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Washington, D.C.—In a spirited noontime demonstration, more than 250 members of the National Treasury Employees Union (NTEU) marched and chanted yesterday at the Washington headquarters of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) in opposition to agency plans to cut as many as 700 jobs.

NTEU President Colleen M. Kelley told the cheering crowd that their challenge now is “to make sure our voices are heard” on proposed cutbacks at the FDIC, and “to not let this agency, or any agency, sidestep Congress and ignore the public’s demand for greater accountability” by its banks and others businesses, and by federal regulators.

NTEU represents some 4,600 employees at the FDIC. The agency, whose employees monitor and aid in maintaining the health and well-being of the nation’s banking system, wants to reorganize and reduce its workforce even as it contracts out to the private sector the work of federal employees.

President Kelley told the chanting, sign-waving crowd that the FDIC plan is “taking a needless risk” in its plan to conduct a reduction in force in its legal division and its proposed elimination of some 700 jobs, especially at the same time it is reporting a sharp increase in the number of “troubled” financial institutions. That report comes on the heels of five bank failures already in 2002, a figure greater than the number of banks that closed in all of 2001, she said.

The NTEU leader said the FDIC is making “a monumental mistake in its plan to gut the agency of the institutional knowledge and skills it needs,” calling that “a mistake that our country cannot afford” and one that “need not be made, given the capable and committed FDIC employees on the job for America.”

She emphasized that the issue is one of accountability. The FDIC says it will eliminate 700 jobs “at a time when the workload is increasing,” Kelley said, “…at a time when more and more banks are at risk, at a time when the American people not only expect but are demanding the federal government provide and enforce greater accountability.”

To emphasize that message, demonstrators carried signs with such slogans as “Less Bank Regulation? Remember The ‘80s” and “Safe Banks Yes, Enron No.”

The latter reference is to the ongoing bankruptcy scandal of the huge energy trading company, Enron Corp. The “Safe Banks Yes, Enron No” chant was shouted repeatedly by the protesting NTEU members, as they marched in front of FDIC headquarters both before and after President’s Kelley’s remarks.

In broader terms, the NTEU leader used her rally remarks to address the union’s concerns about administration efforts to increase the amount of government contracting. “The rhetoric of reorganization is well known here in the nation’s capital,” she said, “and lately, it is a language being spoken at an ever-increasing number of our federal agencies.” She pointed to a plan at the Department of Energy (DOE for a reduction-in-force of some 1,000 employees as one example.

President Kelley urged Congress to “be suspect” of any reorganization plan “that has left out the most important ingredient—the views of those doing the work.”

NTEU is the largest independent federal union, representing some 150,000 employees in 25 agencies and departments.