Secretary of Homeland Security

The Secretary of Homeland Security provides strategic guidance, promotes a national unity of effort and coordinates the overall Federal effort to promote the security and resilience of the Nation’s critical infrastructure.

As the principal Federal official for domestic incident management, the Secretary for Homeland Security coordinates Federal preparedness activities in alignment with PPD-8, including coordinating Federal Government responses to significant cyber or physical incidents affecting critical infrastructure (consistent with statutory authorities).

The Secretary of Homeland Security coordinates with other relevant members of the Executive Branch, as appropriate, to support a single, comprehensive approach to domestic incident management so all levels of government across the Nation have the capability to work efficiently and effectively together, using a national approach to domestic incident management.

Additional DHS roles and responsibilities include, as appropriate:

Establish and maintain a comprehensive, multi-tiered and dynamic information-sharing network to provide timely and actionable threat information, assessments and warnings to public and private sector partners;
Sponsor critical infrastructure security and resilience-related research and development, demonstration projects and pilot programs;
Conduct modeling and simulations with SSAs to analyze sector, cross-sector and regional dependencies and interdependencies (including cyber dependencies) and share the results with critical infrastructure partners, as appropriate;
Document and apply lessons learned from exercises, actual incidents and pre-disaster mitigation efforts to critical infrastructure security and resilience activities; and
Evaluate the need for and coordinate the security and resilience of additional critical infrastructure categories over time.

Select this link for the complete list of roles and responsibilities assigned to the Secretary of Homeland Security by PPD-21 (Refer to Pages 41-42)