THE MULTI-BILLION DOLLAR FLOP
BERKLEY BACKS COSTLY TSA
BY ROGER ROOTS, J.D., PH.D.

It was two months after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Congress was in a mad scramble to show it was making air travel safe from terrorism. During the confusion of the period, Congress nationalized the country’s airport passenger screeners, and created a new federal agency, the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) to screen passengers and luggage. At more than 45,000 employees, the TSA was the largest new federal agency created since the 1930s, dwarfing the size of several executive departments.

Although Congresswoman Shelley Berkley (D-Nev.) criticized the president for other hastily passed measures post-9/11 like the PATRIOT Act, Berkley finds comfort in the TSA. Berkley, who occupies a seat on the aviation subcommittee of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, was a strong proponent of the nationalization of screeners in 2001 and reportedly opposes the privatization (or re-privatization) of the screeners.

Berkley’s spokesman David Cherry said that a return to private workers at airport security checkpoints might “open up a new can of worms.” Cherry expressed suspicion that pressure for privatization is being brought by corporations seeking profits. While Cherry conceded that private workers might be more efficient than public workers, he warned that “with efficiency may also come vulnerability.”

Although the TSA is still one of the youngest agencies in the federal government, it has already developed a reputation as one of the biggest policy flops in American history. Recent studies of failure rates at TSA-staffed airports — the rates at which government screeners fail to detect model weapons smuggled in by undercover mock terrorists — show that government screeners perform no better than the private-sector screeners they replaced.

The major difference is cost. Pre-9/11 private-sector screeners cost America’s airlines approximately $660 million annually, while TSA screeners have cost taxpayers about $6 billion per year, almost 10 times more. In fact, these budget differences greatly understate the total costs of switching from private screeners to the TSA. Air transportation has become substantially more costly in terms of added time and inconvenience for American travelers and business people.

The specific rates of failure to stop weapons from getting through airport checkpoints remain classified on the grounds that disclosure would expose the extent of vulnerability at the nation’s airports. However, the findings have been confirmed by more than one branch of government. The Department of Homeland Security — of which the TSA is now a part — has funded two separate studies which found no material differences between TSA failure rates and those of pre-TSA screeners. The General Accounting Office (GAO), the investigative arm of Congress, has recently found that TSA employees perform worse than those at privately staffed airports.

The nationalization of airport screeners was accomplished during a climate of hysteria when commentators and policymakers claimed that airport security was too important to be left to the private sector.  Congressmen from both major parties who knew better went on record predicting that government employees would provide better airport security than private workers. This proposition, of course, is refuted by virtually every scientific study of government work performance that has been conducted over the last three decades.

Even the TSA’s supporters concede that Americans are now paying way too much for way too little aviation security. Americans seeking to travel by air now face screening procedures which are annoying, disruptive and humiliating, but which show very little success in stopping people from smuggling contraband onto airplanes.

Congressman John L. Mica (R-Fla.), chairman of the Aviation subcommittee of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, is now leading a movement in Congress toward ending the government employment of screeners. Mica was an early skeptic of the government takeover, and was savvy enough in 2001 to place a provision in the final bill which allowed five American airports to keep private-sector screeners as a “pilot program” for study. This decision turned out to have been prescient. The recent GAO study comparing screener performance at these five airports (San Francisco, Kansas City, Rochester, N.Y., Tupelo, Miss. and Jackson Hole, Wyo.) with screeners at the nation’s other airports shows that the private screeners outperform their government counterparts by a statistically significant margin.

Sadly, Mica can’t count on the support of Congresswoman Berkley. LW