Can anyone withstand the scrutiny, criticisms and pressure from the MSM for a long period of time?  Will this position continue to be filled every few years?  

Who/What type of person is best suited for the job...someone eventually has to work out.

Thoughts?

HH

I predict the job will be rotated whenever

1) a new prez is elected
2) something bad happens in the country (attack, disaster, etc.)

I think whomever runs FEMA and/or DHS will be considered expendable, and they will have a very difficult time filling those positions.

I personally think that anybody who was running FEMA was going to lose their job after Katrina hit.

Quoted: Can anyone withstand the scrutiny, criticisms and pressure from the MSM for a long period of time?  Will this position continue to be filled every few years?   Who/What type of person is best suited for the job...someone eventually has to work out. Thoughts? HH

DHS secretary is a VERY complicated job. It is a new agency with a developing internal organization that is trying to make sense out of departments taken from other executive departments. (Agencies don't like re-organization and react poorly to it usually...) The mission for the department is so broad and high profile that truly running it effectively requires a person with a broad range of knowledge.

Add to that operating in the most difficult political environment that has existed since the civil war, and you have a recipie for heartburn.

The DHS is a work in progress and will probably take 15 years or so to get fully sorted out.

Public administration is FAR more difficult than most realize, usually far more difficult than running a private company. Running an agency like DHS requires someone who can wrestle with bureaucracy, has enough specialized knowledge in a public policy area to be able to withstand the bureaucratic expertise of those within the agency, political skills sufficient to keep legislators from causing too many problems yet happily shelling out funding for the department, the ability to conduct good PR, the ability to manage media coverage, the ability to recognize problems within the policy area before they arise, the ability to keep the policy advisors in the White House out of the department's buisness as much as possible, an almost inhuman ability to sort through information, and a host of other skills I don't have time to list.

Public administrators have probably the hardest job in the nation. Everyone in Washington's leadership is persuing their own interests to the point that someone like the DHS secretary has to develop a sub-system of interest group and legislator support just to function, and even that can completely disappear in an instant.

Managing DHS is a task bigger than just about any person in America right now. It is probably the hardest job in Washington. It is made much harder by the fact that half of the legislature is absolutely dedicated to the failure of the administration of which you are a part, and the MSM is even more rabidly committed to that than the legislators.

It is amazing how we seemed to manage so well so long before we had it.