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Washington, D.C.—As the fiscal 2004 budget process moves forward, the National Treasury Employees Union (NTEU) continues to press Congress to include funding for the marketing of U.S. Savings Bonds—the most widely-held Treasury security in the nation.

More than 55 million Americans hold savings bonds, said NTEU President Colleen M. Kelley, who once again criticized administration plans to eliminate the proven and successful community-based method of marketing the bonds. The plan is part of a Treasury Department effort to sharply increase customer use of the Internet to purchase savings bonds.

Under the proposal, all 41 field offices of the Savings Bond Marketing Office (SBMO) would be closed. SBMO is a unit of the Bureau of the Public Debt (BPD), where NTEU is the collective bargaining agent for some 1,250 employees.

The administration’s proposed 2004 budget eliminates the entire $22.4 million in SBMO funding that supports the community-based program involving SBMO employees working with large and small employers and school districts around the country to encourage participation in the bond program.

“While the drive by Treasury to boost the electronic marketing of its financial instruments might offer some long-term benefits with respect to some of Treasury’s offerings,” Kelley said, “that

is not the case with savings bonds.”

Bonds traditionally—and successfully—have been marketed on the basis of the strong working relationships fostered in communities around the nation by SBMO employees. Eliminating this longstanding marketing program, President Kelley said, will substantially hurt important efforts to improve the financial knowledge and exposure to savings of young Americans.

She added that a cutback in traditional savings bond marketing programs would effectively eliminate a nationwide volunteer network and committee, on which Treasury Secretary John Snow has previously served, that has not only helped contribute to the nation’s financial security, but has aided immeasurably in promoting savings bonds as a patriotic program.

NTEU is the largest independent federal union, representing some 150,000 employees in 29 agencies and departments.