Lawmaker threatens to force DHS to let employees wear masks

Angered by the Homeland Security Department's response to questioning about how it prepared for the swine flu outbreak, Rep. Stephen Lynch, D-Mass., said he will introduce legislation if necessary to force DHS to give its employees the right to wear face masks or respirators to protect themselves.

"I shouldn't have to do that. I shouldn't have to blow up the bureaucracy in order to get something done," Lynch said Thursday during a hearing of the Subcommittee on Federal Workforce, Postal Service and the District of Columbia, which he chairs. "This is a simple issue."

DHS' current policy -- which requires workers who come in close contact with an infected person to wear face masks, but otherwise doesn't explicitly allow or prohibit them -- has drawn the ire of the National Treasury Employees Union and the American Federation of Government Employees, which claim that thousands of passenger screeners and others on the border have been ordered to remove masks by their managers.

Elaine Duke, undersecretary of management for DHS, said there wasn't enough evidence to warrant a departmentwide policy endorsing the use of face masks.

"There has to be a reasonable probability that our employees are going to encounter the sickness in their line of work," Duke said. "It did not seem appropriate."

Subcommittee members of both parties criticized DHS' position.

"They seem to worry about perceptions more than allowing people to make that choice themselves," said Rep. Brian Bilbray, R-Calif.

Duke and Nancy Kichak, head of the strategic human resources policy division at the Office of Personnel Management, said a commitment to implementing telework policies could help prevent the spread of an outbreak.

"Telework, of course, is not a useful tool for those we think of as 'front-line workers,' " Kichak said in her written testimony. "But for the rest of the workforce, telework can be an extremely useful tool in coping with pandemic health crises and other emergencies."

When asked by committee members to rate how well-prepared the government was to implement widespread telework in response to a pandemic, Kichak said four out of 10 -- although she admitted, under further questioning, that only about 6 percent of government workers now telecommute regularly.

Kichak said OPM's recent initiatives on telework could improve the federal government's ability to deal with a pandemic.

While federal agencies have received generally good reviews for their response to the outbreak of the H1N1 virus, experts warn the real test will likely come when flu season starts in the fall.

"We're in the first two weeks of a yearlong outbreak," said Eric Toner, a senior associate at the Center for Biosecurity at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center.