TSA is woefully unequipped to handle busy travel season

By Chris Tomlinson

Monday, May 30, 2016 | 2 a.m.

If you end up sleeping at an airport this summer because the security line was too slow, know that Congress is to blame, not the overworked Transportation Security Administration screeners.

Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport provided a preview of what to expect on May 15 when the TSA failed to move people through security fast enough, forcing 450 passengers to miss their evening flights. American Airlines set up cots and rescheduled travelers to depart the next morning, when security lines again took three hours to navigate.

TSA Administrator Peter Neffenger happened to meet with the Chronicle’s editorial board the next morning. He offered no explanation for why his agency failed so miserably, promising only that he’d sent a team to Chicago to see what happened.

Screeners are under a lot of pressure, and the summer travel season will be difficult, he warned.

“We’re a smaller agency than we once were, and we have significant passenger growth over the past years,” Neffenger said. Specifically, there are 10 percent fewer screeners than in 2013 and 15 percent more passengers.

TSA has also implemented more thorough procedures since the agency’s inspector general found that 95 percent of fake bombs and weapons made it past security checkpoints in 70 covert tests. Neffenger took over shortly afterward and found that TSA supervisors had emphasized quickly moving travelers through the system after Congress and the public had complained about long lines.

“They focused on efficiency over effectiveness,” he told the Houston Chronicle.

TSA retrained staff last fall, and now we’re back to long lines, missed flights, frustrated travelers and congressional hearings.

Neffenger is too politically savvy to complain about congressional funding. He persuaded lawmakers to let him keep 1,600 positions that were on the chopping block and give him an additional $8 million to hire 768 new screeners and $26 million for additional part-time hours and overtime.

Bait and switch

Yet, Neffenger doesn’t talk about how Congress and the White House are diverting $12.6 billion in passenger security fees to reduce the deficit over the next decade in a classic case of bait-and-switch taxation.

Congress began charging passengers a per-flight security fee in 2012 to pay for the TSA following the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. Congress and the administration raised the fee to $11 per round trip in 2013, then diverted most of the money to Treasury instead of giving it to TSA.

“That decision has come home to roost,” said Nick Calio, president of Airlines for America, in a letter to Congress. “If Congress wanted to take constructive and well-justified action, it would immediately pass legislation putting that money, paid by airline passengers, where it belongs.”

Both Congress and the White House are responsible for the decision, which allows Republicans to claim they didn’t raise taxes and lets the administration avoid cutting government programs. But it’s really a covert tax hike that also taxes travelers’ time be creating the long lines.

That’s a shame, because Neffenger has some good ideas for how to improve airport security. The first is to get people out of the screening line.

TSA needs more people to sign up for the Trusted Traveler program, which allows people to pay for a fingerprint background check in return for expedited processing at the airport. That means more convenient interview locations and lower fees.

Neffenger would also like more technology to accurately rank travelers in terms of risk so they can move them through the system faster. He praised an Israeli experiment using seven levels of screening, depending on how much the government knows about the person.

There are computer programs that can compare airline reservations with intelligence databases to determine a person’s risk profile, and companies are developing machines that can scan irises at a distance as a traveler walks down a terminal.

The goal is to put as many people as possible into one of two boxes, trusted and dangerous. It’s the people whom TSA doesn’t know who slow the security line because screeners must assume they are potentially dangerous.

More sniffer dogs

More sniffer dogs would also help. Neffenger says they not only speed up the search for non-metallic explosives but charm frustrated fliers.

“There’s lots of technology and capability right now that we could put into place; it’s just a matter of will and resources,” he said.

Neffenger fired his head of security and reshuffled the TSA leadership in Chicago last week. But by all accounts, traveling this summer will be awful because of TSA’s security posture and lack of funding.

Normally I would say that we get the government we pay for, and we can’t expect a Cadillac on a Chevy budget. In this case, though, we are paying Cadillac prices and getting a wheelbarrow. We must demand better.

Chris Tomlinson is a columnist for the Houston Chronicle.