Home
Media Center
News Releases
Washington, D.C.— The government’s independent, investigative arm today told a House panel that the Customs Service will not provide personal radiation detectors to all its front-line personnel until the end of this fiscal year and questioned the effectiveness of the detectors.
“The administration and some of its allies in the Senate have inaccurately accused NTEU of blocking the distribution and use of radiation detectors, thus being an obstacle to homeland security,” said National Treasury Employees Union (NTEU) President Colleen M. Kelley. “In fact, NTEU never blocked their distribution and use but did raise questions regarding training on the use of detectors and questioned how well the detectors actually worked.”
NTEU’s concerns were reinforced in testimony by the General Accounting Office (GAO) to a House Committee on Energy and Commerce subcommittee.
“What GAO found in its investigation was that the pagers will not even be available for all Customs employees for months, despite a patently untrue suggestion by the president that all employees would have them, if it weren’t for the union,” Kelley said. NTEU told the Customs Service earlier this year that the union had no objection to the mandatory use of these detectors.
The GAO also told the House members that the radiation detectors “have limitations” and are “not designed to detect weapons-usable nuclear material.” Rather the detectors are designed to be used in conjunction with other radiation detection equipment, such as portal monitors. Customs currently has one such portal monitor in use at a U.S. port.
“While the president and others tried to paint the union as obstructionist in improving homeland security, this GAO report only shows that NTEU was asking the right questions long before anyone else. The administration still insists that collective bargaining hampers homeland security, but the truth is that NTEU has long worked with the Customs Service in improving homeland security,” Kelley said.
NTEU represents nearly 12,000 employees of the U.S. Customs Service, who are among the 170,000 federal workers from some 22 agencies and departments who would be transferred to the Department of Homeland Security.