TSA: Mission Creep Meets Waste

Mass media regularly feeds on the Transportation Security Administration (TSA)’s checkered past, and for good reason. According to a recent ABC News exclusive, “an internal investigation of the Transportation Security Administration revealed security failures at dozens of the nation’s busiest airports, where undercover investigators were able to smuggle mock explosives or banned weapons through checkpoints in 95 percent of trials.”1 This followed the leak of an internal Department of Homeland Security (DHS) inspector general’s report indicating that TSA agents failed to detect 67 out of 70 threats presented by red team members. This isn’t an isolated problem at the TSA, as we’ll see. DHS secretary Jeh Johnson’s response was to announce some insubstantial changes and re-assign the TSA director.2 As is the way with government, oversight of the internal investigation and change process will fall to a team of DHS and TSA insiders, as these are the tools that bureaucrats use to diffuse criticism or cover up problems. What’s more, the DHS inspector general (IG) announced a few days later on 9 June 2015 that he has launched an investigation into the source of the leak(s) exposing the TSA’s ineffectiveness in detecting guns and bombs in the first place.3 In the span of two weeks in early June the DHS went from imbalanced defense to full-court offense: it silenced the media and Congress by announcing a sham investigation, while aggressively pursuing the whistleblowers who brought the public’s attention to the matter—that’s a great way to send a very clear signal to TSA agents who might be inclined to talk to reporters or Congress. It is axiomatic in government that the way to make an ineffective program work better is to make it larger. Axioms, of course, are assumed and not proven. The TSA’s approach to this was to create added screening programs such as the Visible Intermodal Prevention and Response (VIPR) squads.4 These VIPR squads were another byproduct of the George W. Bush administration’s concession to bigger government. But after three years of operation, the 2008 DHS IG reported that more than 50 percent of VIPR inspectors surveyed didn’t understand their mission, chain of command, or job responsibilities.5 After such a glowing review, the criticisms of VIPR teams for harassment of the traveling public must have come as quite a shock to Congress.6 TSA: Mission Creep Meets Waste