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Washington, D.C.—From its misguided program to centralize border inspectional expertise to its inability to adequately staff U.S. ports of entry, the policies of the Bureau of Customs and Border Protection (CBP) are jeopardizing the nation’s security in meaningful ways, the leader of the union representing CBP employees told a key House homeland security subcommittee today.

CBP’s ‘One Face at the Border’ program is not working, National Treasury Employees Union (NTEU) President Colleen M. Kelley said in testimony before the House Homeland Security Subcommittee on Management, Integration and Oversight, adding that Congress must ensure that inspectional expertise is maintained at U.S. border crossings. The subcommittee met to examine Department of Homeland Security personnel and security clearance issues.

The misguided and mismanaged ‘One Face at the Border’ program, President Kelley said, has sought to combine the inspectional expertise of legacy Customs, Immigration and Naturalization and Agriculture Department inspectors into a single port of entry position. Instead, she warned the subcommittee, the result has been a continuing and severe loss of such expertise which “jeopardizes our national security.”

On a related matter, the NTEU leader faulted CBP’s staffing decisions at the nation’s 317 air, land and seaports. These critical locations are “woefully understaffed,” she said. The House has called for the addition of 1,200 new CBP Officers over six years—a number President Kelley described as “far short of the need”—and emphasized NTEU’s support for a Senate proposal to add at least another 2,500 CBP Officers to ports of entry.

Moving beyond these pressing issues, the NTEU leader told the subcommittee of the low morale among CBP employees—the main cause of which is the agency’s continued efforts to impose on them a regressive personnel system that would sharply erode employees’ collective bargaining, due process and appeal rights.

NTEU, as lead counsel for all Department of Homeland Security unions, has succeeded twice in winning federal court rulings preventing implementation of the regulations.

But the personnel regulations aren’t the only matter adversely impacting morale, Kelley said. Another is CBP’s misuse of national and internal security arguments to justify actions “that have no security implications,” she told the subcommittee.

Among others such actions, Kelley pointed to a CBP claim that wearing uniforms with shorts was a threat to security and a directive outlawing facial hair and implementing strict limitations on hair styles—both of which were rejected by neutral third-parties after NTEU objected.

“It is particularly disturbing to CBP employees that security concerns are falsely raised on these types of minor issues,” she said, when issues with “real security implications” like the recent controversy involving Dubai Ports World and lack of adequate staffing “go unquestioned by CBP.”

The NTEU leader also noted the failure of CBP to offer its strong support for bipartisan legislation—H.R. 1002—that would provide law enforcement officer (LEO) status for CBP Officers. LEO status is “long overdue for these employees who perform critical law enforcement duties every day,” she said.

NTEU is the largest independent federal union, representing some 150,000 federal workers in 30 agencies and departments, including nearly 16,000 in CBP.