Yay for theTSA

[Dedman]

Try to ignore the obviously biased Bush bashing. If you can do that and still read the article, you may be dismayed at the seemingly low efficiency and performance yield of the TSA.

Margaret Carlson:
$2.5-Million Chart, $250,000 in Art: Ain't Life Grand?


The Bush administration pledged to end frivolous spending. It hasn't.

Last week, the Department of Agriculture released its new food pyramid, which no longer has pictures of actual foods you are supposed to eat but just blocks of colors. For a lot less than the $2.5 million that the USDA paid Porter Novelli, a marketing firm, I could paint you five stripes.

The problem with the new pyramid is that there was nothing wrong with the old pyramid, except that it lacked a stick figure running up the side to denote that exercise is good. This one has its own website, mypyramid.gov, in which you enter your age, sex and level of physical activity.

When I entered my information and checked off less than 30 minutes per day of physical activity (truthful), I was told to eat five ounces of grains. When I upped my exercise to 60 minutes per day (untruthful), I was hoping I could replace a bowl of fiber with a Pop-Tart. Instead it upped the requirement to six ounces of grain. Why torture yourself when all you get for your trouble is a second bowl of oatmeal?

A federal agency forking over millions to tart up a chart â?? isn't that just what the cost-cutting Bush administration is supposed to get rid of?

The week that the new pyramid was unveiled, we got a report of far greater waste at the Transportation Security Administration. The TSA, founded post- 9/11, is in charge of much of the nation's security (although not the color-coded alerts, which, incidentally, might work well with the pyramid).

According to the Homeland Security Department's inspector general, the TSA achieved in three years what it took the Pentagon decades to accomplish. The agency's multiple Sub-Zero refrigerators, $250,000 worth of art and a fitness center with towel service make the Pentagon's fabled $600 toilet seat look like a blue-light special at Kmart.

I wouldn't complain about a top-of-the-line stainless steel appliance or two if I felt safer. But I don't and shouldn't, according to the rest of the report.

Screeners famous for over-frisking women and nearly disrobing hobbling grandfathers are still stealing from passengers' luggage. Since a 2003 inspection, there's been no progress in the rate at which they catch undercover investigators carrying fake weapons and explosives. These failures are more serious than the USDA's frivolous pyramid. No one's going to die from eating too much oatmeal.

Gary Burns, the spokesman for Rep. John Mica (R-Fla.), chairman of the House subcommittee on aviation, calls TSA's Ops Center the "oops center" and says the Justice Department is investigating overspending throughout the agency, including the project manager who avoided the $2,500 expense cap by breaking up his purchases of armoires, loveseats, coffee makers and leather briefcases into separate transactions.

Then there's the matter of erratic passenger screening. Burns had to remove his flip-flops in the Los Angeles airport, but not his dress shoes in Nashville. In addition to more consistency in shoe removal, Mica's subcommittee believes the accuracy of the terror watch list will be improved by a new program that is supposed to reduce the portion of passengers super-searched from 16% to 5%.

The Bush administration had a chance to change the culture at Homeland Security when an earlier inspector general, Clark Kent Ervin, reported the department was slow to accomplish its mission but quick to spend a buck. He revealed that the department had thrown an elegant party for itself costing $462,000 ($64 per gallon of coffee, $1,486 for three balloon arches). For speaking out, Ervin was let go.

And this report doesn't touch on security at ports or borders. The borders are so poorly secured, a group of vigilantes dressed in camouflage and sitting in plastic lawn chairs took a flier at patrolling the line between Arizona and Mexico. The best you can say about that is that no one died.

Private isn't always bad. Mica found that private screeners performed better than public ones. But Mica says the way to go is not to upgrade the screeners but to spend money to upgrade the old-tech magnometers. That would reduce staff by 78%, according to Mica's staff. The machines are costly but more foolproof than humans. And they don't need leather briefcases or towel service.