A letter report issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is developing a resilience policy, but an implementation strategy is a key next step that could help strengthen DHS resilience efforts. DHS defines resilience as the ability to resist, absorb, recover from, or adapt to adversity, and some high-level documents currently promote resilience as a key national goal. Specifically, two key White House documents emphasize resilience on a national level--the 2011 Presidential Policy Directive 8 and the 2012 National Strategy for Global Supply Chain Security. Since 2009, DHS has emphasized the concept of resilience and is currently in the process of developing a resilience policy, the initial steps of which have included creating two internal entities--the Resilience Integration Team and the Office of Resilience Policy (ORP). According to ORP officials, they saw a need to establish a policy that provides component agencies with a single, consistent, departmentwide understanding of resilience that clarifies and consolidates resilience concepts from high-level guiding documents, and helps components understand how their activities address DHS's proposed resilience objectives. ORP officials hope to have an approved policy in place later this year. However, DHS officials stated that …

A letter report issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), within the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), employs a risk-based approach that uses the Automated Targeting System (ATS) and other tools to identify (target) maritime cargo shipments for further examination. ATS is a web-based enforcement and decision support system that includes a set of rules to assess the risk level for each arriving cargo shipment. This set of rules is referred to as the maritime national security weight set (weight set) because each rule in the set has a specific weighted value assigned to it. CBP classifies the risk scores from the weight set as low, medium, or high risk. CBP policy states that a shipment's risk score is to determine, in part, actions taken by CBP officers (targeters) at the ports. Specifically, targeters are generally required to review shipment data for all medium-risk and high-risk shipments and hold high-risk shipments for examination. The risk score, however, is not the sole factor that determines whether a targeter reviews the data for a shipment or whether CBP examines a shipment. In particular, targeters at each of the six ports GAO visited …