Home Media Center News Releases

Washington, D.C.—A contract that will pay a private company as much as $175 million over the next three years to design and implement a new personnel system for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is troubling evidence that neither the department nor the administration is interested in the views of front-line employees in helping build a system that will ensure the nation’s safety.

That sharp criticism was expressed today by President Colleen M. Kelley of the National Treasury Employees Union (NTEU), which represents nearly 14,000 legacy U.S. Customs Service employees who now are part of DHS’s Bureau of Customs and Border Protection (CBP).

She made the comments in the wake of a DHS decision to award Northrup Grumman Corp. a contract of up to $175 million to provide “the full range of services” needed to redesign, and then implement, the core human resources systems, including pay and performance, at DHS.

“This suggests that DHS and the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) are not taking seriously their obligation under the Homeland Security Act to meet and confer with the unions representing DHS employees to reach agreement over the new system,” President Kelley said.

“I hope that appropriate appeals are filed to shine the light of public scrutiny” on this contract award by DHS, she said. Such decisions can be appealed to the General Accounting Office (GAO)

Kelley added: “System design decisions should be made jointly during the statutory collaborative process, and not by a contractor,” and noted pointedly that DHS employee unions, including NTEU, have been working with the agency and OPM for a year-and-a-half on these issues—although the agency has yet to incorporate, in any meaningful sense, any positions advanced by the unions.

The NTEU president said she is particularly concerned with DHS’s use of a contractor to do market research dealing with compensation and employee performance appraisal systems. The result, she said, could well be that decisions in these critical areas will be made based on data and survey methods that the contractor will treat as proprietary, and thus refuse to disclose.

The obvious impact, she said, will be that “employees will have no confidence that such data and methods will be fair, objective and reasonable.” From the beginning of the DHS design process, employees and their unions have emphasized the critical importance of having a system that is fair, transparent and credible.

While the actual contract has not yet been provided by DHS, it is clear that the contractor will work on at least six general groups of issues, including program management and integration; pay, performance and classification; labor relations, adverse actions and appeals; training, communications and organizational change management; human resource information technology, and shared services.

“I said at the beginning of this process that any new system that excludes in meaningful ways the voices of front-line workers in DHS is doomed to fail,” President Kelley said. “I fear that this contract is another step in that direction.”

NTEU is the largest independent federal union, representing some 150,000 employees in 30 agencies and departments.