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| Upcoming Events: | | | 5/21
(4 days) | | 5/21
(3 days) | | 5/21
(3 days) | | 5/21
(4 days) | | 5/30
(2 days) | | 6/3
(4 days) | | | 6/5 | | 6/11
(4 days) | | | More |
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Advisory Council Inaugural Luncheon & SARMA Awards Ceremony
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Phil LaCombe giving the Excellence in Public Service Award to the Honorable David M. Walker, former Comptroller General of the United States, for his seminal role in elevating the use of risk management principles as a tool both for guiding the Nation's investments in homeland security and for evaluating their effectiveness.(Kerry Thomas in the background.)
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Advisory Council/Awards Luncheon a Great Success
On February 2nd, SARMA formally launched its long-anticipated Advisory Council with a well-attended luncheon at Washington's prestigious Cosmos Club. The luncheon also served as an awards ceremony for a number of recent SARMA award recipients.
SARMA is now in its fifth year of operation. The aim of the Advisory Council is to bring together leaders from across government, academia and industry to advise SARMA on its direction and needs as it prepares to enter its next five years of service.
The Council is chaired by Phil Lacombe, who recently completed four years of service as SARMA's Chairman. In his introductory remarks, Lacombe noted that senior leaders in the homeland security community "have charged us with ensuring that SARMA has a strategic path forward that continues to contribute even greater amounts to the success of the nation, to our national security and to global stability."
SARMA President Kerry Thomas called the event "a major milestone for SARMA." SARMA's new Chairman of the Board, John Paczkowski, noted that the organization and the nation as a whole are at a crossroads: "The threat continues to change, there's a period of federal retrenchment in terms of money being put into homeland security, and some very important decisions need to be made about where we're going to put precious resources." He concluded with the prediction that "security risk analysis is going to move to the forefront once again in terms of how the federal government makes those choices."
The luncheon, which was sponsored by PricewaterhouseCoopers and PMC Group, also served as an opportunity to formally present the Hon. David M. Walker, former U.S. Comptroller General, with the SARMA Excellence in Public Service Award he won in late 2011 for "his seminal role in elevating the use of risk management principles as a tool both for guiding the Nation's investments in homeland security and for evaluating their effectiveness."
In his remarks, Walker, founder and CEO of the nonprofit Comeback America Initiative, focused on the threat that high deficit spending and a growing national debt pose to economic and national security. He pointed to the need for better strategic planning across all sectors of government as key to making the right security decisions in the future, and noted that SARMA's role "is of critical importance" in the process, and in fact "is going to increase in importance, because government has grown too big, promised too much and waited too long to restructure."
As Walker put it: "We're going to have to make a lot of tough choices in the coming years over what we're going to do, how we're going to do it, at what level, and how we're going to measure success. We're going to have to realign in many, many different ways, and clearly value and risk have to be central to that process."
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