Mr. President. This evening I rise to express my strong support for Senator Lieberman's substitute. I have strong respect for the senior Senator from West Virginia but I will vote against his amendment. Senator Lieberman has done a great service to his country by holding hearings and debating extensively the structure of a Department of Homeland Security. Without his determined effort, the President might never have conceded the need for such a department. As Senator Thompson has noted, the Governmental Affairs Committee debated in great detail the structure of such a department. Numerous changes were made to the President's proposal which have substantially improved it.
I rise to discuss the flexibilities available at the Federal Aviation Administration and the Internal Revenue Service. My colleagues have criticized the legislation before us for not providing the same flexibilities available to the FAA and the IRS. The most important factor in the personnel systems at these two agencies is the involvement of federal employee unions.
In April 1996, at Congressional direction, FAA was allowed to develop its own personnel and compensation systems, to give the agency more flexibility because of its daily interaction with the fast-paced and rapidly-growing aviation industry. The Secretary of Transportation argued strongly that the agency needed flexibility to pay people what the job required and to move them where the work was needed, without the restrictions of standard government personnel procedures.
While the FAA was given wide authority to develop their personnel system, the FAA still must negotiate with its federal employee unions in developing and making changes to the personnel management system. The FAA system contains provisions protecting a large portion of the rights of federal workers. These include whistleblower protections, including the provisions for investigation and enforcement; veterans' preference; anti-discrimination; compensation for work injury; retirement, unemployment compensation, and insurance coverage; and review of employee matters by the Merit Systems Protection Board.
In addition, employees subject to major adverse personnel actions may contest the action through any contractual grievance procedure.
And because the FAA is not subject to federal pay rate regulations, the federal employee unions are allowed to bargain over wages at the FAA as they do in the private sector.
Such bargaining rights are not provided in the President's original Homeland Security bill or the House passed bill. In fact, both bills would allow even current collective bargaining rights to be waived.
Despite this praise of FAA flexibility, just last year, the Republican-led House Appropriations Committee concluded that FAA's personnel reform has been a failure. At that time, the most recent FAA employee attitude survey showed severe levels of employee dissatisfaction, even as compensation levels rose to make DOT the highest-paid cabinet level agency in the Federal Government.
Fewer than one in ten employees felt that personnel reform had been successful at eliminating bureaucracy or helping accomplish FAA's mission. Fewer than one in five felt the agency rewards creativity and innovation--even though personnel reform allows the agency great flexibility in this area.
A review of staffing at air traffic control facilities indicates that reform has not been used to place employees where they are needed. These findings were supported by an independent study conducted by the National Academy of Public Administration, which found that FAA hasn't met many of the key goals of personnel reform.
In addition, the House Committee believed that Congress should carefully review the effects of personnel reform leading up to reauthorization of AIR 21 in fiscal year 2004 to gauge whether the experiment should be continued.
According to the GAO, the decentralized personnel structure that resulted from FAA's reform has caused (1) moral problems, (2) communication gaps and inconsistencies in technical advice and leadership within FAA organizations, and (3) insufficient understanding throughout the workforce about the intent of reforms. As a result of these problems, FAA lacks a broad base of support and accountability for reform initiatives among employees below the highest management levels.
More recently, TSA, which uses the FAA's pay banding system, has caused great concern with the high salaries given to federal law enforcement officers that are higher than those currently earned at other federal agencies. Such a system has contributed to the loss of law enforcement officers at the Capitol Police, the U.S. Park Police and the U.S. Secret Service.
The IRS was granted additional flexibilities to address its unique workforce as well. The IRS personnel flexibilities include: critical pay authority; enhanced recruitment, retention, and relocation authority; enhanced authority for performance awards to senior executives; and exceptions to Title 5 rules in filling Senior Executive Service positions which are reserved for career employees.
Additional flexibilities are granted to the IRS which can only be applied to union represented employees subject to a written agreement between the union and the IRS. This includes streamlined demonstration project authority; variations to the performance appraisal and awards sections of Title 5; variations from Title 5 pay and classification systems for pay banding; and variations from Title 5 hiring rules.
However, the IRS' progress on reform seems welcome to all but those who work inside the agency. In response to the agency's 2001 employee climate survey, 42 percent of employees said the organizational changes have had a negative effect on them, compared with 24 percent who reported positive effects and 34 percent who reported no effect. Such dissatisfaction does nothing to help retain employees when the federal government is facing a human capital crisis.
While there has been an increase in customer satisfaction with the IRS, the widespread personnel reshuffling has yet to guarantee that the IRS is matching its workforce to its workload appropriately. Over the past four years, the backlog of taxpayer requests for compromise settlements with the IRS on the amount of back taxes they owe has tripled, even though the staff devoted to the backlog has doubled. A General Accounting Office review found that putting staff on the compromise program may be hurting other collection programs. The large percentage of bad information given to taxpayers by IRS employees also shows that the right people with the right skills are not in place in customer service jobs-though the IRS is retraining customer service representatives to improve accuracy.
As we are debating the creation of a new Department of Homeland Security, we must make sure that providing new flexibilities does not compromise the mission of the agency. In providing the agency with the tools to effectively manage their workforce, we must make sure that agencies have a strategy in place to meet their missions and keep employees satisfied. If our dedicated workers do not feel valuable to the agency, the mission will fail. Without sufficient union participation and civil service protections, our homeland will not be secure.
