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Washington, D.C.—The escalating controversy over the management of major U.S. port facilities highlights this administration’s manipulation of the ‘national security’ label when that suits its purposes and to shrug its shoulders when it does not, the leader of the union representing thousands of front-line border security workers said today.

“This divergence is most clearly illustrated by a comparison of the administration’s lack of concern over foreign government entities operating U.S. ports with its reliance on ‘security concerns’ to force the most irrelevant and unnecessary rules on the men and women of the Bureau of Customs and Border Protection (CBP),” said President Colleen M. Kelley of the National Treasury Employees Union (NTEU).

Among numerous examples, she cited “the steps this president and his appointed leadership at CBP have taken,” in the name of ‘internal security’ including: preventing employees from wearing beards; preventing them from wearing uniform shorts in warm climates; preventing dedicated CBP employees working at U.S. borders from living in either Canada or Mexico; denying them the availability of a dedicated telephone line to receive calls about family emergencies; preventing pregnant CBP Officers from wearing shoulder rather than waist holsters; and others.

The real issues at the nation’s ports are two-fold, said Kelley: one, staffing is woefully inadequate to carry out the necessary inspections to ensure that cargo entering our country is secure; and two, there is a significant loss of expertise and specialization due to the mismanaged ‘One Face at the Border’ program.

The president’s budget proposal would do nothing to shore up critical staffing. In fact, the 2007 Department of Homeland Security budget request calls for the addition of only 21 fulltime employees at the 317 ports of entry, despite a recent Government Accountability Report that cites the lack of a staffing plan and increased resources for staffing at ports of entry.

Apart from the staffing shortages, the ‘One Face at the Border’ initiative is having a particularly serious negative impact. It seeks to combine the positions of legacy Customs, Immigration and Agriculture inspectors into a single position at border crossings. The result is a severe loss of inspectional expertise, with CBP employees now required to perform multiple and vital functions for which they were not trained.

President Kelley said the administration is seeking to assure Americans the nation’s ports are safe by pointing to business-based initiatives such as the Container Security Initiative and the Customs Trade Partnership Against Terrorism. It’s a false sense of security, she said, since these programs, and others, have been roundly criticized by security and trade experts as being inefficient and falling short of the need.

As to the present controversy about port management, the NTEU leader said “this White House can’t have it both ways by claiming the existence of false security issues when it suits its political purposes, then arguing that no such issues exist.”

NTEU is the largest independent federal union, representing some 150,000 employees in 30 agencies and departments, including some 14,000 in CBP. That latter number makes NTEU the largest union representing CBP employees.