Posted on 08/03/2019 4:50:21 AM PDT by BigKahuna
According to a June 12, 2019 article in the Washington Post, Transportation Security Administration security screeners are "short-staffed, poorly paid and suffering meager morale." What's also worrying, is that the situation for TSA screeners (or "Transportation Security Officers," as they're officially known) is likely to worsen by next year. And unfortunately, the chronic short-staffing issue is nothing new to the government security agency, as 2006 news reports, as well as government inspector general findings, reveal. Indeed, air travel has increased so much since TSA's creation that it's overwhelmed the agency's ability to increase staffing in response
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Solutions do exist, though. For starters, former TSA administrator John Pistole writes in a July 15, 2019 opinion piece in the Washington Examiner that Congress should stop diverting money from the security fee already paid for by travelers.
Ostensibly, the "Sept. 11 Fee" is supposed to finance the cost of providing security for the nation's transportation system, and with record-high air travel for the last several years plenty of money from the fee has been collected. But, as the Policy Genius website notes, Congress has a lamentable history of diverting the money to fill budget gaps as well as to "pay down" the national debt. Pistole himself maintains Congress diverts up to one-third of the funds to other government programs or the debt.
(Excerpt) Read more at h4-solutions.com ...
Here is a better idea. Get rid of the TSA and it’s bureaucracy, privatize the screening process, doing away with the ignoring of people wearing burkas and frisking grandma.
Time to get rid a it and start over..
Airport Security?
Hire the person that runs airport security in Israel. Do what they do, the way they do it. Yrain folks how they train them. They do a pretty good job at it.
No need to frisk 90 year old nuns or 7 year old girls, unless there are other triggers observed or discovered. It is all about the evil “profiling”. It works, when done correctly.
Privitization has its problems, too. Remember Argenbright...?
“Here is a better idea. Get rid of the TSA and it’s bureaucracy, privatize the screening process, doing away with the ignoring of people wearing burkas and frisking grandma.”
I think there’s a lot of political correctness that’s causing all those grandmas to be frisked, and all that does is allow the people who actually pose the threat to skate right past any secondary or tertiary screening. It’s crazy. SMDH.
Someone on the thread mentioned how the Israelis do aviation security. It can work here as well, with the right people trained in the right ways. I don’t know if we have the will to do it, though. Very sad.
“Privitization has its problems, too. Remember Argenbright...?”
Argenbright, Huntleigh, Global... they were all airport checkpoint security companies back before TSA. I think Huntleigh in Boston was one of the companies that let Atta and the other 9/11 terrorists on his crew through. They maintain to this day that none of the items (including those wires and the box cutters) were prohibited under FAA security rules at the time. But c’mon... you’re going to let some 18-year-old, $7.00 an hour kid working the security line make that kind of decision. Yeesh...
Argenbright?
Better pay would help increase the numbers, but not morale. You need to feel part of a team to increase morale.
Another good model would be Singapore. You don't even know there is security. But there is, big time. There are built-in metal detectors along halls to your gates. Once you are at your gate waiting, a pretty uniformed lady will come around at some point and politely ask if she can wand you. No red-blooded guy will ever say no.
I worked around/for/over the “low morale TSA types”....if they won’t do the job now, giving them more money won’t help...the more you reward bad behavior, the more entitled the slackers feel...nothing will ever be enough to give them a solid work ethic.
TSA screener morale is too high already.
Can pay raises improve attitudes at department of motor vehicles? How about tripling their pay? Will they become attentive, polite, fast, caring efficient workers seeking to serve the public as well as they can?
Or will they take the money and keep on being catatonic, rude, indolent and moronic as they have always been?
The answer is obvious. The job is modern-day Make-Work: they pretend to work, and the government claims to have taken people off welfare and put them to work. Plus jobs are given to minorities of all kinds for political gain.
Am I wrong or isn’t the problem with a lot of the gov’t. funding have to do with diverting funds for other uses? Seems like this could be stopped in short order if there was a will to do it. We are always hearing about a call for more gas taxes & other things pertaining to maintaining roadways & it seems to be going into a slush fund. The problem seems to extend to cities & localities as well. No way to run a country.
How about can that redundant agency of mall cops, and return the duty to the department which performed that function before instead.
TSA doesn’t need to be fixed.
It needs to be disbanded.
F-— the TSA. What about us who have to put up with those goons?
ML/NJ
You guys make some goods, especially about whether more pay will help. Not sure it does, especially if there isn’t a sense of being on a good team.
I’m retired military. The best units I were in were the ones that were the tightest and in which the esprit de corps was intense. I don’t see that at TSA, I have to admit.
How about don’t privatize the screening process.
What about having the Coastguard perform it instead.
You know, like they did during WW2, Korea, and the early stage of Vietnam? It wasn’t broken and didn’t need to be fixed.
“Am I wrong or isn’t the problem with a lot of the gov’t. funding have to do with diverting funds for other uses? Seems like this could be stopped in short order if there was a will to do it. We are always hearing about a call for more gas taxes & other things pertaining to maintaining roadways & it seems to be going into a slush fund. The problem seems to extend to cities & localities as well. No way to run a country.”
I think the problem starts with Congress (and who said that Congressfolk and diapers both need to be changed often and for the same reason? ;-). It’s raided the Social Security trust fund for decades and put a bunch of IOUs in there (like Harry and Lloyd did to that briefcase full of ransom money in “Dumb and Dumber”) and then tells us all that those slips of paper are as good as cash.
Congress diverting money from the security fee tacked on to all airline tickets? This is my shocked face. LOL!
TSA is nothing more than a jobs program for minorities.
I agree: get rid of it and privatize it.
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