If you’re one of the estimated 231 million people who will fly on a U.S. airline this summer, get ready to spend some quality time in the TSA airport security line. Long wait times are racking up across the country, partially as a result of the busy summer travel season — the busiest ever, according to Airlines for America. But that’s not the whole story: TSA watchdogs are suspicious that the embattled agency is not underfunded or understaffed — it seems to be using money and manpower in terribly inefficient ways.
Chris Edwards of the Cato Institute says that the TSA cannot move staff from one location to another (if only they worked with something that could facilitate the movement of people…). Additionally, the agency spends billions of dollars on initiatives that ultimately fail the American people.
The TSA wants more money and more staff, and Congress — sensing the ire of their traveling constituents — has obliged. “Congress has already agreed to move $34 million to the TSA to hire nearly 800 new officers and cover overtime pay for the existing TSA screeners this summer,” according to the LA Times. The TSA employees’ union wants 6,000 more officers.
More bureaucrats does not equal a better outcome — nor does more money. The TSA should know: it raked in $7 billion in federal funding last year, and still asks for more. With that $7 billion, “TSA agents failed to detect 67 of 70 fake bombs planted in luggage during regular security tests.” Huge wait times and bad outcomes sounds familiar: “TSA: It’s Comcast, but for the sky.”
In Atlanta and Chicago, passengers have reported wait times of up to three hours. Depending on where you’re headed, you might spend more time in line for security than in the air.
American travelers accept it as inevitable that you’ll have to take your shoes off, remove your laptop, and risk getting selected for a Freedom Cuddle (which is what I’m calling the pat-down now. Spread it.) However, airports in the U.S. are permitted to use outside contractors, so long as those contractors are approved by TSA’s Screening Partnership Program.
The SPP exists to make sure that contractors are upholding the same security standards as the TSA. At least, that’s the program’s theoretical purpose — in practice, it has been delaying the application process so that TSA can maintain its near monopoly on pre-flight passenger screening. San Francisco and Kansas City currently use private screening companies, but the application process for other airports who’d like to jump ship can take several years. The Obama Administration has made it even more difficult for private companies to get approved. The long approval process has nothing to do with the quality of service being provided: Contractors have proven themselves to be more effective at screening security threats than the TSA itself.
In the meantime, to keep travelers’ anger at bay, airports in Seattle and Atlanta have brought in musicians to entertain crowds in security lines. San Diego has decided to (literally) send in the clowns, with clowns on stilts performing throughout the airport. By far the most creative method of assuaging passenger anger is found at Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky International airport, where “therapy unicorns” (mini horses with dyed pastel hair) regularly make rounds outside the security checkpoints.
Feedback on these initiatives has been decidedly…mixed, to put it kindly. Passengers don’t want a distraction from TSA’s failure — they want TSA to stop failing.
