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When a pilot a month ago deliberately crashed his private plane into a Texas office building housing some 200 Internal Revenue Service (IRS) employees, the men and women inside that building reacted with incredible bravery and acts of heroism, the leader of the union representing IRS employees told a House subcommittee today.

“I think that hearing what went on immediately after the attack may help to increase the urgency of preventing this from happening again,” President Colleen M. Kelley of the National Treasury Employees Union (NTEU) told the House Oversight and Government Reform Subcommittee on the Federal Workforce.

The subcommittee, chaired by Rep. Stephen Lynch (D-Mass.), conducted a hearing on the safety and security of the federal workplace, at which President Kelley offered several suggestions to achieve that necessary end.

Much of her testimony, however, was devoted to the stories of individual IRS employees in the wake of that attack, which killed a 27-year veteran of the agency, Vernon Hunter.

These stories included describing the work of two who used a crowbar to break a window—they first, unsuccessfully, tried using a chair—and take themselves and four of their colleagues to safety down a ladder placed by a passer-by; those who delayed their own escape from the smoke-enveloped offices to call to and help guide their dazed co-workers to doorways leading to stairs; employees who went back into the building to help evacuate colleagues with disabilities; and one who carried an employee with mobility problems on his back down four flights of stairs to the outside.

These “incredible stories of terror and heroism,” the NTEU leader told the subcommittee, were shared by employees when she, joined by Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and IRS Commissioner Douglas Shulman, visited with the Austin IRS employees shortly after the attack.

President Kelley said NTEU has requested the IRS undertake, with employee participation, “a comprehensive review of safety and security measures at all of its facilities around the country, many of which have no guard or armed presence at all.” She further called for increased staffing and training for the Federal Protective Service, and efforts to ensure that IRS employees have access to any information on taxpayers who may pose a threat to their safety as they perform their duties.

At the same time, Kelley took note of comments by some public figures purporting to understand the motivation of the suicide pilot. “I have to say that I was shocked to hear comments from elected officials that expressed empathy for the man responsible for the horrific attack in Austin that took the life of a wonderful, patriotic American, who was carrying out the laws that this Congress writes,” she said.

Kelley called for “holding public officials to a responsible level of discourse when it comes to the federal government and those who work for it,” adding that “I am not asking for limitations on free speech rights, but I am asking the members of this committee and this Congress to forcefully denounce this kind of irresponsible rhetoric before it contributes to more misguided violence against federal workers who are just doing their jobs.”

NTEU is the largest independent federal union, representing 150,000 employees in 31 agencies and departments, including tens of thousands in the IRS.