Study fuels fight over use of private airport screeners

A review of passenger and baggage screening operations at the nation's airports faced several limitations, but generally concluded that private workers are as effective as federal screeners, according to a summary of the report released Thursday.

Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle found enough ammunition in the report to bolster their arguments on whether screening should continue to be managed and operated by the federal government or partially handed over to private contractors. Rep. John Mica, R-Fla., issued a call to top Homeland Security Department officials for an emergency meeting within 10 days to address the issue. Mica said he was prepared to issue subpoenas to Homeland Security Secretary Ridge and his top lieutenants to appear at a closed subcommittee oversight hearing.

Private screeners at five airports across the country compared favorably with federal screeners employed by the Transportation Security Administration, according to summary findings from a report by BearingPoint Inc. of McLean, Va.

When Congress created the TSA, it set up pilot programs at five airports allowing them to continue using private screeners. Those airports are in Jackson Hole, Wyo.; Kansas City, Mo.; Rochester, N.Y.; San Francisco;, and Tupelo, Miss. TSA hired BearingPoint to compare the security, cost and performance of private screeners at those airports versus federal screeners. The company's evaluation was conducted from Dec. 1, 2003, to March 19, 2004.

Officials from TSA, BearingPoint and the pilot airports testified Thursday before the House Transportation and Infrastructure Subcommittee on Aviation. According to TSA, findings in each of the three criteria areas are:

• Security effectiveness: There is no evidence that any of the five privately screened airports performed below the average level of federalized airports. The report concludes there is credible data that in Kansas City, private screeners performed above the average level of their federal counterparts.
• Cost: For the five privately screened airports, costs were not significantly different from the estimated cost of a federal screening operation at the same airport.
• Customer and Stakeholder Impact: Performance was mixed at the larger airports and inconclusive at smaller ones. Generally, at the larger airports passengers had less confidence in the private security process, but their average wait time was slightly shorter. For the smaller airports, there was not enough data available to support any conclusion.

BearingPoint, however, noted that the study came up against limitations. The company said the way the pilot program was structured limits the ability to generalize findings and apply them to future privately screened airports.

"If TSA desires a more robust comparison of private screening operations to federal screening, it should consider three steps: open some of the degrees of freedom in a controlled manner; provide a larger, well-designed sample of airports; and improve its data collection systems," according to the report.

The General Accounting Office also found flaws in the pilot program. GAO's conclusions, also released Thursday, said a "key limitation" was that the program did not permit an effective evaluation of the differences of federal and private screening.

"TSA provided the screening contractors with little opportunity to demonstrate innovations, achieve efficiencies and implement initiatives that go beyond the minimum requirements of the Aviation and Transportation Security Act," GAO stated. "TSA officials said they had not granted contract officials more flexibility because they wanted to ensure that procedures were standardized, well coordinated and consistently implemented throughout all airports to achieve consistent security."

Regardless, members of the committee seized on the report Thursday to bolster their positions.

Mica, the committee's chairman, said the pilot program "has been an unqualified success" compared to the TSA-managed bureaucracy. He said he is a major proponent of a decentralized screening program.

"Quite frankly, it is difficult or impossible to micromanage the employment, training and deployment of tens of thousands of screeners from Washington, D.C., to scores of differently configured airports with fluctuating scheduling requirements," Mica said. "While problems with the 'Soviet-style' federal screening operations should raise the serious concern of Congress, anyone who has seen the classified performance results and detection rates of this system and does not call for reform in the program is derelict in their responsibility."

Mica said he supports allowing the private sector to provide security under the supervision of strong federal oversight.

Committee ranking member Rep. Peter DeFazio, D-Ore., said the study showed that the TSA-managed system could be improved.

"I don't believe it means we should have a massive, wrenching transition back to private security at all the other airports in America with all the disruption that that would potentially bring back," DeFazio said. "We have had an overly centralized bureaucratic system with the TSA, as the chairman pointed out. But instead of coming to the conclusion that that means we should change everything over to private [contractors], what it means to me is that the flexibility that the TSA has extended to the private contractors … should be applied to the TSA."

DeFazio added that the screening system should be decentralized and TSA federal security directors should be given more authority. "They should be given authority for training, for hiring and for firing," he said. "We've got to do away with a centralized bureaucracy and give this decision-making to the FSDs. If we don't have confidence in the FSDs, we need to replace them and put people in there who can handle that kind of authority."

DeFazio said the most startling part of the report was that people who did not know whether they had gone through private or federal security had less confidence in private security in Kansas City and San Francisco.

"The fact that Americans have more confidence in the federal government performing a national security function than a private contractor is a bit telling," he said.

David Stone, TSA acting administrator, said the agency views the evaluation as a starting point for developing the opt-out program. "TSA is in the early stages of developing an efficient, understandable and effective procedure for opt-out applications," he said, "and is currently drafting the specific contents of the opt-out guidance."

Greta Wodele of CongressDaily contributed to this report.