Public Administration: Managing Competing Agendas - Essay Example

The outfit is headed by a director who works closely with the chief of staff. Director and chief of staff delegate executive immigration orders to the chief of counsel, policy & strategy officer, deputy director and executive secretariat. The agency has a program department that handles administrative appeals, citizenship, communications, legislative affairs, performance & quality and the transformation coordination. The program officers work closely with the directorate department offices (Uscis.gov, 2015).

Directorate offices discharge customer service and public engagement, service center operations, and field immigration operations. The department caters for enterprise services, fraud detection and national security, management and refugee, asylum and all international operations. The agency has also undergone significant changes that have transformed the way the departments interact. First, the creation of Fraud Detection and National Security Directorate has increased focus on anti-fraud activities and more accountability to security.

Secondly, the Customer Service Directorate gives a cutting edge level of service to immigration customers irrespective of their origin. Lastly, the creation of Domestic Operations Directorate tackles innovation and fosters efficiency to enhance faster immigration processes. The human resource department of USCIS has failed to overcome the decentralization and ad hoc structure (Gao.gov, 2015). The plan has for long resisted any modernization efforts in order to simplify the immigration efforts.

The modernization efforts have been met by a human resource management structure that hardly gave room for efficient organization and business transformation initiatives. However, the last five years have seen profound restructuring not only in the departments but also in key practices that the agency is empowered to undertake. The transformation has not been without financial costs that averaged up to $536 million by 2013. The aim