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.

FMI: www.tsa.gov