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Washington, D.C. —The head of the National Treasury Employees Union (NTEU) said today that more needs to be done beyond the administration’s fiscal 2012 modest budget request to address serious staffing shortages in the number of frontline Customs and Border Protection (CBP) Officers, Agriculture Specialists and trade-related personnel.

In testimony submitted today to the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Homeland Security, NTEU President Colleen M. Kelley said the men and women of CBP “are deserving of more resource and technology to perform their jobs better and more efficiently.”

The NTEU leader added: “After a net decrease of over 500 CBP Officer positions between 2009 and 2011, the administration is only seeking appropriated funding to support 300 CBP Officers above the fiscal 2011 budget and additional canine assets to port of entry operations,” she said.

Moreover, she said, staffing in CBP’s other critical mission—its trade-related functions— essentially has been frozen at March, 2003, levels. “As a result, CBP’s revenue function has suffered,” she said, noting that CBP, which is the government’s second largest generator of revenue, collected $29 billion in 2009, a drop of more than $2 billion from just a few years earlier. The administration’s fiscal 2012 budget proposes no increase in CBP trade operations personnel.

Separately, and earlier today, the House Appropriations Committee approved its version of the fiscal 2012 homeland security appropriations measure that provides for a total of 21,186 CBP Officers.

President Kelley also used her testimony to express the union’s concerns that CBP “is continuing to increase the number of supervisors, when a much greater need exists for new frontline hires.” In real numbers since the creation of CBP in 2003 within the Department of Homeland Security, “the number of new managers has increased at a much higher rate than the number of new frontline CBP hires.”

CBP’s own numbers, she said, showed a 2009 ratio of one supervisor for every CBP five Officers and one supervisor for every six CBP Agriculture Specialists. In part, she said, “the tremendous growth in CBP managers and supervisors at the (ports of entry) has come at the expense of national security preparedness and frontline positions.”

She also called on Congress to examine the existing schedule of user fees to ensure that such fees relate more realistically to the cost of processing and inspection, noting that some user fees have not been increased in years, and some cover only a portion of recoverable fee-related costs.

Congress authorized user fees as a dedicated source of funding to pay for inspectional overtime, which becomes particularly important in light of the agency’s lack of adequate staffing.

NTEU is the largest independent federal union, representing 150,000 employees in 31 agencies and departments, including the entire 24,000-employee CBP workforce.