Passenger Screening Reform

Airport Screening Reform -- Private-Federal Screening Model Is More Efficient & Cost-Effective, and Could Save Taxpayers $1 Billion

The Transportation Security Agency (TSA), created in 2001 following the 9/11 terrorist attacks, was intended to be a lean security agency with the flexibility to quickly respond and adapt to potential threats of terrorism. Instead TSA has mushroomed into a massive, inflexible, backward-looking bureaucracy of more than 65,000. Over its first ten years of existence, the agency and its numerous failures have cost taxpayers $57 billion.

TSA is a top-heavy agency in need of reform. Its ranks include 3,986 headquarters staff in Washington, DC making $103,852 per year on average, and 9,656 administrators in the field. The agency's primary objectives should be setting security standards, overseeing security performance, and analyzing intelligence, but it has become too focused on maintaining and growing its own bureaucracy. This is an agency that needs to get out of the personnel management business and into the security business.

One key reform necessary to ensuring TSA becomes a better security agency and stops throwing away taxpayers' money is expansion of the program that allows airports to “opt out” of federal security screeners and instead use certified private screeners under federal standards, supervision and oversight.

The original law creating TSA included this program that utilizes the private-federal screening model, known as the Screening Partnership Program (SPP). Last year, however, TSA arbitrarily decided to halt the expansion of this program.

An important provision included in the FAA Modernization and Reform Act of 2012 (H.R. 658), a bill introduced in the House by Chairman John L. Mica and signed into law in February 2012, restarts the SPP program and allows airports the continued option of selecting the more cost-effective private-federal screening model. Click here for more information about this potentially cost-saving provision included in the FAA law.

In order to ensure TSA complies with the law, Chairman Mica, Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Darrell Issa, and National Security, Homeland Defense and Foreign Operations Subcommittee Chairman Jason Chaffetz on March 13, 2012 wrote to TSA Administrator Pistole, putting the agency on notice that they expect TSA to implement the law's reforms ensuring airports can opt out of all-federal security screening. (Click here for the press release.)

Mica also wrote to the nation's approximately 200 busiest airports informing them of their right to opt out of all-federal passenger security screening.

The Government Accountability Office (GAO) and others have shown the SPP model of screening to be as effective or more effective than the all-TSA model. When TSA used a flawed cost analysis in order to justify shutting down this program, GAO reported that TSA ignored critical data related to costs. A 2011 Transportation and Infrastructure Committee investigative report entitled "TSA Ignores More Cost-Effective Screening Model" evaluates costs in a more comprehensive and accurate manner than previous TSA cost estimates. The Committee's report demonstrates that the private-federal model is 65% more efficient and would increase taxpayer savings by at least 42%. According to the report, if the nation’s top 35 airports opted out, taxpayers would save $1 billion over five years.

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More information on the need for TSA reform

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