USCIS furloughs 13,700 of its 20k employees

U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) has issued furlough notices to 13,700 of its 20,000 employees, potentially putting as much as 73% of USCIS staff our of work temporarily. The furlough will go into effect on August 3, 2020 unless Congress and the President take action to provide emergency funding for USCIS to continue operations at its present level.

Why were the furlough notices issued?

USCIS receives 95% of its funding comes from filing fees paid by applicants and petitioners for immigration benefits. USCIS operations have gone from a yearly surplus to a massive deficit: the agency had a total carryover balance of over $1.26 billion at the end of FY 2019. It is now requesting $1.2 billion

USCIS asserts that the budget shortfall is due to COVID-19 and the decrease in petitions/applications being filed. However, many reason that the shortfall occurred due to a focus on increasing fraud detection operations and several policy changes which significantly increased the already high percentage of issuance of post-filing Requests for Additional Evidence, and consequently increased overall processing times.

In May USCIS asked Congress for $1.2 billion to support operations while charging a 10% surcharge on future filing fees to reimburse the Treasury. This surcharge would be in addition to an average 21% fee increase that USCIS proposed in December 2019 and is close to finalizing by regulation.

Based on an internal USCIS document, the $1.2 billion request breaks down into $571.2 million to support operations in fiscal 2020, which ends Sept. 30, 2020 and $650 million in carryover funds to ensure that sufficient resources are available at the start of the next fiscal year. Of the $571.2 million in fiscal 2020 aid, $373.4 million would be used for payroll and $197.8 million for other expenses including rent, FBI name checks and fingerprinting, and information technology contracts.