Textbook example of waste
Published 3:25 pm Tuesday, November 29, 2011
Ten years after creating the Transportation Security Administration, Congress issued it a report card. The agency did not receive good marks. If it could be subject to one of its own scanners, it would be revealed that the emperor has no clothes.
Some government agencies take decades to reach the level of bloated bureaucracy the TSA achieved in just 10 years, it can be inferred from the report, titled, “A Decade Later: A Call for TSA Reform.”
The report, according to USA Today, concludes the TSA is:
•A bloated and inefficient bureaucracy with 65,000 workers, including nearly 4,000 at headquarters and 9,656 administrators in the field.
An ineffective agency, with 25,000 security breaches in a decade.
A sponsor of inadequate technology, including 500 advanced-imaging technology machines costing $122 million that are “easily thwarted” and $39 million wasted on explosive-detection “puffer” machines that were unreliable.
Rep. John Mica, R-Fla., a longtime critic who wants to privatize TSA screening jobs, said Congress never intended the agency to “mushroom” into a workforce of 65,000 employees, “top heavy” with bureaucrats, CNN reported.
The agency has an annual budget of $8 billion.
With the federal deficit out of control, TSA is an excellent example of where to cut without worry.
“I can tell you, in our wildest dreams … no one ever envisioned 4,000 administrative personnel in Washington, D.C., making on average … almost $104,000, and then nearly another 10,000 out in the field,” Mica told CNN.
How are 4,000 administrative personnel in D.C. keeping us safer? They dream up ways to spend money, such as the recently launched program to “chat-down” passengers, in addition to subjecting them to the body scanners and/or physical pat-downs.
In its defense, TSA spokesman Greg Soule said the agency has developed a highly trained workforce that has screened 5 billion passengers and prevented more than 1,100 guns from being brought onto planes this year.
“At a time when our country’s aviation system is safer, stronger and more secure than it was 10 years ago, this report is an unfortunate disservice to the dedicated men and women of TSA who are on the front lines every day protecting the traveling public,” Soule said.
But this isn’t about the men and women who are on “the front lines every day.” It’s about the thousands employed by the agency who aren’t on the front lines every day. The bureaucrats and the administrators. The consultants and middle managers. If you give an agency $8 billion, it will spend it. According to the report card, we aren’t safer for it.
