The Office of Infrastructure Protection (IP) is a component within the National Protection and Programs Directorate. IP leads the coordinated national program to reduce risks to the nation's critical infrastructure posed by acts of terrorism, and to strengthen national preparedness, timely response, and rapid recovery in the event of an attack, natural disaster, or other emergency.

Mission

Protecting the nation's critical infrastructure is a key Department of Homeland Security mission established in 2002 by the National Strategy for Homeland Security and the Homeland Security Act.

This is a complex mission. Critical infrastructure ranges from the nation's electric power, food and drinking water to its national monuments, telecommunications and transportation systems, chemical facilities, and much more. The vast majority of critical infrastructure in the United States is privately owned and operated; thus, public-private partnerships are essential to protect and boost the resilience of critical infrastructure and respond to events.

IP manages mission complexity by breaking it down into three broad areas:

• Identify and analyze threats and vulnerabilities.
• Coordinate nationally and locally through partnerships with both government and private sector entities that share information and resources.
• Mitigate risk and effects (encompasses both readiness and incident response).

IP's Vision and Mission

IP’s vision is a safe, secure, and resilient critical infrastructure based on and sustained through strong public and private partnerships. The IP mission is to lead the national effort to mitigate terrorism risk to, strengthen the protection of, and enhance the all-hazard resilience of the nation’s critical infrastructure.

To fulfill its mission, IP understands that critical infrastructure owners and operators, planners, and responders need to know:

• what the specific risks are in their locations and to their industries;
• how to coordinate with others within and across sectors and share vital information; and
• how to prepare, protect, and respond

IP addresses these needs through the National Infrastructure Protection Plan (NIPP) and a robust set of programs and activities to support critical infrastructure partners in the field. The NIPP establishes both a partnership structure for coordination across 18 critical infrastructure sectors, and a risk management framework to identify assets, systems, networks, and functions whose loss or compromise pose the greatest risk. IP is building on this foundation through expanded mission collaboration with partners, to strengthen not only the protection of critical infrastructure, but also its resilience.

The NIPP structure provides a foundation for strengthening disaster response and recovery. The Critical Infrastructure and Key Resources Support Annex (PDF, 36 pages - 397 KB) to the National Response Framework (NRF) provides a bridge between the NIPP “steady-state” processes for infrastructure protection and the NRF unified approach to domestic incident management. These documents provide the overarching doctrine that ensures full integration of the two vital homeland security mission areas – critical infrastructure protection and domestic incident management.

Within the sector framework, IP works with public and private partners to help assess risk to critical infrastructure, build resilience, and strengthen incident response. IP initiatives fall into six programmatic areas:

• Partnerships, outreach, and training
• Contingency planning and incident management
• Chemical facility security and compliance
• Critical infrastructure protective security and field operations
• Infrastructure analysis, research, and development
• Infrastructure information collection and protection

In addition, IP acts as the Sector-Specific Agency for six critical sectors.

Leadership and Organization

The Office of Infrastructure Protection is led by Assistant Secretary Caitlin Durkovich.

More about the Office of Infrastructure Protection