Americans are approaching their wits end in tolerating the TSA as long lines and incompetency at ensuring basic security has soured its reputation.
“The TSA’s inefficiency isn’t just aggravating and unnecessary; by pushing people to drive instead of fly, it’s actively dangerous and costing lives. Less invasive private scanning would be considerably better,” Dylan Matthews wrote for Vox.
The incompetency of the TSA verges on a Stanley Kubrick black comedy. Testing the agency for finding dangerous materials in luggage, they failed in 95 percent of cases. Whistleblowers are punished for calling attention to faulty practices. They’ve blown $160 million on body scanners that lacked any scientific evidence to show they were effective. They spent $1.4 million on an app that randomly chooses to send passengers left or right.
“There’s basically zero evidence the agency has prevented any attacks,” Matthews noted. In changing the travel plans of Americans, however, the TSA has been effective in increasing travel deaths.
The consequences for government incompetency, however, are extraordinarily small. If a private security firm was so ineffective and screening and processing passengers, they’d be fired and replaced. Not so for the government agency that provides “security theater.”
“This is the essential logic of bureaucracy,” Megan McArdle noted for Bloomberg. “The TSA will suffer terribly if a terrorist slips through with a bomb — or even if the auditors make it through with a fake bomb. On the other hand, what happens to them if there are long lines? Not much. They’ve got to be there for eight hours, so why should they care if we are too? This is why government agencies tend to be much more attuned to remote risks than the real and persistent costs they impose on the rest of us.”
So long as the TSA postures about its dedication to national security and defending Americans from terrorists, they avoid reform. The rhetoric triumphs over reality.
Some lucky passengers have private screening companies instead of the TSA. Most are smaller airports such as Tupelo Regional Airport in Mississippi and Lewistown Municipal Airport in Montana, but San Francisco International Airport contracts with Covenant Aviation Security via the TSA to provide airport security.
Those private contractors “result in screening that is more efficient, more customer friendly, less costly, and more secure,” according to The Daily Signal.
Don’t expect the abolition of the TSA anytime soon though. For now, the American people are stuck with the TSA and its kitschy Instagram account that brags about doing its job.
