CBP Officials Repeat Sequester Warning, Praise Funds for Staffing Increase, at House Hearing
The addition of more than 3,000 CBP officers in President Obama’s 2014 budget proposal will alleviate the agency’s “significant” staffing shortage and help facilitate trade, CBP officials said before the House Appropriations Homeland Security Subcommittee April 17. The officials were testifying about the agency’s 2014 proposed budget, and once again warned of sequestration’s “disruptive” effect on CBP’s mission.
Sign up for a free preview to unlock the rest of this article
Timely, relevant coverage of court proceedings and agency rulings involving tariffs, classification, valuation, origin and antidumping and countervailing duties. Each day, Trade Law Daily subscribers receive a daily headline email, in-depth PDF edition and access to all relevant documents via our trade law source document library and website.
The automatic cuts -- about $600 million for CBP -- “occurred against a backdrop of significant growth in travel and trade in all [port of entry] environments,” said Border Patrol Chief Michael Fisher, Acting Deputy Commissioner Kevin McAleenan and Air and Marine Assistant Commissioner Randolph Alles in joint written testimony. At another House hearing April 12, a CBP official said distributing sequestration cuts will likely affect employee’s paychecks (see 13041229).
The agency has already seen "significant impacts to cross border activities," the testimony said, such as increased wait time at ports and a decrease in air surveillance. Potential reduction in officer overtime also “impedes CBP’s capacity to facilitate and expedite cargo, adding costs to the supply chain and diminishing our global competitiveness,” the officials said. In their budget breakdown, the officials praised the 3,477 new CBP officers proposed in the 2014 budget. The staffing boost will both enhance processing of legitimate cargo and help the overall U.S. economy, the testimony said. An addition of $210 million in the budget funds 1,600 of the officers. The remaining 1,877 will be funded through legislative changes to user fee collections.
National Treasury Employees Union President Colleen Kelley supported the officer boost in written testimony, and urged Congress to end the sequester. Without doing so, the extra funds CBP received in the 2013 continuing resolution -- about a $200 million increase -- cannot be properly utilized, because the continuing resolution includes sequester language that caps staffing levels, Kelley said. “Maintaining current staffing floors means CBP cannot use all of the increased funding in the CR to reduce furloughs for current employees since it must continue to fill vacant positions.”
Other aspects of the budget proposal the officials highlighted in their testimony include:
- $19 million for “investing in technology to improve processing at air and land ports of entry”
- $10.8 million for hand-held mobile devices to further speed the processing of travelers and cargo
- $3.3 million for the Single Transaction Bond Centralization Initiative. “CBP continues to make improvements to increase collections of customs revenue,” the testimony said. “Automation and centralization of these bonds will improve current revenue collection procedures, consistent with recommendations made by the General Accountability Office.”