A government official who says the TSA was his fault now says he regrets the monster he helped create.
…a decade after the TSA was created following the September 11 attacks, the author of the legislation that established the massive agency grades its performance at “D-“
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“It mushroomed into an army,” Mica said. “It’s gone from a couple-billion-dollar enterprise to close to $9 billion.” As for keeping the American public safe, Mica says, “They’ve failed to actually detect any threat in 10 years.”
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The fledgling agency was quickly engulfed in its first scandal in 2002 as it rushed to hire 30,000 screeners, and the $104 million awarded to the company to contract workers quickly escalated to more than $740 million.
Federal investigators tracked those cost overruns to recruiting sessions held at swank hotels and resorts in St. Croix, the Virgin Islands, Florida and the Wyndham Peaks Resort and Golden Door Spa in Telluride, Colo.
His solution? Reduce government oversight by giving large portions away to be run by private companies.
Asked whether the agency should be privatized, Mica answered with a qualified yes.
“They need to get out of the screening business and back into security. Most of the screening they do should be abandoned,” Mica said. “I just don’t have a lot of faith at this point,” Mica said.
Allowing airports to privatize screening was a key element of Mica’s legislation and a report released by the committee in June determined that privatizing those efforts would result in a 40% savings for taxpayers.
A committee figured that out? Is it anything like the committee that thought the TSA was a good idea? As far as I can tell the magic Mica savings report was based on simply comparing the number of government supervised private screeners working at SFO to the number of government employed LAX screeners. Fewer screeners work at SFO so labor costs are lower, so they must be more efficient, right?
A 2006 report comes to mind that showed the SFO screeners failed to report security breaches to the TSA. There’s also the 2010 knife incident that the TSA tried to hide. And who can forget the missing laptop at SFO? Even though the laptop was found, confidence in the security screeners at SFO was lost.
Extrapolating screening management from SFO to the rest of the country does not seem to make a lot of sense either from a security or a financial standpoint. Sure, it reduces the number of jobs, but is that the real goal? And if all he wants is to reduce jobs, and screening is unnecessary, then why stop at most? Why not dismantle the whole program instead of saying government will be better off to try and take on management of fraud and waste among private contractors?