Washington monument surrounded by flags

Our Capabilities

Our primary objective in conducting research and analysis is to support decision makers with results and recommendations they can use as a basis for action. We employ a multidisciplinary team approach to address disparate stakeholders’ perspectives. We also come to problems from a systems thinking perspective, integrating policy, economic, technical, operational, and other factors.

Consistent with our original charter and the future needs of DHS, we continually enhance our core capabilities in business enterprise, workforce, policy, operations, program, and threat and risk analysis.

Policy Analysis

Policy analysis informs homeland security policy through independent and objective analysis across the various stages of the policy process. Our skills and competencies include:

  • Strategic analysis, including emerging issues, futures, trends, and environmental scanning and monitoring
  • Policy analysis, including stakeholder identification, landscape surveys, analysis of authorities, identification of options and alternatives, risk assessment, budget assessment, testing and red-teaming, modeling, and specific issue “deep dives”
  • Policy development, including strategic planning, requirements development, doctrine development, issue analysis, process coordination across the homeland security enterprise, and stakeholder engagement
  • Policy implementation, including stakeholder outreach and development of enabling process and governance frameworks
  • Policy evaluation, including performance measurement, metrics development, outcome and impact analysis, capabilities and gap analysis, and identification of lessons learned