"We met the mission," Curtis said. "We met the mandates."
TSA officials acknowledged that government decisions drove up the cost of the Pearson contract. "We did not properly identify the requirements," said Lee R. Kair, assistant TSA administrator for acquisition. "There was a real sense of speed on this. That's what led to many of the changes."
The Homeland Security Department's inspector general deployed undercover agents to test the new screeners. Such agents try to smuggle weapons or simulated explosive devices through airport checkpoints. Officials use the results to test vulnerabilities in the system.
Last month, the inspector general said that "the lack of improvement since our last audit [a year ago] indicates that significant improvement in performance may not be possible without greater use of new technology."
Jonathan J. Fleming, the TSA's chief operating officer, said the undercover agents are able to evade screeners and their systems at about the same rate as shortly after Sept. 11, 2001. But he and other government officials said the comparison is unfair because the agents testing the screeners are using more sophisticated techniques.
'A Reasonable Profit'
When Clark Kent Ervin began his work as the Homeland Security Department's first inspector general in early 2003, he quickly realized that the department was about to become one of the top contracting bureaucracies in Washington without the infrastructure to handle the task. Ervin, a Bush supporter from Texas, found that the new department had poorly staffed contracting offices spread across the 22 agencies that were about to be merged to form the department, the largest federal reorganization since World War II.
Ervin said he tried to alert Tom Ridge, who had recently been confirmed to head the Homeland Security Department.
"Two areas that DHS needs to get control of early to minimize waste and abuse are the procurement and grant [federal assistance] management functions," Ervin wrote in the memo on March 18, 2003, 17 days after the department opened its doors.
The memo urged Ridge to train and supervise the department's contract officers and establish a "robust and effective" program to monitor contractors.
"Early attention to strong systems and controls," the previously undisclosed memo said, "will be critical both to ensuring success and maintaining integrity and accountability."
A few weeks later, Ervin said he was told that Janet Hale, the homeland security undersecretary for management, had held up the delivery of the memo. Ervin said he was told that Hale did not want to give Ridge the news that the systems and controls were not in place. Hale said Friday that she did not recall the episode but that she strongly supports efforts to bolster the department's contracting oversight.
"I would not stop a memo from the IG," she said. "It's just not in my disposition."
