The Transportation Security Administration is less efficient and less likely to detect explosives than the private security screeners who once handled America’s airports, even though those screeners were themselves not terribly good at detecting bombs in tests.
The Heritage Foundation’s Zack Smith writes about how the TSA is so slow it routinely makes travelers miss their flights at the Pensacola Airport. Making many people miss their flights is not something a private screener would do, because it would fear being terminated and replaced by a competitor:
Anyone who travels through Pensacola’s airport knows that the Transportation Security Administration’s screening process there is broken. For frequent flyers who use that airport regularly (like me), it stands out as a consistently subpar experience.
TSA is either unwilling or unable to perform its missions efficiently and effectively, often leading to obscenely long lines that create safety issues because they spill into areas not designed to queue waiting passengers.
Screeners also appear to have trouble operating the new high-tech scanning machines with the accompanying backups, extra bag checks, and delays not found in other airports.
TSA advises travelers to arrive at the airport at least two hours before their flights to account for the long lines, but it fails to note that they don’t open the lines at least two hours before the earliest flights depart − wreaking havoc for those trying to catch those flights….Pensacola’s mayor even asked members of Congress to intervene because TSA refused to provide sufficient staff. After their intervention, TSA agreed to temporarily provide more screeners, but only through the end of July. After that, everyone anticipates the long lines and unnecessary delays will return….
Pensacola should fire TSA and privatize screening operations at our airport…Twenty-one current airports have already done it…At least three other Florida airports − Key West, Orlando Sanford, and Sarasota-Bradenton − currently utilize private screeners. TSA’s Screening Partnership Program [theoretically] allows airports to opt out of using TSA screeners and to instead hire private parties to do the job.
Studies have shown that airports participating in this program have greater efficiency and better customer satisfaction. A 2011 study by the U.S. House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee found that private screeners at San Francisco’s airport screened 65 percent more passengers per screener than TSA screeners who manned the security checkpoints at LAX, Los Angeles’s primary airport.
The private screeners also would not likely be impacted by government shutdowns and other federal labor issues like TSA screeners would be. Ironically, because TSA functions as both the regulator and the regulated entity, it stands to lose if it approves airports’ requests to privatize screening operations. That’s likely why the process is notoriously slow and difficult to undertake. In fact, the Obama Administration’s TSA even tried to kill the privatization program until Congress passed legislation requiring the agency to restore it.
Democratic administrations have made the TSA and Amtrak less efficient, and made it harder to dismiss bad employees, such as by introducing collective bargaining at the TSA, and by disbanding Amtrak’s Office of Security Strategy and Special Operations in 2009. They did so, even though:
A study found that the TSA is more than twice as likely to fail to detect a bomb as the private security firms it replaced. And TSA’s failure rate is three or four times as high as the few remaining private firms still allowed to handle airline security.
In tests, TSA failed to detect fake bombs 60 percent of the time at Chicago’s O’Hare airport, and 75 percent of the time in Los Angeles. Yet the Obama administration plans to make TSA even more bureaucratic by introducing collective bargaining, which will make it even harder to get rid of ineffective employees.
Rather than take over airline security screening, the federal government should have stepped up testing of the private companies that performed it, to weed out bad companies. President Bush initially objected to Congressional demands for a federal takeover, but knuckled under for political reasons. Ironically, even in European countries run by Socialist parties, airline security and screening is generally in the hands of private companies, which are are usually more diligent, innovative, and efficient, as well as less bureaucratic.
The Obama administration is also undermining the security of railroad passengers by gutting an expert, highly-rated, anti-terror agency at Amtrak, which Amtrak’s unions hate, because it is not unionized. Political cronyism also appears to be playing a role in the gutting of Amtrak’s Office of Security Strategy and Special Operations (OSSSO). Ultimately, OSSSO’s “highly-specialized officers” will likely be replaced by unionized employees with “alarmingly low pass rates” in “basic” classes.
