Goldwater-Nichols Act sought to change the 
military's Service-specific culture and mentality over the long 
term by creating incentives to motivate the best-and-brightest 
officers to do a rotational tour outside of their Service. The 
Act required officers to serve on joint duty--including on the 
Joint Staff or a combatant commanders' staff--and to fulfill 
certain educational requirements in order to be eligible for 
promotion to general or admiral. In addition, officers could 
not be penalized for serving on joint duty, as the promotion 
rates for such officers were required to match the promotion 
rates for officers who remained within their Services. The 
National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2002 
clarified that service to achieve eligibility for general or 
admiral needed to be a ``full tour'' of duty in a joint duty 
assignment and to achieve a joint designation.\14\
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    \14\Dale, National Security Professionals and Interagency Reform, 
September 26, 2011. The John Warner National Defense Authorization Act 
for Fiscal Year 2007 established a four-tiered system of joint 
qualification, with the purpose being ``to ensure a systematic, 
progressive, career-long development of officers in joint matters and 
to ensure that officers serving as general and flag officers have the 
requisite experience and education to be highly proficient in joint 
matters.'' Id., at 6.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    It is noteworthy that the Services were resistant to the 
personnel provisions of the Goldwater-Nichols Act. Even senior 
military personnel who supported the need for significant 
reorganization of DoD and favored the strengthening of the 
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and of the combatant 
commanders opposed the personnel requirements.\15\ However, 
Congress overcame that resistance and imposed the personnel 
requirements on DoD.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    \15\Lederman, Reorganizing the Joint Chiefs of Staff. 
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    Twenty-five years after the enactment of Goldwater-Nichols, 
that Act is seen as an unqualified success in improving DoD's 
organizational functioning. Joint military operations have 
vastly improved in their effectiveness. DoD's culture is widely 
regarded as having changed from Service-specific to ``joint,'' 
with the Act's personnel requirements being the driving force 
of this change. Air Force General Michael Hayden, who served as 
Director of the National Security Agency, Principal Deputy 
Director of National Intelligence, and Director of the Central 
Intelligence Agency, commented at one of his Senate 
confirmation hearings, ``Now, I can tell you as a military 
officer, one of the most powerful sentences of legislation I've 
seen in my military career was that one sentence in Goldwater-
Nichols. It says: The promotion rates of officers on the joint 
staff shall be equal to or greater than the promotion rates of 
the officers on the military headquarters staff.''\16\ The 
effects of the personnel requirements were not felt for over a 
decade, as a new generation of officers developed and served in 
joint assignments.\17\ The Joint Staff and combatant 
commanders' staffs are now attracting the best and the 
brightest due to the promotion requirement.\18\
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    \16\Senate Committee on Armed Services, Intelligence Nominations 
Hearing, April 21, 2005.
    \17\See Peter Chiarelli, ``Beyond Goldwater-Nichols,'' Joint Forces 
Quarterly (Autumn 1993), at __
    \18\See Letter from former Chairman of the Joint Chief of Staff, 
General Colin Powell USA (ret.), to then-Lieutenant Colonel General 
Peter Chiarelli, cited in Peter Chiarelli, ``Beyond Goldwater-
Nichols,'' Joint Forces Quarterly (Autumn 1993), at 77 and n.25 
(stating that the quality of officers assigned to the Joint Staff has 
improved due to the Goldwater-Nichols Act); see also statement by 
Lieutenant General Norman Ehlert USMC (ret.), cited in id. at 77 and 
n.26 (``Many observers agree with [General Powell] and are convinced 
that [the Goldwater-Nichols Act's personnel requirement] has improved 
both the quality of the officers serving on the Joint Staff and their 
work. General Ehlert has noted that: `[The Marine Corps] used to send 
officers who were retiring to work on the Joint Staff--not since 
Goldwater-Nichols. Now we send our sharpest folks and so the other 
services.''') .
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    The success of DoD's rotation program for military officers 
inspired Congress to require a similar type of rotation program 
for the Intelligence Community. As identified by the 9/11 
Commission, the Intelligence Community has been composed of 
disparate agencies and elements including the Central 
Intelligence Agency, National Security Agency, National 
Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, National Reconnaissance Office, 
Defense Intelligence Agency, and intelligence offices in the 
Departments of Defense, Energy, Homeland Security, State, and 
Treasury. Congress enacted the Intelligence Reform and 
Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004 to implement the Commission's 
key recommendations. Among other things, the Act created a 
Director of National Intelligence to serve as the leader of the 
Intelligence Community and to integrate the agencies and 
elements of the Intelligence Community into a single 
intelligence enterprise.
    Congress recognized the need to change the culture of 
Intelligence Community personnel to become less agency/element-
specific and more `joint.' Accordingly, the Intelligence Reform 
and Terrorism Prevention Act mandated that the Director of 
National Intelligence provide incentives for Intelligence 
Community employees to serve on the staffs of `joint' bodies--
that is, Intelligence Community entities outside of the 
traditional Intelligence Community agencies and elements 
including the Office of the Director of National Intelligence 
and national intelligence centers such as the National 
Counterterrorism Center.\19\ Also akin to the Goldwater-Nichols 
Act, that Act required personnel who serve in such positions to 
be promoted by their home departments or agencies at the same 
rate as personnel who have not served in such positions.\20\ 
Finally, the Act required that the Director of National 
Intelligence ``facilitate the rotation of personnel of the 
intelligence community through various elements of the 
intelligence community in the course of their careers in order 
to facilitate the widest possible understanding by such 
personnel of the variety of intelligence requirements, methods, 
users, and capabilities.''\21\
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    \19\Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act, P.L. 108-458, 
Section 1011.
    \20\Id. 
    \21\Id. 
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    In response, the Director of National Intelligence launched 
a program requiring intelligence professionals to serve a 
rotational period within the other agencies and elements of the 
Intelligence Community in order to qualify for senior-level 
promotion.\22\ That program received Harvard University's 2008 
Innovations in American Government Award.\23\ However, as 
demonstrated by the military's rotation program, Congressional 
vigilance and oversight will be essential to ensure the proper 
implementation of the requirement, and once the requirement is 
fully implemented it will take a decade or more for the 
benefits of the rotation program to manifest as a new 
generation of intelligence officers--who have done rotations--
reach senior-level intelligence positions.
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    \22\Intelligence Community Directive Number 601, Office of the 
Director of National Intelligence, available at http://www.dni.gov/
electronic_reading_room/ICD_601.pdf.
    \23\Intelligence Community Joint Duty Program Highlighted, Press 
Release, Office of the Director of National Intelligence, June 30, 
2009, available at http://www.dni.gov/press_releases/
20090630_release.pdf.
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C. Government and nongovernmental support for creating a rotation 
        program to foster interagency integration for national and 
        homeland security missions

    The notion of a rotational program across the Executive 
Branch for national and homeland security missions has been 
suggested or endorsed by governmental and nongovernmental 
experts since at least 2001.
     In 2001, the Congressionally-created U.S. 
Commission on National Security/21st Century (called the 
``Hart-Rudman Commission,'' after its chairmen, former Senators 
Gary Hart and Warren Rudman) proposed the creation of an 
interagency cadre called the National Security Service Corps in 
order to develop leaders ``skilled at producing integrative 
solutions to U.S. national security policy problems.'' The 
Commission proposed that the program include rotational 
assignments and professional education as prerequisites for 
certain promotions.\24\
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    \24\The United States Commission on National Security/ 21st Century 
(``Hart-Rudman Commission''), Road Map for National Security: 
Imperative for Change, Phase III Report, February 15, 2001, at xvi, 
101-102. The Commission recommended that the program include a wide 
range of departments and agencies such as Commerce, Defense, Energy, 
Homeland Security, Justice, State, and Treasury but exclude the 
military, the Intelligence Community, and the Foreign Service. The 
Commission recommended that an interagency advisory group oversee and 
establish guidelines for the rotations and education, while the 
departments and agencies would have authority over their own personnel 
and make promotion decisions. See also Dale, National Security 
Professionals and Interagency Reform, September 26, 2011.
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     In 2006, the Congressional-mandated DoD 
Quadrennial Defense Review noted, ``Much as the Goldwater-
Nichols requirement that senior officers complete a joint duty 
assignment has contributed to integrating the different 
cultures of the Military [Services] into a more effective joint 
force, the QDR recommends creating incentives for senior 
Department and non-Department personnel to develop skills 
suited to the integrated interagency environment.''\25\ The 
report endorsed creation of ``an interagency cadre of senior 
military and civilian professionals able to effectively 
integrate and orchestrate the contributions of individual 
government agencies on behalf of larger national security 
interests.''\26\ The 2010 Quadrennial Defense Review reiterated 
DoD's support for improved cross-agency training, education, 
and professional experience opportunities.\27\
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    \25\Department of Defense, Quadrennial Defense Review Report, 
February 6, 2006, at 79, available at http://www.defenselink.mil/qdr/
report/Report20060203.pdf. 
    \26\Id. See also Dale, National Security Professionals and 
Interagency Reform, September 26, 2011.
    \27\Department of Defense, Quadrennial Defense Review Report 
(February 2010), at 69. That report stated that improving DoD's 
cooperation with other agencies is ``a central facet of statecraft.'' 
As the report stated, ``Finally, the Department of Defense will 
continue to advocate for an improved interagency strategic planning 
process that makes optimal use of all national instruments of 
statecraft. The complexity of 21st century conflicts demands that the 
U.S. government significantly improve interagency comprehensive 
assessments, analysis, planning, and execution for whole-of-government 
operations, including systems to monitor and evaluate those operations 
in order to advance U.S. national interests. One solution is to 
allocate additional resources across the government and fully implement 
the National Security Professional (NSP) program to improve cross-
agency training, education, and professional experience opportunities. 
This will help foster a common approach to strategic and operational 
planning and implementation, improving prospects for success in future 
contingencies. Id., at 71.
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     In 2008, the Congressionally-created Commission on 
the Prevention of WMD Proliferation and Terrorism (called the 
Graham/Talent Commission, after its chairmen, former Senators 
Bob Graham and Jim Talent) recommended that the government 
``build a national security workforce for the 21st Century'' 
including by ``establishing a program of education, training, 
and joint duty with the goal of creating a culture of 
interagency collaboration, flexibility, and innovation.''\28\ 
More specifically, the Commission stated that ``the President's 
top national security officials should consider including 
assignments in more than one department and agency as a 
prerequisite for advancements to the National Security Council 
or to department or agency leadership level.''\29\
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    \28\World at Risk: The Report of the Commission on the Prevention 
of WMD Proliferation and Terrorism (December 2008), at 101-2.
    \29\Id., at 103. The Commission went on to state, ``Greater 
opportunity for education and training is a necessary but not 
sufficient condition for creating an effective national security 
workforce for the 21st Century. To foster true interagency 
collaboration, national security officers from across the government 
must have the experience of working closely with colleagues from other 
agencies.'' Id. 
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     Also in 2010, the Department of State released its 
first Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review report.\30\ 
That report called for ``expanding interagency rotations'' for 
State Department and U.S. Agency for International Development 
(USAID) personnel.\31\ As the report stated, ``Our training 
must focus more on how to engage and coordinate other agencies 
as well as ensure their representatives are effectively 
integrated into a Mission's Country Team. To foster these 
skills, we will increase rotational assignments to and where 
possible from other agencies at all levels in both State and 
USAID.''\32\ The report also called for the criteria for 
selection of Deputy Chiefs of Mission or Chiefs of Mission to 
include ``how well candidates have worked with the interagency 
or managed multi-agency missions in previous postings'' and 
that ``service at other agencies, such as USAID,'' should be 
considered in promotions to the Senior Foreign Service, 
selection as Deputy Chief of Mission, and recommendations for 
presidential appointment as Chief of Mission.''\33\
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    \30\Leading Through Civilian Power: The First Quadrennial Diplomacy 
and Development Review (2010).
    \31\Id., at xvi.
    \32\Id., at 174.
    \33\Id., at 30.
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    In keeping with these calls for creation of a rotation 
program, President George W. Bush issued Executive Order 13434 
on May 17, 2007, National Security Professional Development. 
The stated purpose of the executive order was to enhance 
national security by ``promot[ing] the education, training, and 
experience of current and future professionals in national 
security positions (security professionals)'' across the 
Executive Branch.\34\ The executive order required that the 
Director of the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), 
``consistent with applicable merit-based hiring and advancement 
principles, lead the establishment of a national security 
professional development program . . . that provides for 
interagency and intergovernmental assignments and fellowship 
opportunities and provides for professional development 
guidelines for career advancement.''\35\
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    \34\Executive Order 13434 (May 17, 2007), Section 1.
    \35\Id., Section 5.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    To design this program, the executive order created an 
Executive Steering Committee chaired by the OPM Director and 
including the Secretaries of State, Treasury, Defense, 
Agriculture, Labor, Health and Human Services, Housing and 
Urban Development, Transportation, Energy, Education, and 
Homeland Security and also the Attorney General, the Director 
of National Intelligence, and the Director of the Office of 
Management and Budget (OMB).\36\ In practice, the Executive 
Steering Committee was led by the OMB Deputy Director for 
Management rather than the OPM Director.\37\
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    \36\Id., Section 3(b).
    \37\Statement of Major General (ret.) William A. Navas, Jr., 
Hearing on National Security Reform: Implementing a National Security 
Service Workforce, before the Committee on Homeland Security and 
Governmental Affairs, Subcommittee on Oversight of Government 
Management, the Federal Workforce, and the District of Columbia (April 
30, 2009), at 4.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    Pursuant to the executive order, a national strategy was 
approved by President Bush and released in 2007.\38\ That 
strategy discussed the importance of interagency rotations in 
fostering interagency integration:
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    \38\White House, National Strategy for the Development of Security 
Professionals (July 2007), available at http://humancapital.doe.gov/
resources/National-Strategy-for-the-Development-of-Security-
Professionals.pdf. 
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
          Inter-office, interagency, and inter-governmental 
        assignments, fellowships, and exchanges, including 
        those with appropriate non-governmental organizations, 
        provide personnel with a wealth of information about 
        the capabilities, missions, procedures, and 
        requirements of their national security partners. 
        Further, they foster an improved awareness of the 
        missions and personnel in other offices, which helps to 
        break down cultural barriers and promote professional 
        relationships that have valuable practical applications 
        during national security missions. As personnel 
        increasingly learn to work together and synchronize 
        common missions, we will achieve unity of effort to 
        improve the Nation's overall national security-related 
        capabilities.
          In order to achieve a more cohesive national security 
        system, the Federal Government will provide 
        opportunities for inter-governmental, interagency, and 
        inter-office assignments, fellowships, and exchanges, 
        including non-governmental organizations where 
        appropriate, in order to accomplish the following 
        objectives: (1) enable national security professionals 
        to understand the roles, responsibilities, and cultures 
        of other organizations and disciplines; (2) promote the 
        exchange of ideas and practices; (3) build trust and 
        familiarity among national security professionals with 
        differing perspectives; and (4) minimize obstacles to 
        coordination.\39\
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    \39\Id., at 9.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    In 2008, the National Security Professional Development 
Integration Office was created to coordinate and monitor 
implementation of the program. DoD serves as the executive 
agent for the office, meaning that it provides the funds for 
its operation and the office space, but DoD does not direct the 
office's operations because the office is serving an Executive 
Branch-wide function and not a DoD-specific function.\40\
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    \40\Statement of Major General Navas, at 5.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    Subsequently, 17 departments and agencies individually 
developed criteria for identifying national security 
professionals for inclusion in this program. In total, the 17 
departments and agencies identified approximately 14,000 
national security professional positions, with approximately 
1,200 at the Senior Executive Service (SES) level and the rest 
at the level of General Schedule Pay Scale (GS) 13 to 15.\41\ 
In addition, the OPM Director issued guidelines for departments 
and agencies to develop regulations to make interagency 
experience a requirement for selection to an SES position that 
was identified as a national security professional 
position.\42\ However, the departments and agencies did not 
adopt such regulations to provide incentives for the best-and-
brightest among their personnel to rotate to another department 
or agency. Interagency rotations did not occur under this 
national security professional development program.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    \41\Id., at 5. These numbers excluded Intelligence Community 
personnel, as intelligence personnel numbers were classified.
    \42\Id.
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D. The Interagency Personnel Rotation Act of 2011

    The Interagency Personnel Rotation Act of 2011 responds to 
the imperative to improve interagency integration for 21st 
Century national and homeland security missions. The Act 
utilizes personnel rotations in order to improve interagency 
integration, building on private-sector experience and 
Congress's successful mandate of rotations for military 
officers via the Goldwater-Nichols Act. The Act also responds 
to the evidence that, despite the best intentions, the 
Executive Branch has not been able to institute an organized 
interagency personnel rotation program. Indeed, as the 
Goldwater-Nichols Act and the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism 
Prevention Act demonstrate--and as former Vice Chairman of the 
Joint Chiefs of Staff General Pace recognized--the Executive 
Branch often cannot effect internal reorganization by itself 
and instead needs Congress to institute it via legislation and 
drive it via aggressive oversight.
            1. The Act uses interagency communities of interest as the 
                    building blocks for rotations
    Although the Committee looked to the Goldwater-Nichols Act 
as a paradigm, it recognizes the significant differences 
between a rotational program covering the Military Services and 
a rotational program covering the myriad civilian Executive 
Branch departments and agencies involved in national and 
homeland security. The variegated nature of the civilian 
personnel systems across these departments and agencies led the 
Committee to develop a framework that provides significantly 
more flexibility for the Executive Branch in implementation 
than the Goldwater-Nichols Act did for the military. In 
addition, rather than mandate a single rotational framework, S. 
1268 incorporates the Committee's view that civilian 
interagency personnel rotations should focus primarily on 
improving interagency integration within the Executive Branch 
against a particular threat or for a particular mission. 
Accordingly, the fundamental building block of the Act is the 
concept of a National Security Interagency Community of 
Interest (ICI)--that is, the positions across multiple 
departments and agencies that have significant responsibility 
for the same substantive, functional, or regional subject area 
related to national or homeland security that requires 
interagency integration. The Act seeks to improve interagency 
integration within an ICI in order to increase the 
effectiveness and efficiency of the Executive Branch for that 
particular national or homeland security mission.
     The Committee on National Security Personnel 
(discussed below) determines the ICI topics. Examples of ICIs 
could include counterinsurgency, counterproliferation, and 
counterterrorism.
     Subject to guidelines and oversight from the 
Committee on National Security Personnel, the head of each 
department or agency identifies which positions in that 
department or agency are within an ICI and then which positions 
in that department or agency are open for receiving personnel 
on rotation from other departments and agencies. The positions 
are to be at the level of GS-11 to GS-15. The Committee expects 
that most rotations will be at the more junior to mid-level of 
that spectrum rather than more senior--essentially, the level 
of personnel who have achieved a basic level of proficiency in 
their department or agency's mission but who have many years of 
public service remaining, and most likely not management-level 
positions. Thus the rotational experience will pay dividends 
for many years.
     The Act limits the positions within an ICI to 
positions that have ``significant responsibility'' for the 
subject area of the ICI because many positions in departments 
and agencies would likely have some connection, however 
attenuated, to an ICI subject area. The Committee does not 
intend that positions that have attenuated or little 
responsibility for the subject area be included in an ICI.
     For example, an ICI focused on 
counterproliferation could include positions in, among other 
offices, the Department of State's Bureau of International 
Security and Nonproliferation, the Department of Homeland 
Security's Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), and DoD's 
Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Nuclear, 
Chemical, and Biological Defense Programs and the Defense 
Threat Reduction Agency.
     Personnel would rotate within the ICI related to 
their expertise--that is, personnel with counterproliferation 
expertise would rotate to positions in the counterproliferation 
ICI, not to positions in other ICIs such as cybersecurity or 
stabilization and reconstruction. Thus, the rotations would 
build personal relationships, overall cohesion, and a sense of 
interagency mission and strategy across that ICI, with the 
effect of increasing that ICI's overall effectiveness and 
efficiency.
            2. Departments and agencies will not need additional 
                    personnel to implement the rotations framework in 
                    this Act
    In crafting the bill, the Committee was particularly 
cognizant of the significant constraints on the federal budget 
and therefore designed a program that would operate at minimal 
cost. The Committee made sure that the rotation of individuals 
among agencies would not result in a need to hire any 
additional personnel.\43\
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    \43\In so structuring the bill, the Committee chose not to follow 
the military rotation model, in which the Services have additional 
personnel--a so-called ``float''--who are available for rotation or to 
do the work of those rotated out of a particular position.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    Most importantly, as noted above, the essential building 
blocks for the rotations framework under this Act are the ICIs, 
with rotation of personnel occurring within an ICI. The 
Committee envisions that rotations would occur either on one-
for-one basis or in a round-robin format. To use the example 
cited above, an employee in the Department of State's Bureau of 
International Security and Nonproliferation would rotate to a 
position in DoD's Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense 
for Nuclear, Chemical, and Biological Defense Programs, while 
an employee in that DoD office would rotate to a position in 
the Bureau (a ``one-for-one'' rotation). Or, the State civil 
servant would rotate to the DoD office, the DoD employee would 
rotate to ICE, and an ICE employee would rotate to the Bureau 
(a ``round-robin'' rotation). All of the personnel rotating 
would have expertise in counterproliferation, and all the 
positions would be within the counterproliferation ICI. Thus, 
each department or agency would gain counterproliferation 
personnel to compensate for counterproliferation personnel who 
have left for a rotation.
    Moreover, as noted above, the Act permits rotations for 
employees between GS-11 and GS-15 levels, but the Committee 
envisions that most rotations will involve employees at the 
lower end to middle of this scale--essentially, employees who 
have mastered the basic skills and competencies within their 
departments and agencies but are not mid- or senior-level 
managers. The Committee understands that it would be difficult 
for a GS-15 manager in one department or agency to rotate to a 
GS-15 managerial position in another department or agency and 
perform adequately. However, the Committee envisions that most 
of the rotations would involve employees performing so-called 
``action officer'' rather than managerial responsibilities. At 
that level as opposed to the managerial level, personnel on 
rotation would be well-equipped to contribute to the mission of 
the receiving department or agency and to prevent loss of 
mission performance or the need for additional personnel from 
other parts of the receiving department or agency to backfill 
the employee who has left for a rotation.
    Section 6(g) of the bill emphasizes the point: it requires 
that the rotation framework be instituted in a manner that 
ensures a reasonable equivalence of the number of personnel 
rotating into and out of a department or agency within an ICI. 
In addition, the subsection requires that the positions of 
personnel on rotation be filled within a reasonable period of 
time by incoming personnel on rotation or by other available 
personnel.
    Even if for some reason the position of an employee who is 
on rotation cannot be filled or filled adequately by an 
incoming employee on rotation, the bill's flexibility in 
setting the minimum length of a rotation gives agencies the 
ability to design rotations to have minimal effect on a 
department or agency's performance. The Act contains a 
qualitative rather than quantitative minimum for a rotation: 
that the rotation must be of sufficient length to gain an 
adequately detailed understanding and perspective of the 
department or agency to which the employee is rotating. Thus, 
if necessary, a rotation can be of a sufficiently brief period 
of time that the impact on the employee's home department or 
agency's mission will be limited.
            3. The Act seeks to encourage rotations not only to other 
                    departments or agencies but also to interagency 
                    bodies
    The Act seeks to encourage rotations not just among 
departments and agencies generally--provided the positions are 
within an ICI--but also to what the Act calls ``interagency 
bodies.'' Section 5(c)(1) of the Act requires the Committee on 
National Security Personnel to identify such interagency 
bodies, which are (1) entities in the Executive Branch that are 
``primarily involved in interagency activities'' relating to 
national and homeland security, or (2) components of agencies 
that are ``primarily involved in interagency activities'' 
related to national or homeland security and ``have a mission 
distinct from the agency within which the component is 
located.''
    By analogy, the Goldwater-Nichols Act sought to remedy the 
lack of a ``joint'' culture and perspective among military 
officers and, in doing so, to provide incentives for the best-
and-brightest military officers to serve on the Joint Staff and 
the staffs of the combatant commanders. Previously, service on 
such staffs had been considered detrimental to an officer's 
career, and thus the best-and-brightest officers would not 
serve on them. Following the enactment of the Goldwater-Nichols 
Act, the Joint Staff and staffs of combatant commanders were 
transformed to be the tour of choice for ambitious 
officers.\44\
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    \44\Deputy Secretary of Defense John White, ``Meeting the Needs of 
the Secretary of Defense,'' in The Goldwater-Nichols DOD Reorganization 
Act: A Ten-Year Retrospective (National Defense University press, 
1999), at 60-61 (``One of the most important contributions of 
Goldwater-Nichols was to require joint assignments and inaugurate the 
concept of the Joint Specialty Officer. Overnight, this enhances the 
career value of joint assignments. As a result, the quality of officers 
assigned to joint entities improved dramatically. Today, as a general 
matter, the best officers don't avoid joint tours they fight for them. 
I see evidence of this every day as I interact with officers on the 
Joint Staff and in [the Office of the Secretary of Defense].'').
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    The Executive Branch has a small but growing architecture 
of interagency bodies equivalent to the Joint Staff and 
combatant commanders' staffs within DoD. Just as the Joint 
Staff and combatant commanders' staffs are outside of the 
Military Services and play a critical role in ensuring 
integration across the Military Services, the Executive 
Branch's growing architecture of interagency bodies plays a 
critical role in ensuring interagency integration on a variety 
of national and homeland security issues. The Committee 
believes that it is essential that these interagency bodies be 
staffed by the best-and-brightest of Executive Branch personnel 
because of these bodies' criticality for interagency 
effectiveness and efficiency. These bodies fall into two 
structural categories, as listed in the Act.
    First, there are interagency bodies that are not tied to 
any particular department or agency and instead work directly 
for the President on interagency issues. For example, the 
National Security Staff (NSS) supports the work of the NSC in 
assisting the President in national and homeland security 
decisionmaking and coordinating among departments and agencies 
on such issues. The NSS reports to the Assistant to the 
President for National Security Affairs (the so-called 
``National Security Advisor''). The NSS has relatively few 
direct hires; the vast majority of NSS staffers are detailed 
from departments and agencies for often one- to two-year 
assignments. Another example is the National Counterterrorism 
Center's Directorate of Strategic Operational Planning, created 
by the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004 
at the 9/11 Commission's recommendation. The Act states that 
the Directorate of Strategic Operational Planning is 
responsible for planning ``counterterrorism activities, 
integrating all instruments of national power, including 
diplomatic, financial, military, intelligence, homeland 
security, and law enforcement activities within and among 
agencies.''\45\ The Act defines ``strategic operational 
planning'' as including ``the mission, objectives to be 
achieved, tasks to be performed, interagency coordination of 
operational activities, and the assignment of roles and 
responsibilities.''\46\ The National Counterterrorism Center is 
housed administratively within the Office of the Director of 
National Intelligence. However, for purposes of the strategic 
operational planning function, the Director of the National 
Counterterrorism Center reports directly to the President.\47\ 
(In contrast, the Director of the National Counterterrorism 
Center reports directly to the Director of National 
Intelligence for the Center's intelligence analysis function.)
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    \45\Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004, 
Section 1021.
    \46\Id.
    \47\Id.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    Second, there are entities within departments and agencies 
that serve interagency coordination functions separate from the 
particular missions of their parent departments and agencies. 
These entities are being created in order to improve 
interagency integration at the tactical or operational level, 
while the NSS focuses on interagency integration at the 
strategic level. These entities are headed by an employee of 
the department or agency in which the entity is housed 
administratively, and the head of each entity reports to 
superiors within that department or agency. The entities 
usually seek staff from other departments and agencies involved 
in the same mission area in order to bring knowledge and 
understanding of other departments' and agencies' capabilities 
and objectives, reach-back to those departments and agencies in 
order to access information, and interagency credibility for 
the entities' activities and products. Examples of these 
entities include the Human Smuggling and Trafficking 
Center;\48\ the Export Enforcement Coordination Center;\49\ the 
Center for Strategic Counterterrorism Communications;\50\ the 
National Intellectual Property Rights Coordination Center;\51\ 
and Provincial Reconstruction Teams (PRTs).\52\
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    \48\This Center was created by a Memorandum of Understanding in 
July 2004 among the Departments of Homeland Security, Justice and State 
and subsequently established in statute by the Intelligence Reform and 
Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004. Intelligence Reform and Terrorism 
Prevention Act of 2004, Section 7202. The Center is responsible for 
preparing strategic assessments, facilitating the sharing of 
information, and coordinating selected initiatives concerning human 
smuggling and trafficking across departments and agencies. The Center's 
director is selected on a round-robin from the Departments of State, 
Homeland Security, and Justice for a three-year term. The Center's 
staff is drawn from a variety of departments and agencies. As the 
charter that established the Center prior to the 2004 legislation 
states, ``The principal determinant of the success of the Center will 
be its ability to draw on and integrate the diverse experience and 
perspectives of its full-time staff. With this in mind, it is critical 
that key members of the community of interest provide well-qualified 
personnel to the Center.'' http://www.state.gov/m/ds/hstcenter/
41444.htm.
    \49\This Center was created by Executive Order 13558 in 2010. The 
purpose of the Center is to serve as the primary forum for departments 
and agencies (specifically, the Departments of Commerce, Defense, 
Energy, Homeland Security, State, and Treasury and the Intelligence 
Community) to share information and coordinate export control 
investigations and to establish a government-wide statistical tracking 
capability for such investigations. The Center is located in ICE with 
DHS and is headed by an ICE employee designated by the Secretary of 
Homeland Security. Pursuant to the executive order, the Center has a 
deputy director from the Department of Commerce and a deputy director 
from the Department of Justice, as well as a liaison from the 
Intelligence Community.
    \50\This Center was created by Executive Order 13584 in 2011. The 
purpose of the Center is to ``coordinate, orient, and inform 
Government-wide public communications activities directed at audiences 
abroad and targeted against violent extremists and terrorist 
organizations, especially al-Qa'ida and its affiliates and adherents.'' 
The Center is located in the Department of State, and its director is 
selected by the Secretary of State. Its staff includes personnel 
detailed from DoD and the Intelligence Community.
    \51\At the impetus of the NSS and Congress, DHS established this 
center within DHS Customs and Border Protection in order to create a 
``strategic interagency partnership'' for sharing information, 
coordinating enforcement actions, and conducting investigations related 
to intellectual property theft. http://www.iprcenter.gov/. The Center 
is headed by a Customs and Border Protection agent and staffed by 
personnel from a wide variety of departments and agencies--including 
the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the Postal Service, and 
investigative entities from DoD. The Center does not have a minimum 
length of time for personnel from other departments and agencies to be 
detailed to it, instead finding a way to utilize detailees however 
brief or intermittent their detail is. Although intellectual property 
rights would not appear to be a national or homeland security issue, a 
recent investigative report by the Senate Committee on Armed Services 
concluded that counterfeit parts, particularly electronic parts, ``all 
too often end up in critical defense systems in the United States.'' 
This Center plays a role in preventing counterfeit parts from being 
used in U.S. military equipment
    \52\These teams are joint military-civilian counterinsurgency units 
serving as the ``primary civil-military relations tool'' in the 
Afghanistan and Iraq Wars. Robert Bebber, ``The Role of Provincial 
Reconstruction Teams (PRTs) in Counterinsurgency Operations: Khost 
Province, Afghanistan,'' in Small Wars Journal (November 10, 2008), at 
3. They are designed to improve local security, build local governance, 
and engage in reconstruction and development. PRTs are generally headed 
by a military officer and include scores of military personnel along 
with representatives from various civilian departments and agencies. 
Id.
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    A key element of ensuring that interagency bodies are 
included in the rotations framework is determining which 
official is responsible for applying the framework of this Act 
to each interagency body. The Act therefore designates the 
National Security Advisor to fulfill the responsibilities that 
the head of a department or agency fulfills with respect to 
that department or agency under this Act. The Act also 
designates the Director of the National Counterterrorism Center 
to fulfill that role for the Directorate of Strategic 
Operational Planning. And the Act requires the Committee on 
National Security Personnel to designate the federal official 
responsible for each interagency body that it identifies. The 
Committee on National Security Personnel should not designate 
the head of the department or agency in which the interagency 
body is located to be the responsible official; instead, the 
Committee should designate the official with direct leadership 
responsibility for the Center, most often the Center's 
director, as the responsible federal official.
    The Act requires that the federal official responsible for 
applying the framework of this Act to the interagency body 
select which positions in the interagency body are within a 
particular ICI and also which positions are open for rotation. 
The Committee presumes that many of the positions in these 
bodies are staffed by personnel on detail, as opposed to a 
permanent cadre, and thus will be designated as ICI positions 
open for rotation. However, there may be certain positions at 
an interagency body that do not fall within an ICI because the 
positions' responsibilities are, for example, administrative in 
nature. For example, the Executive Secretariat at the National 
Security Staff plays a critical administrative role in workflow 
and document management, but Executive Secretariat positions 
would likely not fall within any ICI. The Act thus permits the 
head of an interagency body to designate certain positions in 
that interagency body to qualify as interagency rotational 
service so that personnel serving on rotation in such positions 
would receive the promotion benefits mandated by the Act (as 
discussed below) and thus would attract highly qualified 
Executive Branch personnel to them. So, for example, the 
National Security Advisor could designate Executive Secretariat 
positions to qualify for interagency rotational service even 
though they are not within an ICI.
            4. Limitations on interagency rotational service
    As discussed above, the Act's overall objective is to 
encourage the best-and-brightest personnel from a department 
and agency to serve in another department or agency or an 
interagency body. This objective is not fulfilled if such 
personnel are able to serve in another part of their home 
department or agency and have such service qualify as 
interagency rotational service. By analogy, the Goldwater-
Nichols Act did not permit, for example, a naval officer who 
specializes in surface warfare to serve a rotation within the 
Navy related to submarine warfare and have that qualify as a 
joint rotation.
    Still, the Act recognizes that a department and agency may 
face a continuing challenge in integrating its internal 
components and may be utilizing rotations across its 
bureaucratic components in order to do so. In addition, a 
department or agency that houses an interagency body may face a 
challenge in staffing that interagency body because its 
personnel may believe that serving in a new entity will not be 
rewarded. Accordingly, the Act permits the following:
     During the first three years after an ICI is 
identified, a rotation from one component of a department or 
agency to another component of that same department or agency 
(assuming both positions are in the same ICI) shall qualify as 
interagency rotational service provided that the two components 
are of sufficiently different functionality. The head of the 
department or agency shall determine these components, subject 
to the approval of the Committee on National Security 
Personnel. For example, the Secretary of Homeland Security 
could determine that DHS's Immigration and Customs Enforcement 
and DHS's Customs and Border Protection are sufficiently 
different in functionality so that a rotation from one to the 
other constitutes interagency rotational service. (The 
determination would be made by the Secretary of Homeland 
Security, not by the head of one of the components involved.)
     A rotation from a component of a department or 
agency to an interagency body housed administratively in that 
department or agency would qualify as an interagency rotational 
service. However, there are certain entities that could 
potentially qualify as an interagency body but are so large and 
inextricably tied to the mission of the parent department or 
agency that a rotation from the parent department or agency to 
that entity should not qualify as interagency rotational 
service. The Committee expects that the Committee on National 
Security Personnel would ensure that the allowance for 
rotations to interagency bodies by personnel of a department or 
agency housing such bodies is used appropriately.
    For example, this Committee has recognized that FBI Joint 
Terrorism Task Forces (JTTFs) play a lead role in 
counterterrorism investigations domestically and rely heavily 
on personnel on rotation from other departments and 
agencies.\53\ JTTFs might qualify as interagency bodies, and 
this Act would encourage and facilitate personnel from other 
departments and agencies to be assigned to JTTFs. However, 
JTTFs are such a large and fundamental part of the FBI's 
internal functioning that permitting service by FBI personnel 
in them to qualify as a rotation under this Act would be 
contrary to the Act's purpose. Accordingly, the Act specifies 
that service by FBI personnel in JTTFs does not qualify as 
interagency rotational service.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    \53\Senator Joseph I. Lieberman and Senator Susan M. Collins, A 
Ticking Time Bomb: Counterterrorism Lessons from the U.S. Government's 
Failure to Prevent the Fort Hood Attack (Senate Committee on Homeland 
Security and Governmental Affairs, 2011), at 74-75. 
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
            5. Ensuring that personnel on rotation contribute to the 
                    receiving department or agency's mission
    The Committee considers that it is critical that personnel 
serving on an interagency rotation contribute to the receiving 
department or agency's mission. In other words, personnel on 
rotation are distinctly not representatives of their home 
departments or agencies, viewing policy or operational issues 
from the perspective of their home departments or agencies and 
seeking to protect or further their departments' or agencies' 
interests.
    A critical way to ensure that personnel on rotation do not 
prioritize protecting their home departments or agencies is to 
provide appropriate incentives via the personnel performance 
appraisal system. Accordingly, the Act requires that personnel 
serving on interagency rotations receive performance 
evaluations based primarily on their contribution to the work 
of the receiving department or agency or interagency body. The 
Act does permit other factors specific to the home departments 
or agencies to be considered, but the Committee expects that 
such factors will generally be administrative matters such as 
physical fitness or continuing education requirements--not how 
well the personnel protected the home departments' or agencies' 
interests during the rotations.
    The Act specifies that officials at the home departments 
and agencies conduct the evaluations, rather than the 
supervisors of the personnel at the receiving departments and 
agencies. The Committee's rationale is that many departments' 
and agencies' personnel appraisal systems tend to be 
idiosyncratic, each with its own subtle lexicon to convey 
whether personnel are truly meritorious. Having performance 
evaluations done by officials at the receiving departments and 
agencies would likely put personnel on rotations at a 
disadvantage for promotion in their home departments and 
agencies because such officials would not know the appropriate 
lexicon. However, the Act requires that the officials at the 
home departments or agencies who are conducting the evaluations 
rely on the input of the supervisors from the receiving 
departments or agencies or interagency bodies. The Act also 
requires that, in order to ensure that personnel doing 
rotations are not disadvantaged, such evaluations are provided 
the same weight for promotions and other rewards as evaluations 
of personnel who have not performed rotations.
            6. Incentives for the best-and-brightest personnel to 
                    perform interagency rotational service
    As Congress recognized in the Goldwater-Nichols Act and the 
Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act, incentives 
are necessary to ensure that the best-and-brightest personnel 
from departments and agencies perform interagency rotational 
service. Incentives are particularly important given that 
departments and agencies generally want to keep their best-and-
brightest personnel in-house, performing the work of the home 
departments and agencies. This desire will likely be 
exacerbated by the government's constrained fiscal situation.
    Thus, an essential component of this Act is its incentives 
for the best-and-brightest personnel to perform interagency 
rotational service. To begin, the Act requires that personnel 
who are performing rotational service are entitled to return to 
their previous positions in their home departments or agencies 
within a reasonable period of time after the end of the 
rotational service. In this way, personnel can be assured that 
they will not be penalized for leaving their positions for a 
rotation.
    Even more importantly, the Act provides personnel who have 
done a rotation with an advantage for promotion to the Senior 
Executive Service (SES) or its equivalent. As noted above, the 
Goldwater-Nichols Act made promotion to general or admiral 
contingent on a military officer having done a joint duty 
rotation, and this requirement is credited with having caused a 
tectonic shift toward jointness in the military's culture. The 
Executive Branch or particular departments or agencies may on 
their own institute such a requirement with respect to SES 
promotions for civilian personnel. However, given the complex 
and variegated nature of the civilian personnel systems across 
the Executive Branch, the Act contains the following incentive 
structure:
     The Act requires that heads of departments and 
agencies identify SES or equivalent positions in their 
departments and agencies that are within ICIs.
     The Act requires that personnel who have served on 
a rotation receive a strong preference in the competition for 
promotion to such positions.
     In addition, the Act requires that, on October 1st 
of each fiscal year, the heads of departments and agencies that 
have ICI positions designate how many of their departments' or 
agencies' SES or equivalent positions within the ICIs shall be 
filled by personnel who have done a rotation. This requirement 
begins for each ICI on October 1st of the second fiscal year 
after the fiscal year in which the ICI is identified.
     No later than thirty days after the end of each 
fiscal year, the heads of the departments and agencies that 
have failed to meet these targets shall submit reports to 
Congress identifying the failure and indicating what remedial 
actions have been or will be taken.
            7. Administration and oversight of the rotational service 
                    framework
    As noted above, the Executive Branch has attempted to 
create a rotational framework with the promulgation of EO 
13434, but that effort did not produce results. A major reason 
for EO 13434's inchoateness was the lack of an effective 
oversight mechanism, which among other things would have 
ensured that departments and agencies implemented EO 13434 in a 
timely and consistent manner. Moreover, it is critical that 
Congress be able to conduct oversight effectively of 
implementation of this Act.
    Accordingly, this Act establishes the Committee on National 
Security Personnel to design and oversee implementation of the 
framework created by this Act and thus to ensure that the 
Executive Branch implements the Act in good faith, consistently 
across departments and agencies, and in a timely manner. The 
Committee has designed this framework so that implementing the 
bill would not require the hiring of new staff either to design 
or to oversee the rotational framework.
    The OMB Director will chair the Committee on National 
Security Personnel, which also will include the OPM Director 
and the National Security Advisor. In consultation with the OPM 
Director and the National Security Advisor, the OMB Director 
will issue directives and establish standards for implementing 
the Act. The Act does not specify all of the types of 
directives and standards that will be required nor all of the 
actions that the Committee will need to take, but it does offer 
examples such as identifying the ICIs and ensuring that 
rotations are accomplished in a manner (e.g., ``one-for-one'' 
or ``round-robin'') that prevents departments and agencies from 
needing additional personnel or suffering a decline in mission 
performance. The Act does specify that the Committee shall 
validate the actions taken by departments and agencies to 
implement its directives and standards.
    Each member of the Committee on National Security Personnel 
would bring particular expertise and capability to the 
Committee. The OMB Director has responsibility for Executive 
Branch-wide management issues, has preexisting authority to 
issue directives and standards for departments and agencies, 
and is confirmed by the Senate and thus serves as a primary 
point of accountability to Congress for the implementation of 
this Act. The National Security Advisor brings expertise in the 
national and homeland security threats and missions that the 
United States faces, which is particularly important for 
identifying and terminating ICIs on a continuing basis and 
identifying which departments and agencies play a role in each 
ICI. The National Security Advisor's presence on the Committee 
also serves to convey that--as with the Goldwater-Nichols Act 
and the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act--the 
rotational framework instituted by this Act is a fundamental 
element of U.S. national security power for the 21st Century. 
The OPM Director brings human capital expertise, which is 
essential given the complexity of a rotational program that 
spans multiple departments and agencies, each with its own 
human capital system.
    Pursuant to the Act, the Committee on National Security 
Personnel is assisted by a board composed of a designee at the 
level of Executive Schedule level III selected by each of the 
Secretaries of State, Defense, Homeland Security, Justice, 
Treasury, Energy, Health and Human Services, and Commerce and 
by the Director of National Intelligence. The Committee may add 
designees of other heads of departments and agencies. 
Similarly, EO 13434 created an Executive Steering Committee 
comprised of representatives of departments and agencies. 
However, the Act specifies that the designees be at the 
Executive Schedule level III in order to (1) ensure senior 
representation, (2) convey the importance of the rotational 
framework for national and homeland security policy, and (3) 
enable the board to make recommendations to the Committee 
quickly. In addition, the Act specifies that the Committee is 
to be advised by the Chief Human Capital Officers Council to 
ensure that the departments' and agencies' lead officials for 
human capital also are consulted.
    The Committee on National Security Personnel will require 
staff support to administer the rotational framework required 
by this Act. However, this Act does not require the creation of 
any new positions or the spending of any additional funds for 
this purpose. As noted above, the Executive Branch created the 
National Security Professional Development Integration Office 
as the staff support for implementation of EO 13434, and this 
office is housed in DoD for purely administrative reasons. 
There is no statutory authorization for this office or its 
funding, but the office is funded under DoD's Five-Year Defense 
Program. This office serves an Executive Branch-wide function, 
not a DoD-specific function. Given this office's Executive 
Branch-wide function--and that this Act supplants EO 13434--the 
Act transfers the office and its three Full-Time Equivalent 
positions to OMB and OPM for them to utilize as staff support 
for implementation of this Act. The Act contains specific 
language, developed in consultation with the Congressional 
Budget Office, to enable this offset even though the office 
does not have a statutory authorization.
    The Act specifies that DoD is prohibited from creating a 
new office that would duplicate the aforementioned office's 
functioning, although DoD may utilize its personnel to 
administer implementation of the rotational framework required 
under this Act for DoD specifically. Indeed, with respect to 
staffing support in the departments and agencies, the Act 
specifies that department and agency personnel who were already 
designated to administer implementation of EO 13434 be 
responsible for implementation of this Act. Accordingly, the 
Committee does not expect that any new positions will need to 
be created in order to implement this Act.
            8. Initial implementation period
    The Act requires that, during the first five years after 
enactment, the Executive Branch establish two ICIs--domestic 
emergency management, and stabilization and reconstruction. The 
Act requires that twenty to twenty-five personnel from across 
departments and agencies in each ICI perform interagency 
rotational service each year during that five-year period. In 
addition, the Act specifies that such rotations occur within a 
metropolitan area, thus preventing inter-city relocation 
expenses.
    This Committee is aware that the National Security 
Professional Development Integration Office is designing a 
rotational program for domestic emergency management and that 
the program is being structured to prevent any costs to 
participating departments and agencies. The Committee intends 
that the ICI and rotations mandated by the Act for domestic 
emergency management encompass this program.
            9. The quadrennial strategy requirement and the importance 
                    of performance measures
    The Act requires that the Committee on National Security 
Personnel produce a quadrennial National Security Human Capital 
Strategy to develop the personnel necessary for accomplishing 
national security and homeland security objectives that require 
interagency integration. The quadrennial nature of the strategy 
is modeled on the quadrennial DoD, State Department, and DHS 
strategies; in addition, a quadrennial requirement is 
appropriate, as opposed to a shorter time span, given that 
personnel systems are relatively static and require long 
periods of time to change--e.g., to develop appropriate new 
human capital policies, to attract personnel to new positions, 
and to have those personnel serve in such positions. In 
addition, the Act requires the Committee to draft an 
implementation report two years after each strategy.
    One potential critique of the Act is that it does not 
sunset after a limited period of time--for example, three or 
five years--and thus force Congress to assess its effectiveness 
and determine whether to reauthorize it. This Committee is 
sympathetic to the motivation behind this critique--namely, 
that Congress should conduct vigorous and sustained oversight 
concerning the Act's implementation and should not hesitate to 
change or even revoke the Act should the framework prove 
unworkable or counterproductive. However, a sunset itself would 
be unworkable and counterproductive for the Act because a 
critical element of the Act is instituting incentives--over the 
long term--for the best-and-brightest personnel to perform 
interagency rotational service.
     If the Act is subject to a sunset, personnel would 
understandably surmise that the ``strong preference'' for SES 
selection would eventually be ignored or revoked by their home 
departments and agencies; these personnel thus would be 
dissuaded from performing interagency rotational service.
     The effect of the Act's rotational framework on 
interagency efficiency and effectiveness will not be felt until 
successive waves of personnel serve on rotations, return to 
their home departments and agencies with a broader perspective, 
eventually achieve SES and GS-level managerial positions, and 
use their leadership positions to enable whole-of-government 
solutions to national and homeland security problems.
     Indeed, as noted above, the Goldwater-Nichols 
Act's personnel incentives to foster jointness across the 
Military Services took one if not two decades to come to 
fruition in terms of creating a new generation of military 
officers who had a joint rather than Service-specific mindset.
    Although a sunset is inappropriate, the Committee 
emphasizes that performance measures are critical for ensuring 
that the framework is implemented fully and delivers the 
desired benefits over the long term. Accordingly, the Act 
requires that the strategy and the implementation reports 
include data on the following performance measures: (1) the 
percentage of ICI positions available for interagency 
rotational service that were actually filled; (2) the number of 
personnel participating in interagency rotational service in 
each department and agency and interagency body; (3) the length 
of interagency rotational service; (4) reports by departments 
and agencies if they failed to meet their targets for SES 
promotion; (5) the training and education of personnel who 
perform interagency rotational service; (6) the positions held 
by employees who perform interagency rotational service after 
completing such service; and (7) to the extent possible, an 
evaluation of the utility of interagency rotational service in 
improving interagency integration. The Committee also expects 
that the strategy and implementation reports will include 
additional performance measures that the Committee may identify 
as the Act is implemented.
            10. The importance of consultation with outside experts
    The Committee recognizes the complexity involved in 
creating an interagency rotational framework. Thus, the Act 
directs the Committee on National Security Personnel to consult 
with nongovernment organizations in designing and implementing 
this legislation. For example, the Simons Center for the Study 
of Interagency Cooperation, located at Fort Leavenworth, 
Kansas, is a program of the non-profit Command and General 
Staff College Foundation. The Simons Center's mission, which is 
to increase the body of interagency knowledge and to facilitate 
broader and more effective cooperation within the U.S. 
government at the operational and tactical levels, equips it to 
provide useful and practical advice and guidance on initiatives 
designed to increase interagency efficiency and effectiveness.

                        III. LEGISLATIVE HISTORY

    Chairman Lieberman, Ranking Member Collins, and Chairman of 
the Subcommittee on Oversight of Government Management, the 
Federal Workforce, and the District of Columbia (OGM 
Subcommittee) Akaka introduced S. 1268 on June 23, 2011. The 
bill was read twice and referred to the Committee on Homeland 
Security and Governmental Affairs.
    The bill's provisions benefited from, among other things, 
the airing of the issues at an OGM Subcommittee hearing last 
Congress (held on April 30, 2009), entitled ``National Security 
Reform: Implementing a National Security Service Workforce.'' 
Witnesses included: Ms. Nancy Kichak, Associate Director, 
Strategic Human Resource Policy, OPM; Major General William A. 
Navas, Jr., USA, Retired, Executive Director, National Security 
Professional Development Integration Office; Dr. Ronald P. 
Sanders, Chief Human Capital Officer, Office of the Director of 
National Intelligence; The Honorable Bob Graham, Chairman, 
Commission on the Prevention of Weapons of Mass Destruction 
Proliferation and Terrorism; The Honorable Thomas R. Pickering, 
former Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs and 
Guiding Coalition Member, Project on National Security Reform; 
Dr. James R. Thompson, Associate Professor and Head, Department 
of Public Administration, University of Illinois-Chicago. At 
the hearing, Ms. Kichak testified on national security 
professional development and said the issue is of ``critical 
importance to the Federal Government.'' Major General Navas 
described the implementation of EO 13434 and spoke of the need 
for ``interagency experience to see the big picture, connect 
the dots, coordinate effectively, and act decisively.'' Mr. 
Sanders provided an update on the implementation of the 
Intelligence Community's Civilian Joint Duty Program and how it 
can serve as a model for developing a national security 
workforce. Senator Graham and Ambassador Pickering spoke highly 
of interagency rotations and strongly advocated for their 
implementation. Dr. Thompson referenced the 9/11 Commission's 
conclusion that the 2001 terrorist attack was allowed to occur 
in large part by a lack of interagency communication and 
advocated for a joint duty program.
    The Committee considered S. 1268 at a business meeting on 
October 19, 2011. Senators Lieberman, Collins, and Akaka 
offered a substitute amendment, which made minor and technical 
changes to the bill. The Committee adopted a modification 
(making minor and technical changes) offered by Senators 
Lieberman, Collins, and Akaka to the substitute amendment, and 
then adopted the modification and the substitute amendment, 
both by a voice vote. The Senators present for both votes were 
Lieberman, Akaka, Carper, McCaskill, Begich, Collins, Brown, 
and Johnson.
    Finally, the Committee ordered the bill, as amended, 
favorably reported, again by a voice vote. The Senators present 
were Lieberman, Akaka, Carper, Pryor, McCaskill, Begich, 
Collins, Brown, and Johnson. Senator Johnson asked to be 
recorded in opposition.

                    IV. SECTION-BY-SECTION ANALYSIS

Sec. 1. Short title

    This section states that the bill's short title is the 
Interagency Personnel Rotation Act of 2011.

Sec. 2. Finding and purpose

    This section states that 21st Century national security and 
homeland security challenges require a whole-of-government 
approach in order for the U.S. government to operate in the 
most effective and efficient manner.

Sec. 3. Definitions

    This section defines several terms used in the bill. The 
term ``National Security Interagency Community of Interest'' 
(ICI) is defined in subsection 3(9) as positions in the 
Executive Branch which as a group (1) are positions in multiple 
agencies and (2) have significant responsibility for the same 
substantive, functional, or regional subject area related to 
national security or homeland security. (An ICI could be, for 
example, cybersecurity, counterinsurgency, or 
counterproliferation.)
    Subsection 3(5) defines an ``ICI position'' as a position 
that is identified by the head of an agency as a position in 
that agency that has significant responsibility for an ICI and 
is at or greater than GS-11 (or a comparable level of 
responsibility to GS-11). Political appointees are excluded 
from the definition.
    In addition, subsection 3(8) defines ``Interagency 
Rotational Service'' as service by an employee in an ICI 
position that is (1) within an ICI in which the employee has 
served, and (2) within either (a) an agency different from the 
agency employing that employee or (b) in an interagency body 
such as the NSS of the NSC or the Directorate of Strategic 
Operational Planning of the National Counterterrorism Center. 
(Interagency bodies are discussed in this section-by-section in 
section 5 below.)

Sec. 4. Committee on National Security Personnel

    This section establishes the Committee on National Security 
Personnel (``Committee'') within the Executive Office of the 
President. Pursuant to subsections 4(b)-(c), the Committee is 
chaired by the OMB Director and includes the OPM Director and 
the National Security Advisor. Subsection 4(d) directs the OMB 
Director, in consultation with the other two members of the 
Committee, to issue directives and standards for implementation 
of this Act and to validate the actions taken by the 
departments and agencies to implement them.
    Subsection 4(e)(1) establishes a board to assist the 
Committee. That subsection directs that the members shall 
include one designee at Executive Schedule level III selected 
by each of the Secretary of State, the Secretary of Defense, 
the Secretary of Homeland Security, the Attorney General, the 
Secretary of the Treasury, the Secretary of Energy, the 
Secretary of Health and Human Services, the Secretary of 
Commerce, the Director of National Intelligence, and the heads 
of other agencies with the Committee's concurrence. In 
addition, subsection 4(e)(2) requires the Chief Human Capital 
Officers Council to advise the Committee on technical human 
capital issues.
    Subsection 4(e)(3) requires that agency heads designate 
officials within their agencies who are already responsible for 
implementing EO 13434 (which concerns national security 
professional development) to be responsible for implementing 
this Act.
    Finally, subsection 4(e)(4) transfers the functions and 
funding of the National Security Professional Development 
Integration Office, established to administer EO 13434, to OMB 
and OPM to administer the implementation of this Act.

Sec. 5. National security interagency communities of interest

    Subsection 5(a) requires the Committee to identify ICIs on 
an ongoing basis. Pursuant to subsection 5(b), the heads of 
agencies shall identify positions within their agencies that 
are within each ICI and, among such positions, those positions 
that are open to being filled by employees on rotation from 
other agencies.
    Subsection 5(c) also requires the Committee to identify 
``interagency bodies.'' Pursuant to subsection 5(c)(1), 
interagency bodies are entities whose primary mission is 
focused on interagency activity. That subsection directs the 
Committee to identify the NSC (meaning the NSS, which serves 
the NSC, reports to the National Security Advisor, and is 
located in the Executive Office of the President) as an 
interagency body. That subsection also directs the Committee to 
identify the National Counterterrorism Center's Directorate of 
Strategic Operational Planning as an interagency body. (This 
Directorate is responsible for developing interagency plans for 
countering terrorism. The National Counterterrorism Center is 
located within the Office of the Director of National 
Intelligence; the Center's Director reports to the Director of 
National Intelligence but reports to the President for purposes 
of this Executive Branch-wide counterterrorism planning 
activity.)
    Subsection 5(c)(2) states that the heads of interagency 
bodies may designate positions within their interagency bodies 
that are ICI positions (e.g., NSS positions responsible for 
counterterrorism could be positions within a counterterrorism 
ICI). That subsection also states that the heads of interagency 
bodies may designate other positions in their entities that 
would not otherwise be ICI positions (e.g., a position in the 
NSS Executive Secretariat) but for which service in them shall 
be deemed to be interagency rotational service.

Sec. 6. Interagency community of interest rotational service

    Subsection 6(b)(1) requires the Committee to provide for 
employees serving in an ICI position to be assigned on a 
rotational basis to another ICI position that is in another 
agency or in an interagency body and within the same ICI as the 
employee's original ICI position. Subsection 6(b)(2) provides 
an exception--namely, that an employee may be assigned to an 
ICI position in another covered agency or in an interagency 
body that is not in the ICI of the employee's original position 
if the employee has particular nongovernmental or other 
expertise that is relevant to the assigned ICI position.
    Pursuant to subsection 6(c), the head of an agency with 
positions in an ICI determines which of those positions are 
open for interagency rotational service.
    Subsection 6(d) directs the Committee to determine the 
minimum length of a rotation, which may vary by position. 
However, this subsection requires that the period of rotational 
service be sufficient for employees to gain an adequately 
detailed understanding and perspective of the agencies or 
interagency bodies to which they are rotating.
    Subsection 6(e) states that interagency rotational service 
shall be voluntary on the part of an employee unless the head 
of an agency has preexisting authority to assign an employee 
involuntarily.
    Subsection 6(f) states that employees performing 
interagency rotational service shall receive the same training 
at the agency to which they are rotating as that agency 
provides to its own new employees.
    Subsection 6(g) contains a subsection designed to prevent 
agencies from needing a ``personnel float'' (i.e., additional 
personnel) in order to implement this legislation: This 
subsection requires the Committee to ensure that employees are 
rotating across agencies within an ICI in a manner that ensures 
that the original positions of employees performing rotational 
service are filled within a reasonable period by employees 
rotating into the various agencies or by other available 
employees. This subsection also notes that some positions of 
personnel doing a rotation may not need to be filled if the 
agency will not lose effectiveness or otherwise incur costs 
from the employee's absence.
    Subsection 6(h) requires that rotational positions be 
filled by fair and open competition except for positions that 
are otherwise exempt from fair and open competition. Subsection 
6(i) also prevents the bill from altering current personnel 
rights under other provisions of law; this subsection states 
that an employee performing interagency rotational service 
shall have the same rights that would be available to the 
employee if the employee was detailed or assigned under another 
provision of law (i.e., other than this legislation) from the 
agency employing the employee to the receiving agency.
    Subsection 6(j) requires the Committee to consult with 
relevant organizations in formulating and implementing this 
Act. The Act gives a non-inclusive list of such organizations, 
specifying/The Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs 
Committee expects such organizations to include, among others, 
the Simons Center for the Study of Interagency Cooperation at 
the Command and General Staff College Foundation.
    Subsection 6(l) states that employees performing 
interagency rotational service shall receive performance 
evaluations that are based primarily on their contribution to 
the work of the agency in which they are serving their 
rotations and to the functioning of the relevant ICI. Pursuant 
to this subsection, officials of the employee's home agency 
shall conduct such performance evaluations based on input from 
the employee's supervisors during the rotation.
    Subsection 6(k) authorizes the Secretary of Defense to 
assign military officers to ICI positions. Also, subsection 
6(m) section contains a specific provision for Foreign Service 
Officers, stating that service in a rotation freezes ``time in 
class,'' which means that a Foreign Service Officer's service 
in an interagency rotation does not count against the maximum 
time that such officer may serve at a particular grade or level 
in the Foreign Service before having to be promoted or retire.
    Finally, subsection 6(n) requires the Executive Branch to 
submit to Congress annually a list of ICI positions and ICI 
positions open for rotation with an explanation of the criteria 
of selection.

Sec. 7. Selection of senior positions in an interagency community of 
        interest

    Subsection 7(a) requires that there be a strong preference 
for personnel who have done interagency rotational service to 
be selected for SES positions within their home agency that are 
within their ICI.
    Subsection 7(b) states that, beginning the second fiscal 
year after an ICI is identified by the Committee, and every 
year thereafter, the head of each agency that has positions 
within that ICI shall establish the minimum number of that 
agency's senior positions in that ICI that shall be filled by 
personnel who have performed interagency rotational service. 
This subsection requires agency heads to submit that target 
number to Congress at the beginning of the fiscal year and then 
to report at the end of the fiscal year if that target number 
has not been reached.
    Subsection 7(c)(1) states that, for the first three fiscal 
years after the Committee identifies an ICI, service in another 
component of an employee's agency may count as interagency 
rotational service (e.g., an employee of the Department of 
Homeland Security Immigration and Customs Enforcement may do a 
rotation to the Department of Homeland Security Customs and 
Border Protection and have that count as interagency rotational 
service), subject to the Committee's approval.
    Finally, subsection 7(c)(2) states that, for the first 
three fiscal years after the Committee identifies an ICI, 
service by an employee of an agency or component of the 
Intelligence Community pursuant to the Intelligence Community's 
internal rotation program shall constitute interagency 
rotational service.

Sec. 8. Implementation

    Subsection 8(a) requires the Executive Branch to establish 
at least two ICIs during the first four fiscal years after the 
fiscal year of enactment: emergency management, and 
stabilization and reconstruction. That subsection requires, for 
each such fiscal year, between 20 and 25 personnel to perform 
interagency rotational service for each of the two ICIs. 
Pursuant to that subsection, the rotations for each such ICI 
shall take place within a single metropolitan area.
    Pursuant to subsection 8(b), for each such fiscal year, an 
agency shall prioritize rotations under this legislation for 
purposes of utilizing the funds that the agency already has 
available for rotations generally.
    Subsection 8(c) requires that the Committee submit a plan 
to Congress within 270 days after enactment of the Act for the 
establishment of these two ICIs.

Sec. 9. Strategy and performance evaluation

    Subsection 9(a)(1) requires that, no later than the 
beginning of the third fiscal year after the fiscal year of 
enactment, and every four years thereafter, the Committee shall 
issue a National Security Human Capital Strategy to develop the 
personnel necessary for accomplishing national security and 
homeland security objectives that require interagency 
integration. Subsection 9(a)(2) requires the Committee to 
consult annually with the majority and minority of relevant 
Congressional committees and, as the Committee determines 
appropriate, to solicit the views of other relevant entities.
    Pursuant to subsection 9(a)(3), the strategy shall, among 
other things: (1) provide for the implementation of this Act; 
(2) identify best practices from ICIs already in operation; (3) 
identify any additional ICIs to be identified by the Committee; 
and (4) include a description of how the strategy incorporates 
views and suggestions obtained through the consultations with 
Congress.
    In addition, subsection 9(a)(3) requires the strategy to 
include the following performance measures over a multi-year 
period: (1) the percentage of ICI positions available for 
interagency rotational service that were actually filled; (2) 
the number of personnel participating in interagency rotational 
service in each agency and interagency body; (3) the length of 
interagency rotational service; (4) reports by agencies if they 
failed to meet their targets for SES promotion under section 7; 
(5) the training and education of personnel who perform 
interagency rotational service; (6) the positions held by 
employees who perform interagency rotational service after 
completing such service; and (7) to the extent possible, an 
evaluation of the utility of interagency rotational service in 
improving interagency integration.
    Subsection 9(b) requires that, two years after each 
strategy, the Committee shall issue a report that updates and 
assesses the implementation of the strategy, including data on 
the performance measures.
    Finally, subsection 9(c) requires that the strategies and 
reports be submitted to Congress.

Sec. 10. Report by GAO

    No later than the end of the second fiscal year after the 
fiscal year of enactment, GAO shall issue a report to Congress 
concerning: (1) the extent to which rotations enabled the 
employees performing such rotations to gain an adequately 
detailed understanding of the agency or interagency body in 
which the rotational service was performed; (2) the 
effectiveness of the Committee in overseeing and managing the 
rotational service under this Act; (3) the participation of 
agencies in interagency rotational service; (4) the extent to 
which employees were rewarded for performing interagency 
rotational service; and (5) the extent to which or likelihood 
that interagency rotational service improved or is projected to 
improve interagency integration.

Sec. 11. Prohibition of printed reports

    To limit costs, all strategies, reports, or other 
submissions produced by the Committee be published 
electronically rather than in hard-copy.

                   V. EVALUATION OF REGULATORY IMPACT

    Pursuant to the requirements of paragraph 11(b)(1) of rule 
XXVI of the Standing Rules of the Senate, the Committee has 
considered the regulatory impact of this bill. S. 1268 would 
have no regulatory impact. In addition, the bill contains no 
intergovernmental or private-sector mandates as defined in the 
Unfunded Mandate Reform Act and would not effect state, local, 
and tribal governments.

             VI. CONGRESSIONAL BUDGET OFFICE COST ESTIMATE

                                                 December 22, 2011.
Hon. Joseph I. Lieberman,
Chairman, Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, U.S. 
        Senate, Washington, DC.
    Dear Mr. Chairman: The Congressional Budget Office has 
prepared the enclosed cost estimate for S. 1268, the 
Interagency Personnel Rotation Act of 2011.
    If you wish further details on this estimate, we will be 
pleased to provide them. The CBO staff contact is Matthew 
Pickford.
            Sincerely,
                                              Douglas W. Elmendorf.
    Enclosure.

S. 1268--Interagency Personnel Rotation Act of 2011

    S. 1268 would establish a Committee on National Security 
Personnel within the Executive Office of the President to 
improve the integration of national security and homeland 
security personnel. The committee would identify areas of 
interest for interagency cooperation among agencies responsible 
for national security and homeland security. CBO estimates that 
implementing S. 1268 would cost less than $1 million annually 
over the 2012-2016 period, assuming the availability of 
appropriated funds. Those costs would be incurred to implement 
new regulations, provide additional staff training, and to 
cover additional administrative expenses. CBO estimates that 
enacting the legislation would affect direct spending; 
therefore, pay-as-you-go procedures would apply. Enacting the 
bill would not affect revenues.
    S. 1268 contains two provisions that would have an 
insignificant effect on direct spending. The bill would rescind 
certain funds previously appropriated to the Department of 
Defense. In addition, S. 1268 would make it possible for a 
small number of Foreign Service officers to retire one year 
later than they would have otherwise. Postponing retirement 
would initially reduce retirement costs. However, that initial 
reduction would be largely offset in later years by a small 
increase in retirement benefits because the affected Foreign 
Service officers would have an additional year of service. CBO 
estimates that both of those provisions would have an 
insignificant net effect on direct spending over the next 10 
years.
    S. 1268 contains no intergovernmental or private-sector 
mandates as defined in the Unfunded Mandates Reform Act and 
would not affect the budgets of state, local, or tribal 
governments.
    The CBO staff contacts for this estimate are Matthew 
Pickford and Jason Wheelock. This estimate was approved by 
Theresa Gullo, Deputy Assistant Director for Budget Analysis.

                      VII. CHANGES TO EXISTING LAW

    This legislation does not make any changes to existing law.

                                  
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