Cohen reorganizes DHS science with “customer-focused” research

Jay Cohen, the retired rear admiral and former submarine commander who has taken the helm as undersecretary of the science and technology directorate at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), worked the crowd in the hallways of the Ronald Reagan building like a professional politician—with a smile, a firm handshake, and eye contact. The event was a four-day conference in mid-May on how defense contractors could better do business with the newly reorganized science and technology directorate.

The conference, sponsored by the National Defense Industrial Association, was a showcase of high-tech gear. Even the name badges worn by the participants were electronic, allowing the exchange of business-card information merely by beaming them at each other. Despite the flash of the technology on display, the message Cohen and other DHS officials delivered was blunt and cautionary.

“We don’t buy no junk,” Cohen told the contractors in the auditorium. “My experience in S&T is that about half the stuff presented doesn’t work. That doesn’t mean we don’t want to hear about it, but in the end it had better work.” Michael Jackson, a DHS deputy secretary, reinforced Cohen’s message by announcing that if new technology fails to meet DHS standards, “We’ll flush it.”

Cohen and Jackson also warned the contractors that Congress is skeptical about the performance of the DHS, and has expressed that skepticism by cutting the S&T budget dramatically in fiscal year 2007 and threatening to do the same in FY 2008. And if a Democrat wins the White House, the future of the DHS may be even less certain. “You have to think about what we can do to make this department as strong as possible before the start of the next administration,” Jackson said. “We are setting a lot of systems for delivery by the end of 2008, and we have no room not to succeed.”

With that bureaucratic and political pressure as a backdrop, Cohen, the former chief of the Office of Naval Research (ONR), talked with Physics Today about his approach to strengthening a directorate that currently has a budget of $628 million.

PT: Last year a Senate appropriations committee report described the S&T directorate as “a rudderless ship without a clear way to get back on course.” The description is particularly apt, given your background. What are you doing to get back on course?

Cohen: First, I drive by looking through the windshield, not the rearview mirror. And I came here with my eyes wide open. The DHS S&T directorate is a management organization. We are the mutual funds, the venture capitalists of S&T. We don’t do S&T, we resource S&T.

Frequently, organizations like the National Science Foundation and the Office of Naval Research sometimes come to believe that the scientists, the laboratories, and the universities are their customers. That is not my model. They are the basis for providing the new ideas, the breakthroughs, the discoveries that change our world, but they are the providers, not the customers. My customers are the 22 components and agencies that make up DHS, from the Coast Guard and Transportation Security Administration to the Secret Service and border protection. And, in law, I also have the customer of my customers, the first responders—the police, fire, EMTs [emergency medical technicians], and bomb disposal.

So my organization needs to be customer focused and output oriented. But it respects and provides the resources and inspiration for scientists, universities, and laboratories. It’s a balance between the two.

PT: With so many different customers within DHS, how do you apportion your budget between basic and applied research and developmental work?

Cohen: In my job, I get to balance risk, cost, the impact of what we do, and time until delivery. In my model, which runs from basic to applied research and to advanced technology, I get to take risks with millions of dollars—which means the chance for success or failure—in order to keep from putting billions of dollars in acquisition money at risk.

So I have an investment portfolio that, when we reach a steady state, which I hope will be by the FY 2009 budget, basic research will represent about 20% of our budget, product transition or spiral development, about 50% of my budget. Another 10%, which is provided for in law, is for Homeland Security Advanced Research Projects, which is a DARPA-like model in the enabling legislation.

I take 10% of that money, or 1% of my total budget, and apply it to “homeworks,” which is my DHS version of “swampworks.” [Cohen established swampworks within ONR to do high-risk research.] I’ve divided my innovation portfolio into two groups. One is called HIPS, which is homeland innovative prototypical solutions. These are game changers, leap-ahead, high-risk projects … where I expect success, but they could fail. Then there is HITS, or high-impact technology solutions, which is the 1% of money in homeworks. Here I expect failure, but if they are successful, wow, we’ve changed the world.

PT: Who brings in the projects? Define the role of scientists.

Cohen: In an S&T management organization such as we have, it is a balance between scientist/researchers and engineers/program managers. The scientist/researchers are the input function, and they are critically important. They have metrics—peer-reviewed papers, patents, and awards. Engineers also have metrics, but their metrics are associated with federal acquisition regulations. Scientists and engineers … have a difficult time reconciling their different time frames, their different rule sets.

Scientists really focus on basic research, and that’s where their dollars come from. Engineers focus on advanced technology dollars, or output. But in the middle is … applied research. A scientist wants one more dollar of applied research to mature their discovery. But they don’t always want to transition their discovery because it’s like an adoption. And once they mature an invention and give it up, they have to find a new area to pursue. The engineer also wants one more dollar of applied research, but he wants it to [lessen the risk] of his prototypical solution. It’s up to my division director to be the Solomon and move the fulcrum toward the scientist or toward the engineer.

PT: At your recent defense contractors meeting, several speakers talked about how, in the recent past, it wasn’t unusual for two … DHS directorates, say the Secret Service and Border Patrol, to both be contracting for the same or similar technology. One group didn’t know what the other group was doing, and there was duplication. How are you solving that problem?

Cohen: There are some cultural changes going on. You have to remember this department is only four years old, and it is an incredible experiment in nuclear fusion. We took 22 disparate agencies and brought them together. It was absolutely the right thing to do because terrorists, criminals, and narco drug dealers will all take advantage of seams. An organization that has seams is bad for security. So DHS was put together to eliminate seams, and it remains a work in progress.

PT: When you took over the S&T directorate in August 2006, Congress had cut the budget by nearly 50% in the previous two budget cycles. The word on the hill now is that the administration’s FY 2008 budget proposal of $656 million for S&T is just a placeholder until Congress can assess your reorganization. Is there hope for more money as a result of your reorganization?

Cohen: OMB [the Office of Management and Budget] last October had me realign the president’s FY 2008 budget request to match this new organization and new investment portfolio. This is a transition year, and we are giving the hill and the administration plenty of opportunities to invest in our programs, but we must show that we are worthy and that the product line that we are investing in will make the nation safer.

PT: With your military background, what terrorist threat do you worry about most?

Cohen: I have all of the fears that any citizen has, but at the end of the day, my two top priorities are interoperability for our first responders [clear radio communications between different emergency organizations in a crisis] and of much greater importance, improvised explosive devices [IEDs].

The interoperability is more a governance and cultural issue than a technology issue because with today’s technologies, we can connect people. The question is, do they want to be connected.

I believe that IEDs are coming to a theater near us and the tactics, techniques, and procedures that our soldiers, sailors, Marines, and airmen are using [against IEDs] in Afghanistan and Iraq would not be acceptable here in the homeland. My customer base, our first responders, have different rules of engagement [from the military]. So we have got to be able to predict, detect, defeat, and destroy, at range—which I define as 100 yards—suicide- and vehicle-borne IEDs. And that’s what keeps me up at night.

PT: Is there a way to do that?

Cohen: Right now I don’t have it. But that is why this [directorate] is science and technology.