Mica, Others, Call For Fundamental Reform Of The Agency
U.S. House Congressional leaders released a report today
highlighting a decade of TSA mismanagement and failures. The
report, entitled “A Decade Later: A Call for TSA
Reform,” calls for dramatic reform of the nation’s
bloated transportation security agency.
“Congress created TSA ten years
ago to be a lean, risk-based, adaptive agency, responsible for
analyzing intelligence, setting security standards, and overseeing
the nation’s transportation security structure.
Unfortunately, TSA has lost its way,” said U.S. Rep. John L.
Mica (R-FL) (pictured), Chairman of the Transportation and
Infrastructure Committee. “TSA has strayed from its security
mission and mushroomed into a top-heavy bureaucracy that includes
3,986 headquarters staff, making $103,852 per year on average, and
9,656 administrators in the field. Currently, TSA has 65,000
employees. Unfortunately, over the past ten years, the agency has
spent $57 billion on numerous operational and technology
failures."
Mica said that, while the United States is safer today than we were
ten years ago, it is largely thanks to the vigilance of American
citizens and passengers, the actions of flight crews and armed
pilots, the addition of hardened cockpit doors, and the assistance
of foreign intelligence agencies. “After ten years, we cannot
continue to rely on luck. It is time for reform," he said. "TSA
must become the kind of agency it was intended to be – a
thinking, risk-based, flexible agency that analyzes risks, sets
security standards and audits security performance."
“TSA was envisioned and sold to
the American people as a proactive agency that would strategically
deploy the latest technology and cutting-edge tactics to protect
travelers,” said U.S. Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA) (pictured),
Chairman of the Oversight and Government Reform Committee.
“Despite these high ambitions, the agency has become a
backwards-looking dinosaur that seeks employees through pizza box
advertising and struggles to detect actual terrorist threats. TSA
needs a vision and purpose that goes beyond throwing expensive
equipment and invasive searches at passengers who do not pose a
security threat.”
U.S. Rep. Paul Broun, M.D. (R-GA) said that despite TSA’s
massive bureaucracy, reports indicate that more than 25,000
security breaches have occurred in U.S. airports since 2001.
“The agency as a whole has been a colossal disappointment;
the one thing it has been successful at is violating the rights of
the American people," said Broun, Chairman of the Science
Committee’s Subcommittee on Investigations and Oversight, and
a member of the House Homeland Security Committee. "Instead of
worrying about ‘political correctness’, TSA should be
putting our resources into intelligence and technologies that could
be more effective when it comes to catching highly elusive and
dangerous terrorists. We should know about terrorist attacks before
they materialize on U.S. soil, and I have yet to see that kind of
progress come out of TSA.”
U.S. Rep. Tom Petri (R-WI) (pictured),
Chairman of the Aviation Subcommittee of the House Transportation
Committee, called terrorism a global problem, and recommended
looking at how other effectively safeguard the public and stop
terrorism. “We need to focus more on identifying and
thwarting terrorists rather than spending vast resources on
programs that simply inconvenience the travelling public who are
not a threat,” he said.
“This report highlights what we have known for years –
that TSA is misguided, overly bureaucratic, and mismanaged,”
said U.S. Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-UT), Chairman of the Subcommittee
on National Security, Homeland Defense and Foreign Operations of
the House Oversight Committee. “It invests in
tomorrow’s technology to fight yesterday’s threats and
wastes billions of taxpayer dollars in the process. It’s time
for President Obama and Secretary Napolitano to refocus the
troubled agency and get serious about real solutions.”
The report paints TSA as a troubled agency from the top down. TSA
and its administrator are buried within the Department of Homeland
Security along with 21 other agencies. The report asserts that
turnover in the position of TSA Administrator has been excessive,
and too little priority has been placed on naming a new
administrator when the position has become vacant.
The report's authors say the list of TSA operational failures has
grown over the last ten years, and the agency has expended a
significant amount of taxpayer resources in too many efforts that
have provided little or no security benefits. Earlier this year the
agency undermined a successful – and congressionally mandated
– program to allow airports to opt out of the all-federal
passenger screening model in favor of a model in which qualified
private contractors conduct screening under TSA standards and
oversight. TSA’s expenditure of a quarter of a billion in
taxpayer dollars resulted in a poorly designed, poorly tested, and
poorly performing behavior detection program, known as SPOT. The
agency has also failed to successfully implement a long-delayed
Transportation Worker Identification Credential (TWIC) program at
many of the nation’s ports.
They also highlight TSA personnel
failures, include its inability to retain its workforce, high
training costs for replacements, and decisions to recruit employees
with ads on pizza boxes and discount gas pumps. The agency has also
failed to effectively deploy technology, the report says. Since
2001, TSA has obligated over $8 billion on screening technology, a
significant portion of which has been useless, unused, discarded,
poorly deployed, or sitting idle because of a lack of trained
personnel.
The report says that, despite great expenditures, TSA’s
record of stopping terrorist plots is dismal. Classified
evaluations of security performance continue to reveal concerning
results. For example, the shoe bomber, the underwear bomber, the
Times Square bomber, and the toner cartridge bomb plot were not
thwarted by TSA, but by flight crews and passengers, or by foreign
intelligence agencies. The report was prepared by the majority
staff of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee and
the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.
Mica said the report is being provided to Congress. and there
are plans to introduce legislation to improve this critical
security agency.