Heavy Baggage

No one is talking about returning to the system that was in place before 9/11, when airlines hired private screeners, usually with minimal background checks, and provided them with little training and low wages. Instead, the Transportation Security Administration will continue to regulate and impose national standards on the screening workforce, whether federal or private. TSA manages 45,000 federal screeners.

Critics of the federal program, among them screening contractors, say TSA is too bureaucratic and unresponsive to airport needs. The agency should establish and enforce national standards, they say, and then get out of the way so private companies can apply innovations that will increase efficiency.

"The TSA should set policy, do oversight, conduct audits, possibly do background checks," Rep. John Mica, R-Fla., told the Associated Press in early June. Mica, who heads the House Transportation and Infrastructure Avia-tion Subcommittee, has been outspoken in his belief that TSA should shrink and screening duty should be returned to the private sector.

Advocates of TSA screening, including federal unions, argue that TSA has greatly improved screening operations and is capable of adapting to airport needs. They contend that airport screening should be considered an inherently governmental function and that handing the reins to the private sector is setting the stage for disaster.

TSA takes no position on which form of screening airports should choose. Instead, the agency is giving airports guidance on how to opt out of federal screening and what they can expect from the government afterward in terms of funding, liability coverage and standards. Airports, in turn, are carefully mulling options. Their decisions may hinge on how TSA handles passenger traffic this summer, which is expected to be the busiest airline travel period in the past four years.

In the end, airports may prefer a hybrid public-private model, says Steve Van Beek, senior vice president for policy and development for the Airports Council International-North America. "Who says you have to have it all federal or all private?" he asks. "If we view this thing with more flexibility and bigger than it is now, we open up some possibilities." He says some airports-especially smaller ones-may want to bypass screening companies and contract directly with TSA so they can use security personnel for many different jobs, including screening. Additionally, some airports may want to keep federal screeners, but pay for additional contract screeners.

Comparing the performance of federal and private airport screeners isn't easy. The law requires that contract screeners perform at the same level as or better than their federal counterparts do. When Congress established TSA, it allowed five airports to test using contract screeners. The five airports are in Jackson Hole, Wyo.; Kansas City, Mo.; Rochester, N.Y.; San Francisco, and Tupelo, Miss.

In April, the General Accounting Office concluded that little data exists to compare the performance of private and federal baggage screeners (GAO-04-505T). What data there is, however, shows weaknesses in both groups. The Homeland Security Department's in-spector general also has weighed in, saying federal and airport screeners "performed about the same, which is to say, equally poorly."

GAO found that covert testing "identified weaknesses in the ability of both private and federal screeners to detect threat objects." A study commissioned by TSA concluded in April that the privately screened airports appeared to match the federal program in the areas of security, effectiveness and cost. In the area of customer satisfaction, performance was mixed at larger airports and inconclusive at smaller ones.

But the inspector general and GAO found that the agency had so tightly limited hiring and other aspects of screening companies' operations that it was difficult to judge their performance fairly. "TSA's tight controls over the pilot program restricted flexibility and innovation that the contractors may have implemented to perform at levels exceeding that of the federal workforce," Home-land Security Inspector General Clark Kent Ervin told the House aviation subcommittee on April 22.

The five airports testing contract screeners plan to continue using them after November. No airports with federal screeners have said they will opt out yet, though Mica estimates that up to 100 airports are interested in doing so. At the very least, the opt-out program is forcing TSA to be more attentive to airport needs, says Angela Gittens, director of Florida's Miami-Dade County Aviation Depart-ment. "The opt-out program does to the TSA what a contract does to a private company," she says. "I can fire them. Anyone who has to worry about being fired has an edge to their performance."