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Washington, D.C.—Two recent reports detailing serious problems in the Department of Homeland Security (DHS)—including an erosion of inspectional expertise at the nation’s borders—underscore serious and continuing concerns raised by the National Treasury Employees Union (NTEU), the union’s president said today.

One of the reports was issued by members of Congress with committee assignments dealing with homeland security and related issues; the other was presented by the DHS Inspector General.

“These broad reports touch on multiple aspects of DHS’s operation,” said NTEU President Colleen M. Kelley, and when the documents deal specifically with border security and the role played by DHS’s Bureau of Customs and Border Protection (CBP), “they offer conclusions that mirror the concerns NTEU has been raising for some time.”

These include the department’s continuing efforts to put in place a regressive personnel system that would severely curtail the collective bargaining, due process and appeal rights of employees; a lack of sufficient resources—including both personnel and technology; and serious problems created by DHS’s insistence of combining border security personnel with highly-specialized skills into a single inspection force known as “One Face at the Border.”

The ‘One Face’ initiative has drawn widespread criticism as diluting the inspectional know-how of experienced officers by making them take on duties for which they are not trained.

CBP includes the former U.S. Customs Service, Immigration and Naturalization Service and Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service of the Agriculture Department. Under the ‘One Face’ program, inspectors need to perform the highly-specialized functions of each legacy agency.

President Kelley particularly noted that the congressional report concludes that DHS has failed to equip its border inspectors with sufficient modern technology, instead relying on “a continuing use of older, less reliable technologies.”

The NTEU leader again pointed to the refusal of DHS leaders to engage in substantive discussions with NTEU on new personnel rules that would provide the agency with certain managerial abilities it says it needs even as it fully protects the rights of its employees.

Instead, DHS is appealing the decision of a federal district court which has twice ruled against the new personnel system the agency would like to implement and enjoined the department from putting in place major portions of the proposal.

“Given the depth and scope of the managerial and other problems identified in these two reports,” President Kelley said, “it makes no sense whatsoever for DHS to try to impose harsh new personnel rules on the very employees this country counts on as the first line of defense against terrorists and terrorist weapons.”

She added: “It is obvious that this department has a long way to go to get its own house in order. That’s where its emphasis should be—not on doing great harm to the day-to-day work lives of the men and women it looks to for accomplishment of its vital border security mission.”

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