Rights for the Transportation Security Administration Workforce Act of 2021

Floor Speech

Mr. Speaker, I rise today in opposition to H.R. 903. When Congress created the Transportation Security Administration more than 20 years ago in the wake of the attacks on 9/11, this body provided the TSA Administrator with unique authorities in the management of its personnel.

H.R. 903 would eliminate this vital flexibility and infringe upon TSA's ability to immediately respond to evolving threats and to protect the traveling public.

This bill goes against Congress' intent by moving an entire agency into an antiquated 1940s system of title 5 of the U.S. Code. TSA will not be able to take emerging intelligence and quickly change security screening procedures at airports without unnecessary and dangerous delays due to the collective bargaining requirements of this bill.

Since 9/11, TSA has kept our Nation's transportation system secure. Airport screeners and Federal air marshals have responded time and time again to emerging threats.

For example, checkpoint screenings procedures were changed almost overnight in response to the liquid explosive plot in 2006 and the personal electronic device threat in 2017. Such immediate and agile responses will be severely hindered under H.R. 903. Security policies should not be subject to union bargaining.

In addition, TSA will no longer be able to easily remove employees who have committed serious misconduct. If a TSA screener is caught smuggling drugs or weapons, it will be nearly impossible for TSA to immediately terminate them due to the layers of bureaucracy in the title 5 system.

According to TSA, this bill will cost an astronomical amount of almost $8 billion over a 5-year period, and much of that money won't go to the frontline personnel. The amount of overhead costs associated with moving an entire agency to title 5 means that billions of dollars will be spent on the transition and will require the hiring of hundreds of new employees, not frontline workers who would be protecting the traveling public but, instead, bureaucrats who will facilitate this massive labor relations effort.

If we actually want to address the needs of frontline workers, we would focus on securing more funding for their pay. Instead, H.R. 903 will waste billions in taxpayer dollars to create more bureaucracy and provide even more money to headquarters and those who work there who already have a much higher salary than the dedicated frontline personnel.

I am extremely concerned that passing this bill would create a massive unfunded mandate that will ultimately divert critical funding from other important DHS priorities like border security, cybersecurity, and emergency response.

If my friends in the majority were truly focused on prioritizing and improving the pay of TSA frontline workers, rather than prioritizing and empowering the unions, they would support frontline pay raises without the expense and the unnecessary bureaucracy of title 5.

Unfortunately, the majority rejected an amendment by Ranking Member Katko at the markup that would have done just that--improve the pay of frontline screeners and air marshals, not the high-paid bureaucrats at headquarters, without all the waste that title 5 would provide.

I and many of my colleagues stand ready to raise pay for frontline workers, but I cannot in good conscience support a bill that is fiscally irresponsible, undermines our national security, hinders the agency's missions and flexibility, and prioritizes the interests of the unions over the interests of the dedicated frontline workforce and the traveling public.

Mr. Speaker, I urge my colleagues to oppose H.R. 903, and I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. GOODEN OF Texas. Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague from Texas for stating so eloquently what I and I believe everyone in this Chamber agrees with, and that is that the TSA agents, the men and women who work for the American people at the airport, are protecting our Nation.

They are on the front lines, which is why I am rising today to urge my colleagues to do something very simple, and that is to protect Americans from terrorists and dangerous criminals when they fly and to assist the TSA by taking away a very dangerous policy that they have enacted from the top that they are encouraging and forcing these agents on the front lines to deal with. That policy is one of allowing illegal aliens onto commercial aircraft without proper identification.

It was confirmed to me from the TSA administrator that migrants are allowed to use arrest warrants and warrants for deportation to board flights alongside everyday travelers. This was confirmed to me before Christmas last year. Despite my demands and those of many of my colleagues, the Biden administration has done nothing to stop this. Anyone in this country illegally, or with a warrant for arrest, should be detained and brought before a judge, not permitted to travel to the city of their choice.

This should be a commonsense request. I will remind my colleagues that the TSA was created in response to the September 11 attacks, but it seems as if we have forgotten that. The lax policies by the TSA that allow unvetted aliens to board flights without identification presents a serious national security threat each and every day and jeopardizes the lives of the American people.

My constituents, and I would venture to argue those of my colleagues, perhaps some of my open border friends across the aisle, would agree that our constituents deserve to fly in a safe aircraft.

My constituents have to pull out an ID to board a flight, but this TSA has said that if you have an arrest warrant, that is good enough to get through security. I think that is crazy, and I think the American people do as well. I introduced this motion to recommit to protect our skies, verify the identity of travelers, and notify law enforcement if someone is in our country illegally.

There is zero excuse to delay when the ongoing border crisis is putting every single community in our Nation at risk. In just 10 months, the Biden administration allowed over 45,000 noncitizens to fly without an ID, nearly 160 passengers each and every day. We also know this administration is allowing people on the terrorist watch list into our country, and we have no clue who is boarding these flights.

I urge my colleagues to protect our airways and prevent another tragedy like 9/11 from occurring by adopting this motion.

Mr. Speaker, if we adopt the motion to recommit, we will instruct the Committee on Homeland Security to consider my amendment to H.R. 903 to prohibit the TSA from accepting documents such as an arrest warrant or notice to appear as a valid form of identification. I ask unanimous consent to insert the text of the amendment in the Record immediately prior to the vote on the motion to recommit.

Mr. Speaker, I think it is clear that all Republicans support increasing the pay of our TSA frontline workers. We know that they are crucial to the security of our traveling public.

But this bill that we are here debating is not a bill that deals specifically with that. If that were the case, in markup Ranking Member Katko's amendment, an amendment that would have provided a $3,000 immediate salary increase to all frontline workers, 5 percent raise on top of that, year one; year 2, a 3 percent raise; year 3, a 3 percent raise; year 4, a 4 percent raise.

This bill that we are talking about today is a bill that is not just to increase pay, which we all agree on, but this is, instead, a labor bill. This is, instead, an attempt to unionize an entire Federal agency.

Mr. Payne spoke about that a little bit when he got up a few moments ago when he talked about the blue-ribbon committee that was established and said that there was not one labor leader on that committee. We shouldn't be putting labor leaders in the position of putting them on committees where we are talking about protecting the traveling public. That committee that he referred to, in 2019 TSA received a report from that bipartisan committee--and I stress that it was a bipartisan committee, the Blue Ribbon Panel Reviewing TSA Human Capital Service Delivery. The panel was composed of former officials from both Democratic and Republican administrations and included the chief human capital officer for DHS under former President Obama.

It says that they strongly--not just recommended, but they strongly recommended against moving TSA personnel under title 5, and then this is a quote directly from that report, and it says here, ``One recommendation the panel heard repeatedly from employees was moving TSA into the General Schedule (GS). The Panel does not agree. The General Schedule is a 70-year-old classification and compensation system from the last century and is the subject of countless studies and recommendations from good government organizations who consistently find it is too inflexible to meet the needs of the 21st century workforce. A better course of action is to use existing ATSA flexibility to improve the TSA pay system so that it operates at a level superior to the GS system.''

Those are not my words. Those are not the words of Republicans. Those are the words of a blue-ribbon committee which was established to study this very thing. Here we see that Congress is going to completely ignore the findings of that committee. We are going to ignore a committee made up of TSA workers, employees, personnel, and supervisors who served on a committee that was established to look at this very point, and we are going to completely ignore that.

We are going to now do exactly what this committee recommended against. And we are doing that not because we want to increase the pay of the frontline workers, which again we all agree on and we all support. We would support a bill today that would do that without putting everyone under title 5. But what this bill is, this is an attempt to unionize an entire Federal agency and a bill which would make the traveling public less safe.

Mr. Speaker, I close by thanking the men and women of TSA, especially the screeners, air marshals, and other frontline workers.

The debate we are having today does not impact the sincere appreciation we have for the tremendous job they do each and every day to secure the transportation system.

While we disagree on the best way forward, we all share the same goal of improving the pay and morale for TSA frontline workforce. It is important not only for the success of the agency but for the security of our Nation. Unfortunately, this bill is not the answer, and, therefore, I cannot support it.

Mr. Speaker, I urge my colleagues to oppose H.R. 903, and I yield back the balance of my time.

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Mr. GUEST. Mr. Speaker, I rise in opposition to the amendment. While I appreciate some of the issues my majority colleagues seek to address in this en bloc amendment, the bottom line is, there is nothing that will improve the bill or address the multiple concerns I have in it.

Nothing in this en bloc amendment will preserve TSA's flexible authority to implement immediate security procedures in the face of national security threats. Nothing in this en bloc will ensure that screeners who commit gross misconduct are immediately relieved of their duties. Nothing in this en bloc will protect the rest of the Department of Homeland Security from having its key mission areas--like border security, cybersecurity, and counterterrorism vetting--from being raided to pay for this massive unfunded mandate.

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Mr. GUEST. Mr. Speaker, I urge my colleagues to oppose the amendments en bloc, and I yield back the balance of my time.

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Mr. GUEST. Mr. Speaker, again, these arguments go to further what we talked about earlier. This bill is not about a pay increase for our frontline workers. This isn't a bill about protecting the traveling public. This is a bill about unionizing an entire Federal agency.

My friends across the aisle say that TSA already has the authority to do what Representative Cammack's amendment sets forth. What is the harm in putting that in the body of the legislation itself?

Should it not be clear to everyone who reads the legislation that collective bargaining should not hold up improvement to security? Should that not be made clear?

Should we not set forth that they already have that? What harm does it do in setting that forth again?

Again, we all want to see that our TSA frontline workers get the pay raise that they need and deserve. What we oppose on the Republican side is the complete unionization of this Federal agency.

I will tell you that this is a critical amendment to our national security. Historically, we look back, and when Congress stood up TSA in the wake of 9/11, they deliberately provided flexibility to the agency to deal with the evolving threats to our transportation system. It is imperative that the TSA Administrator maintain that authority to make immediate changes to screening procedures when addressing national security threats.

The amendment of my good friend from Florida simply preserves that authority and makes it clear that the Administrator has that authority and exempts security procedures from the collective bargaining process.

Without this critical amendment, security changes like those made in response to the 2006 liquid explosives or the 2017 personal electronic device plot could be significantly hampered or delayed if subject to collective bargaining. We simply cannot afford to put our national security on the bargaining table.

I thank the gentlewoman from Florida for leading this important issue, and I urge my colleagues to support it.

My amendment would sunset the requirements of H.R. 903 at the end of fiscal year 2022 if Congress does not appropriate sufficient funds to carry out the bill.

With H.R. 903 having an estimated cost to taxpayers of nearly $2 billion, or $8 billion if you use TSA's own estimates, it is critical that the bill does not simply become an astronomical unfunded mandate.

This amendment will remove this bill's requirement to move TSA to title 5 if sufficient funding is not appropriated specifically for those requirements. This will protect other critical homeland security missions, like cybersecurity and border security, from being raided to pay for this legislation.

In TSA's feedback on H.R. 903, they explicitly stated this: Implementation of H.R. 903 ``without additional, adequate appropriations would have dire impacts upon the TSA mission and negatively impact national and economic security.''

Let me read that again. It said that without proper appropriations, it would have a dire impact ``upon the TSA mission and negatively impact national and economic security.'' That is from TSA itself.

Those are the words of the agency that we are looking at changing, and they are warning us. They are warning Congress that if we do this, and then we don't follow through with the funding, we are putting the traveling public at risk. If this is not clear enough, I don't know what is.

Miss RICE of New York. Mr. Speaker, I claim the time in opposition to the amendment.

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Mr. GUEST. Mr. Speaker, I have no more speakers so I am prepared to close when the majority is prepared.

In closing, I refer back to the words of TSA. These are not my words. These are not the words of the Republican caucus. These are the words of TSA, which was tasked with a critical mission, and the words of TSA are words that we should take into account when we are debating this amendment and debating this bill.

The words of TSA: Implementation of H.R. 903 ``without additional, adequate appropriations would have dire impacts upon the TSA mission and negatively impact national and economic security.''

This amendment is simple. If we are not going to fund this, we cannot put our national and economic security at risk, and this should be sunsetted.

I ask my colleagues to support this amendment, and I yield back the balance of my time.

Miss RICE of New York.

Mr. Speaker, this amendment represents a new frontier in legislative dysfunction. It hinges the rights of TSOs on Congress' ability to pass a completely different bill.

This is not serious legislating. It is a bad faith gimmick and unworthy of support. There is no justification for making the rights of the TSA workforce contingent on the broken annual appropriations process.

This amendment sends the message to the TSA workforce that their fundamental rights have an expiration date.

Mr. Speaker, I urge my colleagues to reject this amendment, just as my colleagues and I did when it was brought up in the committee.

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Mr. GUEST. Mr. Speaker, on that I demand the yeas and nays.

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