TSA Itself On The Chopping Block
By ANN Senior Correspondent Kevin "Hognose" O'Brien
REAL-TIME News-Analysis 1100 EDT: The White
House has asked TSA Director Admiral David C. Stone to resign in
June, and the agency itself is scheduled for dismantling or -- more
likely -- very great reductions in its budget and scope of
operations,according to Friday's Washington Post.
Post Reporter Sara Kehaulani Goo, notes that the 2006 budget
scales the TSA back to be the manager of the nation's airport
screeners. Period.
In explaining why this might have happened, Goo writes: "The TSA
has been plagued by operational missteps, public relations blunders
and criticism of its performance from both the public and
legislators. Its "No Fly" list has mistakenly snared senators. Its
security screeners have been arrested for stealing from luggage,
and its passenger pat-downs have set off an outcry from women."
Excellent summary. Does it sound like she's been reading Aero-News,
or what?
As the Post points out, TSA has seen one of its flagship
elements, the air marshals inherited from FAA, leave, and they left
because they wanted out (they're not too happy with current
management, a layer of appearance-obsessed Secret Service retreads
that TSA settled on them, either). More recently the Agency's
explosives experts have been transferred, and now their labs are on
the move, to other agencies in the Department of Homeland
Security.
The remainder of the
article is highly speculative, as the future shape of DHS and the
TSA depends entirely on decisions by DHS Secretary Michael
Chertoff, and by all accounts Chertoff is still assessing his
department and has not yet made these decisions.
The article has one inevitable boner in it, when Paul C. Light,
an NYU public service professor and scholar at the left-leaning
Brookings Institution, described the TSA as "one of the
federal government's greatest successes of the past half century."
If this is a success.... Light follows up by comparing the TSA to
NASA. This is a comparison that might be true in ways that Light
misses, but he specifically ties the comparison to the
creation of NASA in the 1950s. (NASA was indeed created in the
post-Sputnik-scare 1950s, but as a renamed and modified version of
a 1920s organization, the National Advisory Committee on
Aeronautics; the comparison to the TSA's overnight creation is not
remotely apt, even if it came from your hangar buddy and not a
professor of public service).
While the TSA has gone from one disaster to another, Admiral
Stone has always been both accessible to us, and straight with us.
That's about all you can ask for in the head of an agency whose
interests are in direct opposition to most aviators', and always
left us with the impression of a decent man jammed in a pretty
tough job.