Rights for the TSA Workforce Act
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Rep. Thompson, Bennie G. [D-MS-2]
ID: T000193
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Bill Summary
Another brilliant example of legislative theater, courtesy of our esteemed Congress. The "Rights for the TSA Workforce Act" - because what's more pressing than giving bureaucrats a raise and more benefits? Let me dissect this farce for you.
**Main Purpose & Objectives:** The bill's primary objective is to apply the personnel system under Title 5, United States Code, to Transportation Security Administration (TSA) employees. In other words, it's a cleverly disguised attempt to unionize TSA workers and give them more benefits, all while pretending to "enhance security operations" and "stabilize the transportation security workforce." Please, spare me the theatrics.
**Key Provisions & Changes to Existing Law:** The bill restricts the TSA's ability to modify its personnel management system, essentially freezing it in place. It also establishes a new definition of "covered employee" and "covered position," which will undoubtedly lead to more bureaucratic red tape. Oh, and let's not forget the obligatory "emerging threats to transportation security" clause, because who doesn't love a good national emergency?
**Affected Parties & Stakeholders:** The TSA workforce, of course, is the primary beneficiary of this bill. But don't be fooled - this is just a clever ploy to curry favor with unions and special interest groups. The real stakeholders are the politicians who sponsored this bill, eager to pad their resumes with "pro-worker" legislation.
**Potential Impact & Implications:** This bill will likely lead to increased costs for taxpayers, as TSA employees receive more benefits and higher pay. It may also create a culture of complacency within the TSA, as employees become more entrenched in their positions. But hey, who needs actual security when you can have happy bureaucrats?
In conclusion, this bill is a masterclass in legislative doublespeak. It's a thinly veiled attempt to reward special interest groups and pad politicians' resumes, all while pretending to address pressing national security concerns. I give it two thumbs down - or rather, two middle fingers up.
Diagnosis: This bill suffers from a severe case of " Politician-itis," characterized by an excessive desire for self-aggrandizement and a complete disregard for the well-being of the American people. Treatment involves a healthy dose of skepticism, a strong stomach, and a willingness to call out the obvious lies and half-truths peddled by our esteemed lawmakers.
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Rep. Thompson, Bennie G. [D-MS-2]
Congress 119 • 2024 Election Cycle
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Project 2025 Policy Matches
This bill shows semantic similarity to the following sections of the Project 2025 policy document. Higher similarity scores indicate stronger thematic connections.
Introduction
— 79 — Central Personnel Agencies: Managing the Bureaucracy What is needed at the beginning is a freeze on all top career-position hiring to prevent “burrowing-in” by outgoing political appointees. Moreover, four fac- tors determine the order in which employees are protected during layoffs: tenure, veterans’ preference, seniority, and performance in that order of importance. Despite several attempts in the House of Representatives during the Trump years to enact legislation that would modestly increase the weight given to performance over time-of-service, the fierce opposition by federal managers associations and unions representing long-serving but not necessarily well-performing constituents explains why the bills failed to advance. A determined President should insist that performance be first and be wary of costly types of reductions-in-force. Impenetrable Bureaucracy. The GAO has identified almost a hundred actions that the executive branch or Congress could take to improve efficiency and effec- tiveness across 37 areas that span a broad range of government missions and functions. It identified 33 actions to address mission fragmentation, overlap, and duplication in the 12 areas of defense, economic development, health, homeland security, and information technology. It also identified 59 other opportunities for executive agencies or Congress to reduce the cost of government operations or enhance revenue collection across 25 areas of government.20 A logical place to begin would be to identify and eliminate functions and pro- grams that are duplicated across Cabinet departments or spread across multiple agencies. Congress hoped to help this effort by passing the Government Perfor- mance and Results Act of 1993,21 which required all federal agencies to define their missions, establish goals and objectives, and measure and report their per- formance to Congress. Three decades of endless time-consuming reports later, the government continues to grow but with more paper and little change either in performance or in the number of levels between government and the people. The Brookings Institution’s Paul Light emphasizes the importance of the increasing number of levels between the top heads of departments and the people at the bottom who receive the products of government decision-making. He esti- mates that there are perhaps 50 or more levels of impenetrable bureaucracy and no way other than imperfect performance appraisals to communicate between them.22 The Trump Administration proposed some possible consolidations, but these were not received favorably in Congress, whose approval is necessary for most such proposals. The best solution is to cut functions and budgets and devolve respon- sibilities. That is a challenge primarily for Presidents, Congress, and the entire government, but the OPM still needs to lead the way governmentwide in managing personnel properly even in any future smaller government. Creating a Responsible Career Management Service. The people elect a President who is charged by Article 2, Section 3 of the Constitution23 with seeing that the laws are “faithfully executed” with his political appointees democratically linked to that legitimizing responsibility. An autonomous bureaucracy has neither — 80 — Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise independent constitutional status nor separate moral legitimacy. Therefore, career civil servants by themselves should not lead major policy changes and reforms. The creation of the Senior Executive Service was the top career change intro- duced by the 1978 Carter–Campbell Civil Service Reform Act. Its aim was to professionalize the career service and make it more responsible to the democrat- ically elected commander in chief and his political appointees while respecting the rights due to career employees, very much including those in the top positions. The new SES would allow management to be more flexible in filling and reassigning executive positions and locations beyond narrow specialties for more efficient mission accomplishment and would provide pay and large bonuses to motivate career performance. The desire to infiltrate political appointees improperly into the high career civil service has been widespread in every Administration, whether Democrat or Republican. Democratic Administrations, however, are typically more successful because they require the cooperation of careerists, who generally lean heavily to the Left. Such burrowing-in requires career job descriptions for new positions that closely mirror the functions of a political appointee; a special hiring authority that allows the bypassing of veterans’ preference as well as other preference categories; and the ability to frustrate career candidates from taking the desired position. President Reagan’s OPM began by limiting such SES burrowing-in, arguing that the proper course was to create and fill political positions. This simultane- ously promotes the CSRA principle of political leadership of the bureaucracy and respects the professional autonomy of the career service. But this requires that career SES employees should respect political rights too. Actions such as career staff reserving excessive numbers of key policy positions as “career reserved” to deny them to noncareer SES employees frustrate CSRA intent. Another evasion is the general domination by career staff on SES personnel evaluation boards, the opposite of noncareer executives dominating these critical meeting discussions as expected in the SES. Career training also often underplays the political role in leadership and inculcates career-first policy and value viewpoints. Frustrated with these activities by top career executives, the Trump Adminis- tration issued Executive Order 1395724 to make career professionals in positions that are not normally subject to change as a result of a presidential transition but who discharge significant duties and exercise significant discretion in formulating and implementing executive branch policy and programs an exception to the com- petitive hiring rules and examinations for career positions under a new Schedule F. It ordered the Director of OPM and agency heads to set procedures to prepare lists of such confidential, policy-determining, policymaking, or policy-advocating positions and prepare procedures to create exceptions from civil service rules when careerists hold such positions, from which they can relocate back to the regular civil service after such service. The order was subsequently reversed by President
Introduction
— 79 — Central Personnel Agencies: Managing the Bureaucracy What is needed at the beginning is a freeze on all top career-position hiring to prevent “burrowing-in” by outgoing political appointees. Moreover, four fac- tors determine the order in which employees are protected during layoffs: tenure, veterans’ preference, seniority, and performance in that order of importance. Despite several attempts in the House of Representatives during the Trump years to enact legislation that would modestly increase the weight given to performance over time-of-service, the fierce opposition by federal managers associations and unions representing long-serving but not necessarily well-performing constituents explains why the bills failed to advance. A determined President should insist that performance be first and be wary of costly types of reductions-in-force. Impenetrable Bureaucracy. The GAO has identified almost a hundred actions that the executive branch or Congress could take to improve efficiency and effec- tiveness across 37 areas that span a broad range of government missions and functions. It identified 33 actions to address mission fragmentation, overlap, and duplication in the 12 areas of defense, economic development, health, homeland security, and information technology. It also identified 59 other opportunities for executive agencies or Congress to reduce the cost of government operations or enhance revenue collection across 25 areas of government.20 A logical place to begin would be to identify and eliminate functions and pro- grams that are duplicated across Cabinet departments or spread across multiple agencies. Congress hoped to help this effort by passing the Government Perfor- mance and Results Act of 1993,21 which required all federal agencies to define their missions, establish goals and objectives, and measure and report their per- formance to Congress. Three decades of endless time-consuming reports later, the government continues to grow but with more paper and little change either in performance or in the number of levels between government and the people. The Brookings Institution’s Paul Light emphasizes the importance of the increasing number of levels between the top heads of departments and the people at the bottom who receive the products of government decision-making. He esti- mates that there are perhaps 50 or more levels of impenetrable bureaucracy and no way other than imperfect performance appraisals to communicate between them.22 The Trump Administration proposed some possible consolidations, but these were not received favorably in Congress, whose approval is necessary for most such proposals. The best solution is to cut functions and budgets and devolve respon- sibilities. That is a challenge primarily for Presidents, Congress, and the entire government, but the OPM still needs to lead the way governmentwide in managing personnel properly even in any future smaller government. Creating a Responsible Career Management Service. The people elect a President who is charged by Article 2, Section 3 of the Constitution23 with seeing that the laws are “faithfully executed” with his political appointees democratically linked to that legitimizing responsibility. An autonomous bureaucracy has neither
Introduction
— 147 — Department of Homeland Security Personnel USCIS should be classified as a national security–sensitive agency, and all of its employees should be classified as holding national security–sensitive posi- tions. Leaks must be investigated and punished as they would be in a national security agency, and the union should be decertified. Any employees who cannot accept that change and cannot conform their behavior to the standards required by such an agency should be separated. USCIS’s D.C. personnel presence should be skeletal, and agency employees with operational or security roles should be rotated out to offices throughout the United States. These USCIS employees should live and work in the communities that are most affected by their daily duties and decisions. NECESSARY BORDER AND IMMIGRATION STATUTORY, REGULATORY, AND ADMINISTRATIVE CHANGES The current border security crisis was made possible by glaring loopholes in our immigration system. The result was a preventable and predictable his- toric increase in illegal and inadmissible encounters along our southern border. This pulled limited resources from the front lines of our nation’s borders and away from their national security mission, releasing a vast and complex set of threats into our country. To regain our sovereignty, integrity, and security, Congress must pass meaningful legislation to close the current loopholes and prevent future Administrations from exploiting them for political gain or per- sonal ideology. Legislative Proposals l Title 42 authority in Title 8. Create an authority akin to the Title 42 Public Health authority that has been used during the COVID-19 pandemic to expel illegal aliens across the border immediately when certain non- health conditions are met, such as loss of operational control of the border. l Mandatory appropriation for border wall system infrastructure. The monies appropriated would be used to fund the construction of additional border wall systems, technology, and personnel in strategic locations in accordance with the Border Security Improvement Plan (BSIP). l Appropriation for Port of Entry infrastructure. Border security is not addressed solely by systems in between the ports of entry. POEs require technology and physical upgrades as well as an influx of personnel to meet capacity demands and act as the literal gatekeepers for the country. This is the first line of defense against drug and human smuggling operations.
Showing 3 of 5 policy matches
About These Correlations
Policy matches are calculated using semantic similarity between bill summaries and Project 2025 policy text. A score of 60% or higher indicates meaningful thematic overlap. This does not imply direct causation or intent, but highlights areas where legislation aligns with Project 2025 policy objectives.