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Washington, D.C.—Although likely unintended, the administration’s cabinet secretaries have helped make the case for retaining civil service and collective bargaining rights for federal employees in the new Department of Homeland Security. In a letter, they rightfully identified federal workers as “the backbone” of our nation’s homeland security efforts, the president of the National Treasury Employees Union (NTEU) said today.

NTEU President Colleen M. Kelley said the letter from cabinet secretaries to Senate majority and minority leaders Thomas Daschle (D-SD) and Trent Lott (R-MS) “says the same thing NTEU has been saying since the start of this debate about basic civil service rights for employees in the proposed department—that federal employees work hard over long hours and are dedicated to the missions of the various cabinet departments.”

Kelley attacked the letter’s suggestion that homeland security legislation pending in the Senate would not maintain a president’s authority to exclude department employees from collective bargaining agreements. “That is simply not true,” she said.

Under the Senate proposal, employees with collective bargaining rights who are transferred to the DHS could be excluded from collective bargaining if a worker’s job had changed substantially in the new department and a majority of workers in that unit were involved in terrorism-related or intelligence work.

Since enactment of the 1978 Civil Service Reform Act, no president has acted to strip the collective bargaining rights of unionized federal employees performing this kind of work. That history alone should afford these employees some small benefit of the doubt, Kelley said.

The NTEU president also criticized the cabinet secretaries’ letter for saying that every president over the past 24 years has exercised the power to limit federal employees’ collective bargaining rights “with discretion, and responsibly.”

Just nine months ago, she said, in January, President Bush issued an executive order removing from unions on national security grounds some 500 employees of the Department of Justice—despite the fact that most of them had been union members for 20 years or more and virtually none of them had any access to or occasion to work with national security information.

“That act by the president was neither discreet nor responsible,” President Kelley said, “and serves to fuel concerns with how this president would use such unfettered powers to adversely affect employees in a Homeland Security Department.”

NTEU is the largest independent federal union, representing some 150,000 employees in 27 agencies and departments, including some 12,000 in the Customs Service who would become part of the new department.