Heritage Foundation Leadership for America

Veronique de Rugy's Nationalreview.com column critiques the track record of the Transportation Security Administration:

After the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks, Congress ordered all but five commercial airports to switch from privately employed screeners to a government workforce. Three years after the federal takeover, TSA is inundated with complaints. The GAO reported several times on the agency's ineffectiveness at providing quality airport screening, while the Department of Homeland Security's (DHS) own inspector general showed that passenger screening by the TSA needed to be improved to keep explosives and weapons off commercial aircraft. ...Finally, for the first time GAO found statistically significant evidence that private-passenger screeners perform better than their federal counterparts. This incompetence is augmented by fraud, waste, and abuse. For instance, last year the agency spent nearly half a million dollars on an awards ceremony, including $81,000 for plaques. It spent over $200,000 for travel and lodging for attendees and $461,745 were spent at the Grand Hyatt in Washington, D.C. where the event took place. And recently, the inspector general report revealed "waste and abuse" in the 2003 construction of the TSA Operation Center in Virginia: Employees bought $500,000 worth of artwork and silk plants and hid the purchases under the label "tool and equipment." They also routinely used government credit cards to buy leather briefcases and other personal items. ...Security experts argue that TSA's mandate is also poorly focused. The federal government has already spent over $10 billion of taxpayers' money on systems that screen every passenger to keep knives, weapons, and now lighters off of planes; what we really need, however, is to keep dangerous passengers out of airline cockpits. This can be accomplished with simple cockpit barricades, which the airline industry has now installed at a relatively low costs estimated between $300 million and $500 million over a ten-year period. Another cost-effective security measure to prevent attacks of the 9/11 variety is to let pilots carry guns. Yet two years after TSA launched a program to train pilots to carry guns in the cockpit, lingering bureaucratic problems and unfriendly responses have dissuaded pilots from participating.

Sadly, an article by Ryan Ellis explains that the bureaucracy is being rewarded with a higher budget - money that will come from air travelers who already are paying a high price by having to deal with TSA red-tape and delays:

The Bush administration's proposed fiscal 2006 budget includes a massive tax increase on every American who uses air travel. The tax, estimated to raise $1.5 billion annually, would go to the Homeland Security Department's Transportation Security Administration (TSA) to offset airport security costs. According to the Air Transport Association of America, in 2005 the federal government will collect $3.2 billion in homeland security taxes on flights. The total tax burden represents 26 percent of a typical $200 ticket. The TSA proposal would hike total taxes on airplane tickets by 47 percent, to $4.7 billion in 2006. For the average traveler, the security tax portion of a ticket for one-way flights would go up by 120 percent and on round-trip flights by 60 percent. The federal security tax would rise to $5.50 per flight from $2.50 each way and would cap multiple-leg flights at $8 each way instead of the current $5. ...Fred L. Smith, president of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, raised this issue at a news conference hosted by the Air Transport Association. "The Transportation Security Administration lacks incentive to ask whether an additional 'safety' factor does or does not make a meaningful contribution to air safety," Smith said. "Like all 'precautionary' agencies, their bias is to ensure against risks for which they, the bureaucrats, are responsible. "To put 'risk' in perspective," Smith said, "there's no such thing as risk-free travel; there can only be safer travel. Airlines, data consistently show, offer a safer mode of travel compared to most alternatives, even taking into account any terrorist threat.