Description:
S. 2293 would extend certain employment protections afforded under the Uniformed Services Employment and Reemployment Rights Act (USERRA) to people who are activated for temporary duty by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) in response to disasters declared under the Robert T. Stafford Disaster Relief and Emergency Assistance Act. FEMA currently employs about 12,400 such reservists, who are deployed for duty as needed. USERRA generally requires employers to reemploy covered personnel who serve on active duty upon their return to civilian life and prohibits employment discrimination against such service members. The Department of Labor’s Veterans’ Employment and Training Service (VETS), in coordination with other agencies, collaboratively enforces USERRA by investigating claims of discrimination. Over the past five years, the VETS program investigated an average of about 1,000 new discrimination cases each year out of an eligible population totaling more than 1 million service members (mostly personnel from the reserve and National Guard components of the U.S. military, as well as a small number of FEMA employees). Using information from VETS about the rate of claim filings for the current USERRA population, CBO expects that extending employment protections to additional people would increase the number of claims, on average, by about five each year. Based on the cost to administer the VETS program, CBO estimates implementing the bill would cost less than $500,000 over the 2022-2026 period; such spending would be subject to the availability of appropriated funds.
