Home Media Center News Releases

Washington D.C.—The leader of the union representing thousands of frontline border security employees on Thursday will underscore for a key House subcommittee the union’s continuing opposition to the much-maligned Department of Homeland Security (DHS) personnel rules.

“In critical ways, the personnel system established by the Homeland Security Act and subsequent regulations issued by DHS have been nothing but failures,” President Colleen M. Kelley of the National Treasury Employees Union (NTEU) will tell the House Homeland Security Subcommittee on Management, Integration and Oversight. The body will meet at 10 a.m. Thursday in Room 311 of the House Cannon Office Building.

Despite the continuing failures, DHS has signaled its intention to move ahead with implementation of rules impacting employee rights dealing with adverse actions, appeals and performance management.

She will add that “the law and these regulations effectively gut employee due process rights, putting in serious jeopardy the agency’s ability to recruit and retain a capable workforce. NTEU has identified as one of its key legislative priorities for this year working with Congress to repeal DHS’s authority to change the current personnel system by agency regulation.

The impact of these rules will be one of several important personnel issues affecting the morale of DHS employees the NTEU president will address with the subcommittee.

Other issues include the union’s serious concerns with inadequate staffing levels at the nation’s sea and airports within DHS’s Bureau of Customs and Border Protection (CBP); the continuing use by CBP of its misguided “One Face at the Border” program; the pressing need for the grant of law enforcement officer (LEO) status for CBP Officers (CBPOs); and the impact on the nation’s security of widespread low morale in DHS.

“LEO recognition is of vital importance to CBPOs,” Kelley said. “The work they perform every day is as demanding and as dangerous as any other member of the federal law enforcement community.”

NTEU is the largest independent federal union, representing some 150,000 employees in 31 agencies and departments, including 15,000 in CBP.