Pay, management issues may weigh on Trump’s Border Patrol, ICE hiring surge

President Donald Trump wants to hire 5,000 more Border Patrol agents and 10,000 more Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents. However, federal law enforcement representatives told lawmakers on Wednesday their organizations have too many managers and not enough staff-level employees.

On top of that, CBP and ICE have consistently been ranked as some of the worst places to work in the federal government, in terms of employee morale.

With a yearly attrition rate of about 6 percent, Customs and Border Protection estimates that in order to hire the 5,000 additional agents mandated under Trump’s border security executive order, it will need to bring 2,700 new agents onboard every year for the next five years.

“We lose 1,000 agents per year because they don’t like to work for the border patrol,” Brandon Judd, president of the National Border Patrol Council, told the Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee on Wednesday. “We already have this high attrition rate, and on top of that, in a couple of years, we’re going to start seeing the people we hired in the mid-’90s start retiring.”

Agents leaving en mass might resemble a microcosm of the federal retirement wave that administrations have been predicting since the early 2000s.

Tony Reardon, president of the National Treasury Employees Union, which represents more than 25,000 frontline CPB officers, told lawmakers that CBP suffers from a protracted hiring process that can last anywhere from 16-to-18 months.

“I’ve heard horror stories where an individual has to go to an interview in one location, and then several weeks later or a month later, they’ve got to go somewhere else in a different part of the country, they’ve got to pay for that. That makes it very difficult for people, and they say ‘I don’t need this,’ and they go to work somewhere else,” Reardon told lawmakers, who went on to say that it generally takes 105-to-150 applicants to generate one new hire. “How many people in this country can afford to sit around for 16-18 months before they can be brought onboard?”

Short-staffing at CBP contributes to the decline in morale, Judd said, through unpopular decisions like temporary duty assignments in which agents can be sent to border posts that are far from their families for long periods of time.

For new employees who make it this far, those testifying told lawmakers that CBP and ICE both suffer from hostile management that drives rank-and-file staff away.

“We enthusiastically support the additional officers identified in President Trump’s executive order on interior enforcement. However, we have little faith in the ability of ICE leadership to most effectively implement the additional staff,” Chris Crane, president of the National Immigration and Customs Enforcement Council, told lawmakers. “As with DHS in general, ICE is suffering from a toxic and failed management culture [and] an absolute absence of leadership.”

In 2014, ICE ranked dead last in the Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey put out by the Office of Personnel Management. In 2015, it was second to last. Last year, it placed sixth from the bottom. CBP, meanwhile, also continues to rank low on the employee satisfaction survey.

“If you look at the Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey, we are at the bottom, and we’ve always been at the bottom. If we’re not dead-last, we’re always somewhere right at the bottom. … We have this management structure that is so over-heavy and that is so overbearing that agents just don’t like it,” Judd said, who added that the agency used to have one supervisor for every twelve employees. Now, he said, it has a supervisor for every six rank-and-file workers.

Judd told lawmakers that CBP has suffered from “kingdom-building” within the agency’s bureaucracy, wherein management expands the chain of command to improve their own General Schedule pay scale.

“The only way a manager can increase their GS level from, say, a 14 to a 15 is if their operations become more expansive. And so, in order to make your operation more expensive, you add additional people to your ‘team,'” he said. “We have a chief patrol who’s a GS-15. He only oversees 137 agents, that’s it … He expanded his kingdom and he put intel agents in cities like Billings, Montana, that are four hours away from the border. … They give us nothing as far as the border patrol goes. But that’s how he was able to get his GS-15.”

In order to stem the exodus of CBP agents, Judd urged senators to restore pay parity among the federal law enforcement agencies.

“Though I’m a GS-12, and an ICE agent’s a GS-12, an ICE agent gets paid more because they have FLSA [Fair Labor Standards Act] overtime. We do not,” Judd said.  “If we’re looking at a comprehensive border security bill, we have to look at how we can bring back parity in pay with our sister agencies. Otherwise, you’re going to see a mass exodus when ICE starts hiring.”

For Crane, however, the grass may not appear greener at ICE. He said the agency suffers from supervisors who only look out for their fellow supervisors during internal investigations.

“At ICE, it’s a good ‘ole boy network in which supervisors cover for supervisors, and only rank-and-file employees are held accountable,” Crane said. “‘Screw up and move up’ is the general term used by many ICE employees to describe their supervision. Most employees have no trust in DHS and ICE internal affairs offices to effectively carry out investigations against ICE supervisors.”

Even with a frontline employee hiring surge, it remains to be seen whether those new workers will work directly on the border. Judd said about 60 percent of the CBP’s workforce is on-the-clock on any given day. Of that, he estimated that only 25 percent serve in any law enforcement capacity, while the remaining 35 percent fulfill administrative tasks.

“We have too many officers out there now that are sitting in offices with a gun and a badge,” Crane said about ICE. “They’re in our offices doing data entry all day long. We need to replace them with administrative folks who can do that data entry work for them.”

Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), the committee’s chairman, said he’s looking to investigate the staffing priorities at these agencies, and urged Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly to appear before the committee in future hearings.

“We really do need a top-to-bottom staffing review of every last one of these agencies, providing a recommendation to the secretary,” Johnson said.

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