USCIS postpones planned employee furloughs – By Jessie Bur (Federal Times) / July 25 2020
The Department of Homeland Security’s U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services has decided to delay its plans to furlough nearly 14,000 employees across the agency, making up about 75 percent of its workforce, until the end of the fiscal year.
The delay, announced July 24 by Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., comes less than a week after Leahy and Sen. John Tester, D-Mont., pressed the agency to change its stance after revised revenue estimates revealed that the agency would have a budget surplus, not deficit, at the end of the year.
USCIS is funded primarily by fees collected for processing visas and citizenship applications, and the agency originally planned to furlough employees Aug. 3 due to a projected loss of that revenue from COVID-19. The furloughs are now planned for Aug. 31.
“Furloughing thousands of public servants in the middle of a pandemic and at record unemployment would have upended the lives of the dedicated women and men working at USCIS and impacted thousands who rely on their services, and after new revenue estimates showed the agency ending the fiscal year with a surplus it was completely unjustifiable,” Leahy said in a news release about the delay.
Continue to article: https://www.federaltimes.com/management/2020/07/24/uscis-postpones-planned-employee-furloughs/
