Homeland Security chief Markwayne Mullin: DHS suffering ‘morale issues’ after record shutdown

Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin said his department’s workforce is diminished and key projects are behind schedule after a record 76-day shutdown that ended Thursday.

“It’s going to take some time to recover,” Mr. Mullin said on “Fox News Sunday.”

“Were we able to still be mission capable? Yes,” he said. “Were we able to pick up everything that was being brought to us? No.”

Mr. Mullin said the department is still suffering from “a tremendous amount of morale issues.”

Some of the low morale stems from employees being furloughed or working without pay during the first half of the shutdown before President Trump signed an executive order tasking Mr. Mullin with finding emergency funds for payroll.

That emergency funding was set to run out at the beginning of this month, and the prospect of employees losing paychecks again helped resolve the funding impasse in Congress.

However, the damage from the shutdown still lingers.

Mr. Mullin cited “large turnover” among DHS employees, including 1,100 who left the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency.

The Transportation Security Administration had 8% employee turnover during the shutdown, nearly double its 4.6% average.

DHS was only authorized to continue essential operations during the shutdown, so some programs and projects were on pause for more than two months.

Mr. Mullin cited as an example the Coast Guard agency that issues licenses for barges and boats operating in U.S. waters.

“They’re 18,000 vessels behind,” he said. “And even if we did nothing but just work on the vessels behind, it would take us till the end of July to get them licensed and back on the water. That’s going to have a huge impact on what happens throughout transportation.”

Without funding from Congress, DHS was not authorized to pay most of its bills so had hundreds of electric and gas bills in default, Mr. Mullin said, noting in some cases other executive branch departments would pay those bills for DHS.

He blamed Democrats for the shutdown and its impacts because they refused to fund DHS’ immigration enforcement agencies.

“This is all because the Democrats wanted to have open borders and allow criminals to flow freely on the streets,” he said. “And it makes absolutely no sense.”