USCIS Funding, Furloughs, and Fee Rule

8/25/2020 Update: USCIS Averts Furlough of Nearly 70% of Workforce

I pause for a moment to thank all USCIS employees who are at work today. Though I may criticize your results, the very fact of working deserves credit. We appreciate you acting as civil servants, persevering to do your jobs even as furloughs have been threatened since May and could start August 31. That is, unless the public takes notice, your bosses start acting responsibly, and/or lawmakers decide they want to protect you more than they want someone else to get blamed for damage.

It’s heartening to see a steady stream of EB-5 decisions coming out of IPO, even under these trying circumstances. Thank you, adjudicators, for your service. Considering the huge investment in time and money that went into building and training staff for EB-5 adjudications, and the billions of dollars in foreign investment hanging in the balance, I sincerely hope that USCIS will get its house in order and keep all its people working, and EB-5 working in an economy that desperately needs it.

For the latest updates on the USCIS funding request and furlough situation, and ideas for how to advocate, see the AILA featured issues page on USCIS Budget Shortfalls and Furloughs. With so many issues competing for attention from Congress, representatives need to hear from people who care about averting disaster at USCIS.

To understand the history behind USCIS’s budget request and furlough threat, see the testimony at the House Judiciary Committee Hearing on Oversight of USCIS on July 29, 2020. (The recording is worth hearing, too.)

The testimony gives a well-documented indictment of USCIS management of petition processing. The testimony looks at petition data to demonstrate that USCIS has not actually suffered from falling fee revenue overall, as it claims (IIUSA), but rather from falling efficiency (AILA) and a faulty fee-setting method, obsolete funding process, and lack of fiscal oversight (even pro-immigration-barrier CIS identified this as a problem).

A witness representing AILA who worked until recently at USCIS noted that:

The Homeland Security Act established USCIS in 2003 to focus exclusively on the administration of immigration benefit applications and established Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) to handle immigration enforcement and border security functions. Yet, the current leader of USCIS and DHS, Kenneth Cuccinelli claims that “we are not a benefit agency, we are a vetting agency.”30 So, as the agency collects money paid by its customers for the adjudication of applications, rather than doing its statutorily mandated work, I saw firsthand prioritization on adding layers of screening, such as social media vetting, hiring more fraud detection personnel, unnecessary interviews, as well as USCIS personnel being detailed to other agencies and spending more time on enforcement priorities. Yet, now USCIS leadership simply gets to put its hand out and ask for more than $1 billion of tax payer money, while at the same time passing off the costs of its own inefficiencies to its customers by proposing to significantly increase fees and adding a 10 percent surcharge on top of that to pay back its bailout and furloughing hard working Americans.

But even if USCIS arguably does not actually need and certainly does not merit the emergency supplemental funding that it’s demanded as a condition for averting staff furloughs, I agree with the union leader who made this plea to Congress:

Our Union fully acknowledges and supports the concerns raised by many Members of Congress: that there needs to be more transparency and fiscal accountability by USCIS; that the funding structure of the Agency needs to be reviewed and possibly overhauled – with a part of the operating costs to be met through user fees and part to be met through appropriated funds; that user fees should not be so unreasonably high that applicants cannot afford to pay them; that there need to be “guardrails” to ensure that all funds are utilized for the necessary operations of USCIS and not ever re-programmed or transferred to other federal agencies for any other purpose.

There are also legitimate concerns about many of the Administration’s policies that have hindered, deterred or blocked many forms of legal immigration…. But these concerns should not become hard and fast “conditions” for whether or when and how emergency funding should be made available. Instead, they should inform and frame the agenda for priority action by the next Congress and Administration, which will be elected by the American people to lead and unite our country in facing the great challenges of the troubled times in which we live.

Congress is currently putting together legislation to bail out USPS, another agency that’s facing crisis through every fault of its own. Many people realize that whatever the source of USPS’s current problems, our country simply cannot afford for it to fail. Can we ask Congress to consider USCIS at the same time? Some good legislative language already prepared:
H.R.7508 – To provide supplemental appropriations to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, and for other purposes, and
H.R. 5971: The Case Backlog Transparency and Accountability Act of 2020.

[8/22 Update: Rep. Zoe Lofgren introduced a bill that proposes to help USCIS solve its budget problems for itself  in the sensible way — not by demanding a government handout but by increasing fees and demand for an existing service. H.R.8089 The Emergency Stopgap USCIS Stabilization Act passed the house on August 22.]

The emergency funding and furlough issue applies to USCIS as a whole, not specific to the Investor Program Office and EB-5 processing. We don’t know how many, if any, furlough notices were sent to IPO staff. However, IPO is certainly poised for budget issues. For the detail of the cracks in the planning for EB-5 adjudications specifically, see my comment to DHS in 2019 on the Proposed Rule to set new I-526 and I-829 form fees, and DHS’s response to my comment in the Final Fee Rule pages 226-227 (regarding I-526 processing) and 268-269 (regarding I-829 processing). The issues that I identify in my comment will remain an on-going challenge. Budget problems will naturally result when an agency relies on unrealistic volume forecasts, declines to make price increases sufficient cover anticipated cost increases, declines to budget for the cost of pending inventory whose associated fees were already spent, and operates on a Ponzi system that depends on continually incoming receipts to cover costs.