NTEU President Presents Suggestions to Senate to Boost Sagging CBP Officer Numbers
Congress should raise CBP’s overtime pay cap, re-designate the destination for customs user fees, and fix the “broken and segmented” agency hiring process to help fill its current 3,500-officer staffing shortage, National Treasury Employees Union (NTEU) President Anthony Reardon said in remarks (here) submitted to a Senate panel March 22. CBP is running an existing vacancy rate of 1,400 CBP port officers, and its 2016 Workload Staffing Model indicated the need to hire another additional 2,100 officers, said Reardon, who testified before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee on March 22.
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The Trump administration's budget blueprint submission to Congress (see 1703160022) doesn’t mention new fiscal 2018 funding to hire more CBP officers at ports of entry, Reardon said. The union is also calling on Congress in fiscal 2018 spending legislation to raise the yearly overtime cap for CBP staff from $35,000 to $45,000, and to provide additional funding for staffing at air, sea and land ports in supplemental appropriations legislation for the second half of fiscal 2017, Reardon said.
Reardon added that staffing needs are “dire” along Southwest land ports of entry, and pointed to factors indicating low morale, including involuntary overtime and work assignments, consistently low rankings on federal employee workplace satisfaction surveys, and diversion of personnel to severely short-staffed Southwest ports. The NTEU wants to encourage voluntary, as opposed to involuntary, CBP field office temporary duty assignments (TDYs), and is asking Congress to urge CBP to increase the TDY pool to include several more staff, and to urge CBP to establish incentives for voluntary TDYs, such as advertised cash awards, student loan repayments, overtime cap waivers and home leave.
Congress should steer Customs User Fee Account funds toward CBP staffing, as intended, Reardon said. While user fees were tied to inflationary changes in 2015 (see 1512040024), those fees were diverted to pay for infrastructure projects, Reardon said. CBP isn’t receiving “one additional dime” to fund inspection and enforcement personnel, even though the inflationary indexing is adding $140 million more to the account per year, he said. “NTEU strongly opposes any attempts by Congress to raid customs user fees to pay for infrastructure projects,” Reardon said. With access to the user fees, CBP also wouldn’t need to enter into reimbursable service agreements, whereby the private sector and local and state governments reimburse CBP for “additional inspection services,” including overtime pay and the hiring of new CBP officer and agriculture specialist personnel.
Inadequate port staffing also stems from CBP’s top-heavy and high-paid management structure, and from policies such as different interview rounds being held in different parts of the nation, and an extremely selective application process that hires one employee for about every 150 applicants, Reardon said. Senate Homeland Security Chairman Ron Johnson, R-Wis., pledged to meet with the testifiers of the March 22 hearing about how Congress can help streamline the hiring processes of agencies like CBP and ICE. “We’re going to make sure the department … get[s] rid of these crazy and insane policies that they’ve enacted that prevent [CBP and ICE agents] from actually fulfilling their mission,” Johnson said. “So this isn’t rocket science. This is not hard, and we’re just going to get this done, because there’s a lot of areas of agreement here. I think we can make some significant improvements without having to try and pass a law, because you know how hard that is.”