Still Searching For Airport Security

Nor are private firms particularly anxious to enter the competition. It's one thing to try making money when wages start at $5.15 an hour and a job at Cinnabon is a promotion, as former senator Max Cleland once so memorably suggested. It's quite another to try making money when wages start at $11.30 an hour plus training and benefits. Private firms also rightly wonder whether current federal liability caps would actually hold in the event of another security breakdown, and whether TSA would be a particularly encouraging partner, having been stripped of yet another responsibility.

But it hardly matters who wears the uniform if employees don't get the tools they need. Given the same pay, training and technology, private screeners in San Francisco, Kansas City and the three other airports Congress allowed TSA to leave in private hands have been only slightly more effective at detecting threats than federal screeners. And absent significant investment in new technologies, they won't reach perfection, either.

What TSA desperately needs is a new business model that will reassure its critics and increase screener performance. It needs to be more alert to new threats, such as the strap-on explosives used by Chechen rebels to bring down two Russian airplanes last year; more agile in meeting the inevitable surge of passengers that comes with the changing travel season and the movement of high-volume carriers such as Southwest into underused hubs; and more innovative in funding screening technologies that can be used in a variety of public and private settings beyond airports. Meanwhile, it needs to concentrate fire on the nation's most vulnerable airport terminals. Reagan National's Terminal C, for example, has plenty of room for leisurely passenger screening, but Terminal A has a bottleneck that puts enormous pressure on screeners to get passengers through as fast as possible. Guess which one a terrorist would pick.

Building this kind of robust, risk-focused TSA would require more than new uniforms, obviously. It requires a mindset that harks back to the glory days of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), which was established in 1958 during a similar moment of great urgency. Also operating under personnel and budget caps, NASA created new incentives for private investment in a host of new technologies that helped build a base for decades of innovation.

TSA's challenge is to avoid the fate of NASA, which has been marked by tragedy and is mired in uncertainty about its mission. If its screeners stay federal, TSA could easily end up like the U.S. Postal Service, with its predictable, if sometimes underwhelming, performance. If the screeners go private, it could end up as just another starving regulatory agency like the Occupational Safety and Health Administration.

The public will be poorly served under either scenario. TSA needs to become a more agile, adaptable version of its former self, which will require a round of internal reorganization that will make its first year seem like a cakewalk. But if the agency can pull it off, it could yet become one of the government's greatest bureaucratic achievements of the next 50 years.

Author's e-mail:

paul.light@nyu.edu