Senior officials at the Transportation Security Administration routinely engage in unethical behavior and punish employees who protest those actions or TSA’s security weaknesses, a trio of whistleblowers told lawmakers Wednesday.
“No one who reports issues is safe at TSA,” Mark Livingston, a senior program manager at the agency, testified Tuesday before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.
Senior leaders conduct specious investigations into lower-level employees and use their power to reassign middle-managers as a means of punishing officials who report misconduct, according to the whistleblowers. That leaves unqualified TSA employees in powerful positions within the bureaucracy, which creates security and efficiency problems at airports.
As an example, Livingstone said he saw another senior executive service member (SES) sexually-harassing a female junior employee, only to have that official demand that he lie about the encounter in the event that she filed a complaint. “If you don’t, we can’t work with you and if you’re going to be a boy scout you’re going to be on my [s—-]list,” Livingstone quoted the official as saying. “I was stunned that another SES would ask me to lie.”
TSA leaders regularly put their underlings on “directed reassignments” that require moving around the country. The whistleblowers described cases of people being reassigned in ways that caused personal or financial hardship, such as when a husband and wife were required to live apart because they were assigned jobs in Los Angeles and Washington, D.C.
“That’s the punitive nature of directive reassignments,” Andrew Rhoades, an assistant federal security director, told lawmakers.
The whistleblowers emphasized that such favoritism and animus leaves incompetent officials in key positions. “It’s my testimony today that we have non-intel professionals running your office of intelligence and analysis,” Livingstone said.
Another witness predicted that summer travelers will feel like they’re flying the day after Thanksgiving, because the expedited screening program is ineffective and leadership failed to “put a plan B in place,” according to Jay Brainard, another federal security director.
Even when TSA leaders have the right idea, they sometimes fail in the execution, Brainard noted. For instance, they installed an alarm system at TSA entry points to warn of prospective attackers, but they don’t make any noise.
“The problem is, they’re all covert alarms: They’ve got an auto-dial that calls the police department,” Brainard said. “How do you install 710 alarm systems on a government contract and you forget to put in an audible alarm?”
