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Spires: DHS IT security hiring will increase

DHS CIO Richard Spires doesn\'t have anything against contractors, but he wants more feds and fewer contractors in his IT shop.

Federal News Network Staff

October 29, 2010 7:00 pm

< a min read

wfedstaff | June 3, 2015 4:18 pm

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From “Spotlight: DHS adjusting IT workforce” by Molly Bernhart Walker at FierceGovernmentIT.com:

“Homeland Security Department Chief Information Officer Richard Spires doesn’t have anything against contractors, but when it comes to oversight and collaborating across organizational boundaries, federal employees should be leading the way, he said Oct. 25 at an industry conference.

“‘I walk in the door and there’s a little over 100 feds in my organization and there are about 1000 contractors, and I say, “that ratio doesn’t quite seem right to me,”‘ said Spires during a keynote address at the ACT-IAC Executive Leadership Conference. ‘I am not a big believer in outsourcing program management for large programs, we brought that stuff in house at the IRS, I think effectively, and we’re looking to do more of that here.”

“DHS is currently implementing a plan to ‘re-balance’ the workforce. The agency now has 254 federal employees and hopes to reach 350 or 400 DHS workers, when the plan is complete.”

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I played highlights of Mr. Spires’s speech and the question-and-answer segment on the show today. You can listen to the entire event by clicking the audio link.