TSA Living Up to Expectations

[On this past weekend's flight from Denver, I couldn't help noticing seven TSA employees, all standing around a table, talking with each other, while the other 17 TSA-ers (and two real cops) in the immediate security screening area were "busily" checking all TWO of the prospective passengers behind me --ANN News Editor, Tim Kern]

A newly-released paper, "Terrorized Into Absurdity," by Independent Institute research fellow Roger Roots, details how government's knee-jerk reaction to September 11, plus the militaristic/secret-police mismanagement of the Transportation Security Administration, has done more harm than good, especially compared to what could have been a market solution to the perceived problem.

Roots finds that federalization of airline security will decrease, not increase, passenger safety. Certainly, the recent report of the dozens of screeners with criminal background has something to do with this, but it is also in part due to the civil service -- "once hired, rarely fired" means that these screeners -- in addition to the tens of thousands who have yet to undergo a background check -- are here to stay.

Knee jerks have been around a long time.

Roots starts by showing that government action -- immediate, ineffective, expensive, and permanent -- is not a new "solution" to society's ills. Throughout the 20th Century, government, increasingly free of constitutional limits, has behaved this way. He writes, "Declaration of a national emergency in 1933 facilitated the creation of a number of colossal government programs that survived long after the Depression had ended, even if they had done nothing to end the Depression... A similar climate of hysteria regarding alleged runaway drug use in the late 1980s prompted government officials to fill U.S. prisons with casualties of the war on drugs, but the laws passed in response to that hysteria produced less-than-satisfactory advances against actual drug use...

"Consistent with this pattern, U.S. policymakers responded to the terrorist suicide hijackings of September 11, 2001, with 'the biggest expansion in federal powers and the most free-handed new spending of federal dollars in decades.' Congress and the Bush administration expanded the powers of federal law enforcement to detect and arrest terrorists, increased U.S. investments in counterterrorist intelligence, placed thousands of National Guard troops at airports, and expanded the use of armed air marshals on domestic flights."

He says that's nothing, compared to, "...the creation of a huge new federal agency, the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), to perform security screening at U.S. commercial airports."

Not just ineffective; it's expensive, and hurts other efforts.

Roots notes that, "The expense of the government screening operation was estimated initially at $1.8 billion annually but later increased by $4.4 billion after the TSA had been created. By comparison, the airlines paid approximately $660 million to screening firms in 2000. The explosion in funding for the TSA has enticed hundreds of federal workers to leave other agencies, such as the Border Patrol and the Secret Service, to take advantage of the TSA's $36,900 to $83,900 annual pay scale." Their mismanagement has also resulted in the agency's announcement of upcoming mass firings, further disruptive of the screeners' lives and careers.

Roots continues, documenting the research on what "Professor" Harold Hill (The Music Man) called, "Mass-teria" [Roots uses the more-academic term, "moral panic" --ed.], and its effects on rational policy-making: "Passage of the Aviation and Transportation Security Act exemplified policymaking at its worst: frenzied, panicked, and overreactionary."

Praise for FAA, PAX

Roots notes that on September 11, the FAA did many right things, such as the unprecedented grounding of all flights; the passengers on Flight 93, illegally using cell phones, were able to thwart the fourth attempt. These examples of correct responses to a problem are in sharp contrast to the over-reaction of the TSA and its formation. He notes, "From a passenger pool of only approximately thirty people—without weapons, training, or instruction -— sufficient resistance arose to prevent the hijackers from accomplishing their ultimate objective."

He also brings up the most-important item, overlooked by the federalize-frenzy in the wake of September 11: "Viewed from the most practical perspective, the September 11 hijackings were caused not by the failure of screeners on the ground but by failures of airline personnel in the
air, who were inadequately equipped to defend the cockpits."

In his conclusion, Roger Roots notes, "The damage done to the future of the air-travel industry by Congress’s acts may exceed the damage done to the industry by the terrorists themselves."

What we're saying is, for those with the time and the interest, it's a good read.

FMI: www.independent.org/tii/media/pdf/tir74roots.pdf