Federalizing airport security a major management challenge

While Congress remains divided over whether airport baggage screeners should be federal employees, one thing is certain: a federal agency put in charge of airport security will either have to hire 28,000 baggage screeners or manage the same number of contract employees under strict new security standards. Making a federally run airport security system work will be one of the biggest management challenges government has faced in years, several government officials and public administration experts said last week. Federalizing baggage screeners, as a Senate-passed bill (S. 1447) calls for, would force the Justice Department to conduct a rapid hiring campaign for tens of thousands of workers. This is itself a tall order, according to Donald Kettl, a scholar with the La Follette Institute of Public Affairs at the University of Wisconsin. "Simply finding, recruiting, training and deploying so many new employees would pose an unprecedented challenge," he said. Conversely, if lawmakers approve a House bill (H.R. 3150) supported by President Bush and many Republicans, a new Transportation Security Administration would create a system where contract baggage screeners are directly managed by federal supervisors. Screeners would be held to strict performance standards and could not strike. Experts agree federal managers are capable of managing either system, as long as they can disregard some civil service rules and develop useful performance standards. But how does an agency quickly hire 28,000 employees for a function it has never performed before? And how would an agency develop realistic performance standards for baggage screeners when the slightest error could have life-threatening consequences? Quick, Qualified Hires The Senate bill exempts baggage screeners from Title V of the U.S. Code, meaning screeners could be easily hired and fired and would fall outside the government's General Schedule pay system. But before Justice Department officials can start hiring, they have to decide on the screeners' duties and qualifications. Personnel officials could begin by looking at the hiring standards of current screening companies, but would presumably want to add new standards, said Ron Sanders, chief human resources officer at the Internal Revenue Service. "It strikes me that these jobs have pieces of a Customs Service agent, an Immigration and Naturalization Service agent and security guards," he said. Sanders would hire screeners against a competency model that lists the skills all baggage screeners should have. Bob Smith, assistant commissioner for human resources management at the Customs Service, would give prospective screeners a test that would evaluate their skills so officials could avoid wading through thousands of applications. Screeners should be part of the excepted service, not the competitive service, he added. Excepted service positions are excluded from competitive civil service procedures. Ranking the candidates by category would be another way to quickly evaluate candidates, according to Sanders and John Palguta, director of policy and evaluation at the Merit Systems Protection Board. Instead of ranking job candidates, category ranking allows an agency to divide applicants into two or more categories of quality. The ranking method has cut hiring time at the Agriculture Department and at the IRS, said Sanders. "We reduced hiring time in the IRS from four months to four weeks," he said. The Bush administration has proposed legislation that would allow all agencies to use category ranking. Human resources officials at the Justice Department would need help from other agencies to handle so many quick hires, experts agreed. Automated applications would help, but no agency is equipped to process thousands of quick hires on its own, said Kenneth Hunter, deputy director of the Center for Human Resources Management at the National Academy of Public Administration. "The Federal Aviation Administration does not have the capability of handling that kind of recruitment effort," said Hunter. "Neither does the Office of Personnel Management or anybody else." Conducting background criminal checks on all potential hires would be the most time- consuming part of the process, experts agreed. Here again, Justice would need support from other agencies, Smith added. "[The hiring process] is highly dependent on how many people you have doing background investigations," he said. Given enough support, Smith believes Justice could pull off the hiring effort. "I think it would be a challenge, but with enough help, I certainly feel it's doable," he said. Performance-based airport security If the House bill becomes law, contractors would continue to screen baggage under federal supervision. But the government should write contracts so that screening companies meet strict performance standards, according to contracting experts. Steve Kelman, a professor at the Harvard School of Government and a former administrator of the Office of Federal Procurement Policy, believes it would be fairly easy to write performance-based contracts for airport security. "Compared to many other contracts, it's pretty simple," he said. "I would call it Procurement Reform 101." Kelman would grade screeners according to three measures: ability to catch passengers that sneak contraband items through a checkpoint, performance on background criminal checks and some measure of timeliness. Under Kelman's approach, screeners would not be graded on whether passengers actually take over an airplane. "Terrorist takeovers are such rare events," he said. "You don't normally want a performance measure that is so tied to rare events." Chip Mather, a partner with Acquisition Solutions Inc., a Virginia-based procurement firm, believes the government should let private firms help them develop performance standards. "Let experts in security tell you how to achieve the best mix of performance," he said. Lawmakers have been quick to legislate security measures--for example, both the House and Senate bill would station a law enforcement officer at each screening point - but these measures may not be effective, said Mather. "Beefing up the security presence may add a degree of security, but is it going to improve performance of the screening workforce? Probably not," he said. "That's where performance standards come in."