Fire The TSA
Air Travel: If a private company wasted billions of taxpayer dollars, hired workers who failed to do their job 95% of the time, and then forced people to wait in line for hours, how long do you think they’d be in business? So why is the TSA being treated any differently?
Because this toddler in a wheelchair could be a terrorist?
Over the weekend, 400 passengers missed their flights at Chicago O’Hare International Airport because they were stuck in a TSA line for up to three. Since February, roughly 4,000 passengers have missed flights waiting to get through security.
American Airlines says that, in March alone, 6,800 of its passengers were in TSA lines when their flights left.
There’s even a #IHateTheWait hashtag on Twitter where people are sharing photos of airport security lines snaking around airports.
It’s almost as if the nation’s airports have turned into mini-Soviet Unions, where instead of waiting for bread, people stand in line for hours to be poked and prodded. In a sense, that’s correct, since Congress had the federal government take over airport security in the wake of 9/11.
Instead of superior service lawmakers promised, the public got incompetence, waste and fraud.
The TSA, naturally, blames budget cuts for the current mess. It says staffing is down 10% since 2013, while air travel is up 15%. The mainstream press has bought this line, but as we noted in this space recently, but as we pointed out in this space recently, it is a completely bogus claim.
The better measure of the TSA’s budget is from before Obama flooded the agency with stimulus money. The TSA’s budget today is 9% higher than it was in 2007, and its full-time workforce is up by 4.3%. Over those same years, the number of passengers going through major airports dropped 7 %, and the number of commercial flights fell 22%. Plus, the TSA is responsible for fewer airports today than in 2007.
This is to say nothing of the fact that the TSA has over the years wasted vast sums of money. Last year, for example, we learned that the TSA blew $160 million on body scanners that failed 96% of the time.
As 2012 report from the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee found hundreds of millions of dollars in waste. The investigation found, for example, that the TSA spent $44 million on “explosive trace detectors” that it didn’t need.
More recently, TSA reportedly spent $336,000 to develop an iPad app that randomly displays a left or right arrow to direct passengers.
It should be clear to anyone who has taken even a cursory look at the TSA that its problem has nothing to do with funding, and everything to do with government incompetence. Even the liberal Vox.com has concluded that “TSA is a waste of money that doesn’t save lives.”
More money will not solve these problems.
Instead, Congress should move to kill TSA entirely, and shift back to private airport screeners that are regulated by the government. Several airports — mostly smaller regional ones — have already done this on their own, but since it means adding operations costs, bigger airports are understandably reluctant to follow suit.
Creating the TSA was a huge mistake made in haste after 9/11. It’s time for Congress to rectify that mistake.
