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The Reorganization of the US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) and Its Effects

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Abstract

Few studies have assessed the consequences of reorganization on the perceptions of employees. The article examines the effects of the reorganization of the US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) on employee perceptions. It is based on the Federal Human Capital Survey, an important dataset prepared by the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) to improve the performance of federal agencies. The article assesses changes by comparing measures using t-tests and analysis of variance. The results show that the reorganization of the agency had a statistically significant effect on employee perceptions of performance, goal communication, internal communication, and resources.

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Notes

  1. The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) are still important along with the Defense Department to prevent terrorism. However, the need to improve the level of domestic security led to the creation of the DHS, which became a prominent actor in implementing the National Strategy for Homeland Security (Government Accountability Office 2005; National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, 2003).

  2. Other components exclude office, boards, and divisions under the DOJ.

  3. While the data used for the study may seem outdated, it is ideal to use the two implementations of the Federal Human Capital Survey carried out in 2002 and 2006 since the reorganization of the federal government involving the DHS occurred in 2003. If the study extends the time horizon by using the latest data, it would invite many unknown internal and external factors that would make it difficult to measure the impact of the reorganization. Finally, the fact that there are few empirical studies exploring the impact of reorganizations further validates the importance of the attempt to empirically examine whether such an impact exists.

  4. The FHCS is a secondary dataset. The measures may not be perfect, but the OPM thinks that the FHCS helps agencies to work and perform better and provides a useful tool for them to improve their human resource management. It also assists agencies in identifying management needs and conditions surrounding public employees (United States Office of Personnel Management 2005). The FHCS became the Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey (FEVS) in 2010. The survey results and reports along with the survey questions are available to the public.

  5. The study includes time effects for two reasons: in case there is a structural break in the data such that one time period is not comparable, and to account for any trends. The study finds significant main and interaction effects even though we estimate significant main effects associated with time. This goes some way towards reducing the concern that there are no general differences between the two time periods in the study.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Graduate School of Public Administration, Seoul National University, Seoul, Korea

    Soo-Young Lee & Jae Young Lim

  2. Carl Vinson Institute of Government, University of Georgia, Athens, GA, USA

    Taesik Yun

  3. Department of Public Administration and Policy, University of Georgia, Athens, GA, USA

    Andrew B. Whitford

  4. Community Wellbeing Research Center, Graduate School of Public Administration, Seoul NationalUniversity, Seoul, Korea

    Jae Young Lim

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  1. Soo-Young Lee
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Correspondence to Jae Young Lim.

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Lee, SY., Yun, T., Whitford, A.B. et al. The Reorganization of the US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) and Its Effects. Public Organiz Rev 20, 647–663 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11115-019-00462-4

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