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Is Congress Trying to Force TSA into Allowing Private Screener Experiments?

February 25, 2011 at 3:52 PM | by | Comments (0)

This is a little inside baseball, but if you're at all interested in how political infighting affects airline security, it's also kind of entertaining. By way of background, check out the post we did a few weeks ago about the pluses and minuses of private TSA replacement screeners, who would staff airports and enforce TSA security rules without actually being TSA employees.

The idea, traveling under the banner of the Screening Partnership Program (SSP), was that the quality of the people at checkpoints matter as much as the rules they're enforcing, and that you get better quality if you have some competition. Since TSA recruits its employees via the backs of pizza boxes, it seemed like there was room for improvement. That seemed fair enough.

So naturally TSA Chief John Pistole axed the whole program in the process of letting screeners unionize. There had already been 16 airports running SSP experiments, but Pistole insisted that "TSA should be a federal counterterrorism agency, and we're best able to train, to deploy, to execute on our mission as a federal workforce."

Like Facecompare CEO Rick Seaney also pointed out, we don't know what that means. It sounds an awful lot like, in addition to protecting bad apple TSA employees from customer complaints, Pistole wanted to make sure that travelers didn't have anything to compare them too.

Interestingly, given our usual opinion of their "help," Congress is actually stepping in on the right side here. The aviation bill currently making its way through the House and Senate would reauthorize the SSP and force the TSA to be more accountable in rejecting SSP petitions. Among other things, the bill includes an amendment to approve private screeners within 30 days or give a reason why, and demands that TSA actually provide a good reason. Pistole has been accused of sitting on some applications that were too good to deny, and rejecting others that he should have accepted:

'Congress clearly intended that this opt-out would be open to all airports,' Blunt said in a statement to The Associated Press. 'I have a great deal of respect and appreciation for the hardworking TSA screeners at the Springfield airport, but the law doesn't say that the TSA administrator gets to stop the program whenever he decides he wants to.'

Like we said, esoteric and a little inside baseball. But not unentertaining.

[Photo: TSA]

Related Stories:
· Senate FAA bill would free up private airport security screening [GSN]
· Airline Industry [Jaunted]
· Political Travel [Jaunted]

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