Threat Level Blue: Bush to Meet With Unhappy Homeland Workers

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February 08, 2007 5:00 AM

Misery loves company, they say. So perhaps it's no surprise that with his approval ratings at historic lows, President Bush is scheduled to meet today with the most disgruntled employees under his direction: the rank-and-file workers at the Department of Homeland Security.

Battered by criticism for his handling of the Iraq War, Bush will be meeting with staffers at the Department of Homeland Security, shown by a federal survey to be perhaps the most persistently miserable people in the federal government.

For the second time in two years, responses from DHS workers have shown them to be the least satisfied employees in the Bush administration.  DHS employees showed low confidence in their superiors, doubted their leadership and felt they did not adequately reward creativity or address poor performance.

In response to that harsh criticism, a top DHS official announced recently that he and two other top officials would "with urgency and seriousness" meet and figure out how best to solve the problem.

"You deserve nothing less," wrote Deputy Undersecretary Michael Jackson in a Jan. 30 department-wide memo.

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But many disgruntled workers had quit before that memo was written, and DHS is facing alarming turnover, according to one union official. Close to half of the nearly 20,000 workers who left DHS in 2006 quit or were fired from the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), government statistics show. The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) lost about 3,700.

"[Bush] needs to address the lack of morale across the board," said Gony Frieder, an official with the American Federation of Government Employees union (AFGE), which represents more than half of all DHS workers.

Still, hanging out with disgruntled employees (or an unpopular president) probably beats an hour or two under harsh questioning from a Democratic-controlled Congress.

That's what some DHS officials will be doing today and tomorrow.

This morning and again on Friday, DHS Secretary Michael Chertoff himself will appear before Hill panels to defend Bush's 2008 budget request for his department.  In addition to talking dollars and cents, the former federal judge could face tough questions about recent revelations by Congress' top investigator and his own Inspector General that his senior aides blocked investigations into reported problems in his ranks.

And also today, a handful of DHS managers will face questions about how they've handled two-year-long, multi-billion-dollar projects that have put millions in the pockets of private contractors.