Transportation Secretary Appears to be Hanging On

by Kevin R.C. "Hognose" O'Brien

As the President's second-term cabinet shapes up, it is far different from the first one. The mainstream press has focused on big changes at State and the potential of changes in Defense, with less focus on downline and domestically-oriented departments. But in the department that has the greatest impact on American (and world) aviation, no one knows if change is coming.

Will Norman Mineta retire?
Please?

A Little History Here

Norman Mineta was selected because Mr. Bush promised to nominate a Democrat to his Cabinet. Supposedly he chose Transportation because, everyone thought, it was the least important post in the Cabinet; relatively junior not only in protocol but in the extent of damage one guy can do.

Boy, did they ever get that wrong.

In some ways, Mineta has run the department like the Democrat he has been all his life, for which he can scarcely be blamed. But, sometimes he clings to ideas that his party has left behind. Consider the Federal Flight Deck Officers program -- lawmakers intended to allow licensed line pilots to carry guns, as a last line of defense in the cockpit. It was actually a revival of an old idea -- once, pilots *had* to carry guns if their planes carried air mail.

The DOT under Mineta, murmuring the 20th Century Democratic guns-are-always-bad mantra, did everything they could to undermine this program, even after Congress lost patience and force-fed the regulation to the squirming DOT. Today the bureaucracy continues its passive resistance to the common-sense law. For example, on Mineta's watch, the training was moved from accessible Glynco, Georgia to remote, unserved-by-airlines Artesia, NM, evidently to discourage applicants.

Extensive, expensive psychological testing is required, along with a $7000 fee, and the government fights to keep its decisions secret, in a broad-based attempt to undermine the law. (This isn't just our opinion. It is shared by the bipartisan legislative team who sponsored the initial FFDO bill, who have sponsored a second bill this year to try again to force-feed their original intent to reluctant bureaucrats).

Mineta's reign will also forever be associated with the Transportation Security Administration, an essential component of the Global War on Tourism, and the most grievously mismanaged agency since the UN Oil-for-Food program (...though it IS possible that Oil-for-Food is not as bad as it's been made out to be, which would give the blue ribbon to the TSA).

The TSA moved to the Department of Homeland Security in 2003, but it still carries the tone that Mineta set. His supporters will point out that it was Congress and the President that created the agency, but it was Mineta's minions who were responsible for some of its more bizarre policies. It was a bureaucrat, not a lawmaker, who required employees of the agency created to address the failure of private security screening, to have experience failing at private security screening. It was a bureaucrat who decided that military retreads were the best managers, and who decided they needed to be paid like Saudi princes, and spend hundreds of thousands on interior decorating. It was a bureaucrat that decided that all of TSA's Lake Wobegon above-average executives needed huge performance bonuses. It was a bureaucrat who gave a lifetime-achievement award in an agency that still pleads inexperience when it's caught harboring thieves or mishandling money (both of which happen with timetable regularity).

Norman and the Terrorists

Mineta's own boyhood experience -- he was one of the Americans interned on specious racial grounds during World War Two -- has made him an implacable foe of any type of profiling. Nine days after September 11, 2001, Mineta ordered airlines not only not to conduct any type of profiling, but also forbidding them from giving any extra pre-flight scrutiny to suspicious passengers of Middle Eastern appearance. This is the genesis of the infamous "never screen more than three Arabs" rule, and it came straight from Mineta's psyche.

Unfortunately, profiling is the most effective tool available, as the millions of terror-free miles flown by El Al can attest. The alternate system that TSA has cobbled together has led directly to today's TSA, women fondled by creepy (if nominally female) guards, elderly passengers subjected to ridiculous micro-inspection, and terror watch-list denizen Yusuf Islam (nee Cat Stevens) ushered on to the plane without a raised eyebrow.

Under Mineta, the TSA did squatto to thwart actual terrorists, but was quick to jump and impose restrictions for the commercial, not safety, benefit of corporate interests. You don't have a friend in office, but Disney, the NFL, and corporate NASCAR do.

Cha-chingg.

Again, these Mineta-established policies made the transition over to DHS with the TSA.

We don't believe that Americans named Haddad ought to get treated to a slow boat to Gitmo, but we do think that the fulcrum between civil rights and civil safety is off center. There is something seriously, pathologically wrong in a department that is more worried about the feelings of Yusuf Islam, who has supported the Taliban and Hamas, than about the lives of Americans (and the people of all nations who use American air transport). There is something fundamentally toxic loose in a department that worries more about Michael Eisner's bottom line than about the public trust to which the department is allegedly dedicated, and to which the department directs so much hot air and so many empty declarations of fealty. There is something wrong in the Department of Transportation, and it's not lack of resources ($58 BILLION in 2004, about a million per employee).

And What About the Rest of Aviation?

Aviation isn't just airline security. The hard-working people in the FAA frequently found themselves at loggerheads with DOT honchos during this period. An example of this is the incredible, long and arduous path the Sport Pilot and Light Sport Aircraft rules took. For a while it looked like that rule was going to be analogous to Scott's Antarctic journey -- he made it to the South Pole, but croaked in the process. The rule finally is starting to have an effect, years after Mineta's minions grabbed it by the ankles and wouldn't let go.

The vast amounts thrown on the TSA cash bonfire have done less to save life than more attention to air safety would have done. A more rapid rollout of ADS-B and WAAS have the potential for real, quantifiable lifesaving. The TSA does not. I suppose that this is perfectly logical, in the mixed-up, tossed-up, never-come-down world of Washington. Which is another reason that Mr. Mineta, who has called Washington home for some thirty years, ought to go.

It's pretty clear that the people who fly small planes, and no less, the people who fly in big ones, have no friend in the Executive Office Building.

Mineta's Age and Health

Norman Y. Mineta was born in San Jose on November 12, 1931. In some people, 73 is not old, but last time we saw Mineta, in Oshkosh in 2003, he appeared feeble and disoriented, and was surrounded by a phalanx of phlunkies who insulated him from the press. He's never been available to answer our questions. And that raises the interesting question: if it isn't Mineta, who *is* running that department?

The Bottom Line

It's time to thank Norman Mineta for his lifetime of public service, which began in the Army in 1953 and included stints as Mayor of San Jose and twenty years in Congress, and give him a gold watch, and send him home. (We would name an airport after him, but San Jose did that already). The direct reports that he brought in -- retreads from his Carter Administration post as Secretary of Commerce -- need to follow him into the Dreaded Private Sector.

To replace him, if you must have a Democrat, you could scarcely do worse by just grabbing one at random (anybody on the streets in New York City or Hollywood -- naah, forget Hollywood, there you COULD do worse). OK, forget about a political litmus test, how about a serious good choice for Secretary of Transportation? What about Sean O'Keefe?

He's done a decent job at NASA -- he hasn't satisfied any of the space agency's fractious communities completely, but ask them "compared to Dan Goldin...?" -- and O'Keefe deserves a shot at a larger, more influential agency.

That's only one idea, of course. Thousands of Americans would probably make a good Secretary of Transportation. Just not the incumbent.

FMI: www.dot.gov/affairs/mineta.htm, www.secure-skies.org