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Washington, D.C. — The White House budget blueprint for fiscal 2009 contains a proposed staffing increase at the nation’s 327 ports of entry that is “completely inadequate,” the president of the union representing front-line homeland security employees said today.

President Colleen M. Kelley of the National Treasury Employees Union (NTEU) contrasted the administration’s proposal to add a mere 539 CBP Officers (CBPOs)—fewer than two at each air, land and seaport—with the agency’s own staffing allocation model and a Government Accountability Office report showing that CBP needs between 1,600 and 4,000 additional CBPOs at border crossing points.

“This budget proposal represents a serious lapse in judgment,” President Kelley said.

Everyone who has looked at the issue of ports of entry staffing has come to the same conclusion, the NTEU leader said—namely, that significant additional staffing and resources are critical to our national security. “This is a continuing failure on the part of the White House to address this glaring need.”

Staffing shortages already have caused long lines to form at border crossing points and been the subject of congressional scrutiny in Vermont and El Paso, Texas. As new border security initiatives are rolled out, the lack of adequate staff will become even more acute, President Kelley said.

“In order for CBP to be successful in its twin mission of stopping terrorists and illegal people and goods from entering the country while facilitating legitimate travel and trade, thousands of additional CBP Officers must be hired,” said Kelley. “This ongoing shortfall serves our country poorly.”

Staffing shortages are also contributing to declining morale among CBP employees and causing workers to leave the agency in droves. According to GAO, an average of 52 CBP Officers left the agency in each two-week period during fiscal year 2007, up from an average 34 employees in each two-week period in fiscal year 2005.

“Currently CBP is scrambling just to backfill empty positions,” said President Kelley. There are a number of steps that CBP, and its parent agency—the Department of Homeland Security (DHS)—can take to raise morale and increase the retention rate of skilled and experienced employees:

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Halt the “One Face at the Border” program that combines the work of immigration, customs and agriculture into one position. The only clear result of this effort is diminished specialization and a weakening of the quality of passenger and cargo inspections.

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Drop efforts to impose on DHS employees a discredited new personnel system, parts of which were declared illegal in federal court due to an NTEU lawsuit.

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Allow employee input into the shift management system. CBP employees currently have little say in their schedules with workers forced to work with split days off, different daily shifts within the same work week and arbitrary changes to their working hours with little notice. NTEU recently won an arbitration decision declaring these management practices in violation of federal law and regulation.

“Both DHS and CBP need to get their priorities straight,” President Kelley said, “and that means focusing on real-world staffing and resource requirements, so employees are in the best possible position to perform their important security and trade facilitation tasks on behalf of the American people.”

NTEU is the largest independent federal union, representing 150,000 employees in 31 agencies and departments, including some 22,000 in CBP.