NTEU Applauds Senate Vote Against Cuts in Federal Agencies' Funding

"These deep cuts would have severely impacted agencies already straining with serious staffing shortages and significantly expanding workloads," said President Colleen M. Kelley of the National Treasury Employees Union (NTEU).

H.R. 1 would have cut $61.5 billion from agency resources over the remainder of fiscal 2011 from the enacted levels of fiscal 2010 -- and would have set spending at $96.6 billion less than the president's proposed budget for current fiscal year. The Senate also rejected another proposed budget, which means the American people and the federal workforce continue to operate in the shadow of a possible government shutdown when the current continuing resolution expires on March 18.

"The proposed cuts would put the very missions of many agencies in real danger," President Kelley said, noting that a proposed $600 million reduction in funding for the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) would have forced the agency to return to fiscal 2008 operating levels, reversing the progress made in recent years in rebuilding the agency's decimated workforce.

"Returning to fiscal 2008 levels would result in the loss of 7,000 to 8,000 positions across the IRS," she said, "with devastating effects on IRS's ability to carry out not only its tax enforcement and customer service missions, but on meeting complicated challenges, as well." These include the increasing complexity of tax administration and the large and growing gap between taxes owed and those paid -- presently some $345 billion annually.

Of course, she added, the IRS wouldn't be alone in that posture. Other cuts contained in H.R. 1 would have resulted in a reduction of $242 million for the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), $30 million for the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), $345 million for Customs and Border Protection (CBP), $100 million for the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) and $200 million for the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Administration in the Department of Health and Human Services.

The FDA cuts, in particular, would have a direct impact on the public; the result for this agency, which has faced years of chronic underfunding, would be a further decline in food safety inspections, including 2,000 fewer food inspections of domestic and foreign food and medical product firms, 10,000 fewer import inspections and 6,000 fewer laboratory sample analyses of food and medical products. Food inspections dropped to only 7,500 in 2009, down dramatically from 35,000 in 1978, Kelley said.

These kinds of cuts are especially dangerous in light of expanding agency responsibilities; the IRS and the FDA, along with the SEC and Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, for example, all have been given additional and critical responsibilities under legislation ranging from the new food safety laws to laws reforming the nation's health care and financial regulatory systems.

Not only that, Kelley said, the cuts are counterproductive. For example, IRS Taxpayer Assistance Centers currently are not adequately staffed -- with a particularly severe impact on taxpayers who need help during the tax-filing season -- and funding cuts would mean that phone calls would go unanswered for lack of staff. Insufficient staff could lead to delayed tax refunds, the NTEU president noted.

Fewer IRS resources also would mean that key enforcement personnel such as revenue officers and revenue agents would have increasing case inventories, leading to more cases being unaddressed. That, in turn, could result in billions of dollars not collected.

Cuts to Patent and Trademark Office (PTO) funding would result in further delays in patent applications where the backlog of applications currently stands at 700,000, hindering innovation and new business development.

As for the proposed CBP cuts, the NTEU leader said the union is aware of "instances where CBP Officers do not have sufficient back-up on inspections; where lanes at bridges remain closed because of inadequate staffing, leading to long lines at border crossing points."

As the nation's largest independent federal union, NTEU represents 150,000 employees in 31 agencies and departments.