ISCD Hearing Fallout – Act I

I’m hearing rumors that Assistant Secretary Todd Keil, who heads (headed?) the DHS NPPD Office of Infrastructure Protection, has been fired (‘within hours of the hearing’). If true this would likely have been in response to questions asked by Rep. Scalise (R,LA) about why people haven’t been fired.

Keil would have been the political appointee between Under Secretary Beers and ISCD’s Director Penney Anderson. Beers made reference to him a number of times in his testimony Friday, though I can’t recall him actually using Keil’s name, just his title.

Now, if Keil was insulating Beers from the problems at ISCD, Beers would certainly be justified in removing him. Or it could be just a move to make it look like Beers had not been informed about the problems until June of last year as he testified. Only a real investigation (looking increasingly unlikely after Friday’s undersight hearing) would be able to tell for sure. Anyway he was a political appointee so he almost certainly wasn’t ‘fired’ but rather asked to resign; no big thing.

Keil was kind of late coming to the game. I can’t remember exactly when he was appointed by President Obama, but it was quite a while after Beers took over NPPD (December 2009 according to his DHS Bio). In fact, some of the problems of multiple temporary managers at ISCD were due to that delay in appointing Keil. Sue Armstrong, then the Director of ISCD, served as Acting Assistant Secretary for quite some time, leaving her Deputy, Dennis Deziel, in charge as the first in a string of acting-Directors.

I haven’t been able to confirm the rumor and Keil is still listed on the OIP web page as the head of OIP. If it is true that he has left the building who will take over OIP. Will they ‘temporarily’ promote Ms. Anderson to Acting Assistant Secretary? Then her Deputy David Wulf would then double hat as the Director. Yep, that would make solving the problems at ISCD much easier.