Home Media Center News Releases

Washington, D.C.—The leader of the union representing more than 15,000 employees of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) will tell a Senate committee next week of the likely devastating impact of new DHS personnel regulations on that important agency’s workforce—and the need for the regulations to be redrafted to make the department successful for the American people.

President Colleen M. Kelley of the National Treasury Employees Union (NTEU) will offer her assessment of the DHS regulations in testimony on Thursday, Feb. 10 before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Subcommittee on Oversight of Government Management, the Federal Workforce and the District of Columbia. The hearing is scheduled for 10 a.m. in Room 342 of the Dirksen Senate Office Building.

That subcommittee is chaired by Sen. George V. Voinovich (R-OH), who has a longstanding interest in federal employee issues; President Kelley applauded that continuing interest and in particular his willingness to schedule a hearing on the impact of the DHS regulations.

NTEU, joined by three other unions representing DHS employees, has filed a federal court suit alleging the final regulations are illegal in that they overstep the authority given to DHS in the Homeland Security Act (HSA); and that they subvert congressional intent that DHS employees continue to have a meaningful voice, through their elected union representatives, in decisions affecting them.

The final regulations remove from DHS employees longstanding statutory rights to collective bargaining, and replace them with what President Kelley has described as a “one-sided regime” under which the majority of important conditions of employment are not subject to negotiation, including bargaining on the impact and implementation of management-initiated changes in working conditions.

The regulations also strip from employees meaningful rights to third-party decision-making on important matters affecting their work lives. The responsibility for those decisions, under the regulations, is vested in a DHS-controlled internal labor relations board.

From the beginning of discussions over personnel regulations with DHS more than two years ago, the NTEU leader said, “it was clear that the only system that would work in this agency is one that is fair, credible and transparent. These regulations miserably fail to provide any of those critical elements.”

Kelley also will make the case against extending the DHS regulations, or one similar, to the rest of the federal government. “The changes to the DHS personnel regulations, the president claimed, were for national security purposes,” President Kelley said. “Surely that logic does not extend to other federal agencies. In addition to there being no basis for making such a change across the government, the changes at DHS are still very much a work-in-progress, and remain untested and unproven.”

NTEU is the largest independent federal union, representing some 150,000 employees in 30 agencies and departments.