You’ll be waiting in lines at JFK and La Guardia that will make those at the DMV look positively benign, or so Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano threatened Monday.
“Big Sis” Napolitano claimed that the cuts required by the sequestration that kicked in three days earlier had already made waits at larger airports of 150 percent to 200 percent longer than usual — though, as Reuters noted that same day, “The TSA Web site did not show any major delays at any US airport.”
Big Sis apparently didn’t bother comparing stories with her flunky at the Transportation Security Agency, John Pistole, before scaring Americans with tales of endless lines.
Oh, Pistole also tried to gin up panic over those delays — but he said they wouldn’t hit much before summer, when sequestration’s “hiring freeze” begins to thin employees’ numbers.
Contradictions, inaccuracies and outright lies: par for the course at the TSA.
You may well languish in an airport line as monstrous as the national debt, either now or in warmer weather — but you can thank the TSA’s usual incompetence and nonsense, not sequestration or some supposed shortage of folks eager to grope their neighbors for a living.
On the contrary, anecdotal evidence abounds of the agency’s overstaffing. One of the first unfriendly nicknames that angry victims supplied for the acronym “TSA” was “Thousands Standing Around” — doing nothing while travelers missed their flights.
A recent report from a House Homeland Security subcommittee (optimistically titled “Rebuilding TSA into a Smarter, Leaner Organization”) confirms that impression. The number of travelers running (or willing to run) the TSA’s airport gantlets continues to fall, yet the agency just as continuously expands.
In 2007, some 680 million flyers took to the skies after manhandling by roughly 44,000 screeners. By 2011, traffic had dropped to less than 640 million — yet your taxes paid more than 47,000 screeners.
Even Congress, no bastion of common sense, observed in that House report, “A private sector entity in the face of a shrinking customer base usually must downsize. TSA, by contrast, has continually grown its ranks despite fewer travelers.”
So don’t blame any delays at the airport on the sequester, or on anything but the TSA.
With an already hated and hurtful bureaucracy threatening more grief, isn’t it time to say, “Enough”?
Remember, it was federal rules written by the TSA’s predecessors since the 1960s that mandated and minutely controlled the “private” checkpoints that failed to stop 19 hijackers one September day — and also set the regulations that permitted boxcutters onboard while ordering flight crews to cooperate with hijackers instead of resisting.
The TSA has only piled more malfeasance on top. For all the strip-searched grannies and patted-down toddlers, the TSA has yet to catch a single terrorist. Heck, it can’t even find the simulated bombs and weapons that undercover investigators regularly whiz past it. And the passengers it robs of all defense but their fingernails had to subdue the “Underwear Bomber.”
Now, despite an annual budget of almost $8 billion, the TSA insists its poverty will keep us standing in line for hours. Fine: Let’s return aviation security to the airlines, where it belongs and where it resided until the ’60s.
Sequestration for the TSA is a start. But abolition is far better.
Becky Akers’ American Revolution-era novel “Halestorm” is available in paperback or for Kindle on Amazon.