CBP Officer Union President Urges Field Operations Funding Above DHS FY18 Budget Request
The National Treasury Employees Union (NTEU) would like to see an additional $350 million above CBP’s fiscal year 2018 budget request for Office of Field Operations (OFO) staffing purposes, NTEU National President Tony Reardon said in a June 6 submission to the Senate Homeland Security Committee (here). While CBP is budgeting an overall increase of $2.9 billion for FY 2018 over its FY 2017 annualized continuing resolution-enacted level of $13.5 billion, next fiscal year’s budget doesn’t include any money for new OFO officers, an NTEU spokesperson said in an email.
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NTEU envisions that $300 million of the additional $350 million would go toward helping OFO meet its FY 2017 officer frontline staffing target of 24,214, and toward hiring an additional 2,107 CBP officers necessary to achieve the staffing target of 26,300 officers outlined in the agency’s FY 2017 Workload Staff Model. NTEU is requesting the remaining $50 million to fund the hiring of 631 more CBP agriculture specialists as called for by CBP’s FY 2017 Agriculture Resource Allocation Model.
During her opening statement (here) at a June 6 Senate Homeland Security Committee hearing on DHS’s FY 2018 budget request, ranking member Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., expressed concern that the proposal didn’t contain provisions for a CBP officer increase at ports of entry. “The majority of drugs and other contraband come into this country through ports of entry, and CBP officers are the ones responsible for finding and stopping them,” she said. “If we are so interested in securing our border, why are we completely neglecting our ports of entry?”
DHS’s FY 2018 budget request proposes to fund OFO personnel costs with $157 million in mandatory spending redirected from a user fee account that currently funds Brand USA, a public-private partnership that markets the U.S. as a travel destination. But redirecting funding from the Electronic System for Travel Authorization fee would require enactment of new legislation. CBP is banking on a new statute to shift the user fee funds, so enactment of the FY 2018 CBP budget proposal without a new law to shift the account would leave CBP personnel costs $157 million underfunded and 1,099 positions short of the current staffing target. “This is why NTEU is requesting $157 million of the total $300 million increase for CBP Officer funding to ensure that the number of CBP Officers remains at 24,412,” the NTEU said.
CBP should further create 140 more positions at the Office of Trade to support Trade Facilitation and Trade Enforcement Act requirements, as CBP trade operations staffing has dropped below the statutory floor set in the Homeland Security Act of 2002, NTEU's Reardon said. “In 2016, CBP processed more than $2.2 trillion in imports and collected more than $44 billion in duties, taxes, and other fees,” he wrote. “Since CBP was established in March 2003, however, there has been no increase in non-uniformed CBP trade enforcement and compliance personnel even though inbound trade volume grew by more than 24 percent between FY 2010 and FY 2014.”