Border Patrol to spend $297 million to hire new agents, or $39,000 per hire

This week ICE issued a notice that it plans to seek bids for a three-year contract to help the agency hire 6,597 “support personnel positions.” These jobs are in addition to the 10,000 that Trump ordered — effectively boosting the total new hires to the agency to more than 16,000 in the coming years. ICE currently has a workforce of 20,000 — including agents, officers, investigators and non law-enforcement support positions. The contract for “Comprehensive Hiring and Recruitment Services” has not yet been put out to bid, so what this will cost ICE is not yet known. But there is solid interest in helping the agency out: As of Wednesday, 17 companies signaled interest in bidding on the contract when the time comes. The decision by ICE to reach out to the private sector to help with hiring goals mandated by the Trump administration echoes a similar move that Customs and Border Protection took in November — one that has now drawn scrutiny from the Senate Homeland Security Committee. Trump wants CBP to hire an additional 5,000 Border Patrol agents, a mandate made in a different executive order issued around the same time as the one calling for 10,000 ICE agents. In order to do that, CBP inked a contract with the consulting firm Accenture for up to $297 million over five years to help them hire the Border Patrol agents, as well as 2,000 customs officer and 500 agents for its Air and Marine Operations. That works out to a bit more than $39,000 per hire — just below the entry level salary for a customs officer. The agency said it needed help from the private sector to recruit candidates and process them through hiring because of its long-running hiring woes that have seen it lose more agents that it hires in a year. The agency has to work through 133 applicants to hire a single agent. ICE gives a similar rationale. In a 19-page statement of objectives for the recruitment assistance contract, the agency said the surge in hiring will overwhelm its internal personnel office, called the Office of Human Capital. That office “does not have the capacity to execute at the pace and scope of the hiring activities required to meet this target with its current federal human resources workforce. “...more