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Washington, D.C.—In testimony to a key House committee, the president of the National Treasury Employees Union (NTEU) criticized the administration for making a particular point in its pursuit of legislation creating a new Department of Homeland Security that no additional funding nor personnel would be needed.

For employees of the Customs Service, NTEU President Colleen M. Kelley told the House Ways and Means Committee yesterday, that is an all-too-familiar scenario. Customs, where NTEU represents some 12,000 employees, has dealt with its “rapidly increasing workload,” including its expanded national security responsibilities, “with relatively static staffing levels and resources” for some time.

In just the past five years, Kelley pointed out, Customs employees have faced a 60 percent increase in trade entries processed—including more than 16 million cargo containers arriving at the nation’s 301 land, sea and airports annually—a rate that is expected to grow by eight to 10 percent a year.

“No organizational structure” can succeed, she said, “if the government does not provide proper funding.”

The president’s fiscal 2003 budget proposal for Customs is merely “a token increase” from last year’s appropriation, the union leader said, calling it “simply inadequate to meet the needs” of the agency’s employees,

especially in light of their expanded responsibilities after the events of Sept. 11.

Moreover, Kelley told the committee, the president’s budget proposal fails to call for reauthorization of a user fee account that is key to funding the agency. The COBRA fund pays the overtime pay for all Customs inspectors and canine enforcement officers—as well as paying for some 1,100 Customs positions across the country, Kelley said, emphasizing that without reauthorization, the fund will expire on September 30, 2003.

This fund must either “be reauthorized, or Congress must appropriate additional funds to make up for the loss of user fees,” she said.

Kelley warned about the loss of the “unique expertise” of Customs employees, who are responsible not only for serving as the first line of defense against terrorism, drug-smuggling, money laundering, child pornography and a host of other crimes, but for enforcing U.S. trade laws and facilitating more than $1.3 trillion in international trade.

She said failing to make Customs a distinct entity within a new government department “deals severe blows” to three missions in which the agency has “world class expertise”—trade facilitation, collecting revenue from duties on trade, and drug interdiction at the nation’s borders.

President Kelley also repeated her concerns about the unspecified personnel “flexibilities” proposed by the president to be put in the hands of the director of this new department, working with the director of the Office of Personnel Management.

“I fear that the ‘flexibilities’ proposed by the president will lead to many fewer dedicated people willing to work for the new department,” she said. “That would be a shame, and I hope Congress will not let that happen.”

NTEU represents some 150,000 employees in 25 agencies and departments.