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Washington, D.C.—The priorities expressed in the administration’s proposed 2007 budget for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) are misguided and troubling, the leader of the union representing thousands of DHS employees said today.

“There is not enough DHS staff at our ports of entry to ensure that Customs and Border Protection’s dual missions of securing our nation’s border and facilitating travel are met,” said President Colleen M. Kelley of the National Treasury Employees Union (NTEU).

“And yet, the administration is proposing another $41 million in funding to implement a personnel system, parts of which have been enjoined as illegal by a federal court,” Kelley said. That amount is substantially more than the $32 million boost for salaries and expenses at the nation’s understaffed ports, she added.

The proposed $41 million increase, which includes $4.75 million to fund the Homeland Security Labor Relations Board—creation of which has been blocked by the court—would, if approved by Congress, bring the fiscal 2007 funding for the so-called MaxHR personnel system to more than $71 million. Under MaxHR, DHS employees would see their collective bargaining, due process and appeals rights severely curtailed.

The proposed budget also includes $15 million for establishment of pay pools as part of a move

toward a pay-for-performance system. NTEU has frequently expressed its serious reservations about such a move, noting in particular that there isn’t in place in the department the kind of performance appraisal system that would support it. Recognizing that and other problems, DHS has delayed for a year the planned start-up of a pay-for-performance system.

President Kelley also noted that a primary source of funding for the seven percent increase in the DHS budget for fiscal 2007 as proposed by the administration would be an estimated $1.3 billion generated by doubling the airline passenger security fee to $5 for a one-way trip. This is a proposal that Congress previously has rejected, and thus should not be relied on as a funding source.

The NTEU leader warned about the impact of an apparent emphasis at DHS, spelled out in a joint document with the State Department, on speeding up trade and travel at the nation’s borders. The risks of doing this, she said, are at the expense of effective security checks.

NTEU has raised its concerns about the effectiveness of the agency’s One Face at the Border initiative, which combines the work of legacy Customs, Immigration and Agriculture inspectors into a single position. The result has been a significant loss of inspectional expertise.

“There is increasing concern among Customs and Border Protection Officers (CBPOs) that One Face at the Border is undermining both secondary inspections and national security by throwing scarce resources at passenger processing to the detriment of all other federal inspection functions at airports,” Kelley said. “One Face at the Border is not intended to be a substitute for adequate staffing.”

NTEU is the largest independent federal union, representing 150,000 employees in 30 agencies and departments, including 14,000 in DHS’s Bureau of Customs and Border Protection (CBP).