Six weeks ago the Transportation Security Administration couldn’t get travelers at many of the nation’s biggest airports through security check points in three hours. It set off a near-revolt among millions of American travelers fed up with years of the government agency’s long-recognized and barely tolerated incompetence.
This week that very same agency got nearly everybody through their check points in less than 30 minutes – and under 10 minutes in many places. And it did so during the busiest travel period so far this year, the Fourth of July holiday weekend.
So what gives? Was the TSA incompetent before, or was it manipulating the American public to squeeze millions more in taxpayer dollars out of Congress? Decide for yourself which of the two possible answers to that question is most despicable.
Then consider these two even more important questions:
- How did they make such a dramatic improvement in performance in just six weeks?
- Did they actually fix the real problem, or did they pour water on a public relations brush fire?
The answer to the first question is pretty obvious.
They went to an all-hands-on-deck operating environment, and then got a ton of unexpected support from their “customers,” the airlines. Nearly every TSA employee able to walk and take nourishment was on duty during the holiday period. Far more security check lanes were open during the peak travel hours of the holiday weekend than normally is the case. And top area and airport managers with the TSA were both visible and very hands-on during the period in order to make sure TSA screeners were working fast and efficiently and treating travelers with at least benign disinterest instead of their usual robotic disengagement or aggressive diffidence.
PLUS -there were dozens of airline employees standing out in front of the TSA’s security check points at most big airports around the nation. They were helping travelers arrange their gear for quicker and easier screening, answering questions, and joking around and helping travelers enjoy the experience a little more than, say, a trip to the proctologist.
Last month in Atlanta Delta began helping the TSA out by providing new gear – bigger bins, conveyor belts returning the bins more quickly, CT scanning machines for carry-ons, and new, out-of-the-way areas for secondary screening of carry-ons that set off alarms when they passed through the CT scanners. Now American is making such gear and assistance available at four of its big hubs – Dallas/Fort Worth, Chicago O’Hare, Miami and Los Angeles international airports. Whoopee!
Delta said its effort cost $1 million. American says it’s spending $5 million in its effort. Don’t cry for them. They took in $40.7 billion and $41 billion in revenue, respectively in 2015, and earned profits of $4.5 billion and $6.3 billion, respectively. The money they’re kicking in to keep their customers from storming the Bastille amounts to mere rounding errors on their financial books.
But the answer to that second question - did the TSA (with a reluctant, self-interested assist from the airlines) actually fix the real problem, or did they just pull off a minor PR coup? – is not so obvious. And it's even less pleasant.
Albert Einstein famously once said, “If I were given one hour to save the planet, I would spend 59 minutes defining the problem and one minute resolving it.”
It is clear that the TSA – with a bit of help from the airlines – has done just the opposite. The agency (less-than-fondly known as “Thousands Standing Around”) resolved nothing. It just threw an unsustainable amount of human labor at the problem. The demand for security checkpoint services is still up an arguable 7 percent over 2013, just as it was in May. And the TSA’s budget is still 10 percent smaller, just as it was six weeks ago.
Yes, Congress six weeks ago did let TSA managers shift $34 million from other budget line items to pay for more overtime and technology. But that $34 million equals a piddling four one-thousandths of one percent of the TSA’s total budget – a drop in the ocean so small and so distant that even if it were all spent instantly (it wasn’t) it would take months for the ripple to reach us… and we wouldn’t feel it when it did.
Thus, we conclude that nothing actually has been fixed since May’s news media-powered hubbub over lousy TSA performance. And, more sadly, we can conclude that the TSA (with an assist from their short-sighted primary customers, the airlines) aren’t even addressing the real problem. They’re doing just the opposite of what Einstein advised.
The real problem is that the entire approach to airport and airline security is all wrong – and has been since at least 9-11. It took Herculean efforts – and lots of managerial smoke and mirrors – to get the Fourth of July holiday crowds through airport security checkpoints in less than 30 minutes, on average. But it did not make any one of those passengers, or those airports, or the flights on which those passengers flew, one bit safer. Remember last year’s report from Homeland Security’s Inspector General that showed that airport screeners failed to find weapons and illegal materials smuggled through checkpoints by IG operatives a staggering 95 percent of the time? Nothing has changed over the last year to drop that to some acceptable failure rate – like zero. In fact, with bigger crowds at the airport than ever, and intense pressure to speed up the process, a reasonable person could surmise that the TSA’s failure rate just might have ticked up a point or two (though it can't go much higher than it already is).
More than a decade ago Bruce Schneier, a cryptographer and expert on computer security and privacy, famously dubbed the entire airport/airline security process “security theater.” And that’s what it remains today, even with the “better” performance over the holiday weekend.
A determined terrorist can still find easy ways to board a U.S. airliner and/or to get a weapon of some type aboard. But why bother? Now all a terrorst has to do is set off a bomb – or as we’ve seen in Brussels and Istanbul this year open up with automatic or semi-automatic rifles - outside an airport’s secured area, where hundreds and hundreds of travelers are lined up innocently waiting for the actors in our security theater to perform their parts.
We’re no safer than before. We just suffered fewer hassles and shorter delays – at least on this one holiday weekend.
Even if the improbable happens and security checkpoint delays remain around or even under 30 minutes, instead of three hours, those delays will continue to cost the U.S. economy thousands of jobs and billions of dollars in lost productivity. The U.S. Travel Association says security checkpoint delays cost the nation $4.3 billion annually in lost economic activity, and they keep about 12,000 additional jobs from being created every month. As noted previously in this space, even if the USTA’s numbers are over-hyped by 50 percent, those economic costs remain enormous.
And it’s all because we’re not taking Einstein’s advice to heart. We’ve had nearly 16 years to define and resolve the problem properly. But instead of taking the time to define it correctly we keep rushing to resolve public relations brush fires.
