Ranking Member Henry Cuellar Statement at Transportation Security Administration Fiscal Year 2024 Budget Request Hearing

2023-03-28 14:33
Statement

Congressman Henry Cuellar (D-TX), Ranking Member of the Homeland Security Appropriations Subcommittee, delivered the following remarks at Subcommittee’s hearing on the fiscal year 2024 budget request for the Transportation Security:

Thank you, Chairman Joyce, and I would like to join you in welcoming Administrator Pekoske, who is no stranger to the Subcommittee.  We appreciate the good work that you and your folks have done.

 I look forward to today’s hearing of the President’s Budget Request for TSA for FY24. I think we understand the very important work that you all do.

We rely, the public relies, on TSA to ensure that flights take off on time. And certainly with the growth now, post pandemic, we certainly know that those numbers are going to go up.  

So when it comes to demonstrating the importance of investing in these invidivuals, we made a big down payment in FY23.

We also understand that we want to talk to you a little bit more about the FY23 funding bill that supported TSA’s efforts to provide parity to TSA’s workforce, an effort to bring TSA employees on par with their peers in the rest of the Federal government. We do know that there is some work to be done legislatively.

One of the other things we want to talk about in some of the questions is the recruitment process, the hiring process itself, and also customer service.

Again, we look forward to working with you and welcome back to the Committee.

118th Congress