Robert Silk
I am often opposed to privatizing government services. And, yes, the common argument that introducing a profit incentive into a public service will lead to worse delivery as well as lower pay and benefits is sometimes true.
But when it comes to airport security screening, I believe the Trump administration's push to increase the number of airports using private contractors is sensible as long as it's not done with a heavy hand.
Everyone knows about TSA officers going unpaid during increasingly frequent government shutdowns. It's both a genuine problem and the type of problem that gets the public's attention. Four-hour checkpoint lines in Houston and Atlanta, anyone?
But my fundamental concern is the TSA's competing mandates as a security regulator and a security provider. As such, the agency sets the rules and guidelines for airport screening, conducts that screening and oversees screening efficacy -- in effect overseeing itself, perhaps with an occasional nudge from Congress or independent auditors.
In contrast, the EU more sensibly requires individual countries to set security guidelines and conduct oversight, while airports implement their own security programs.
There are indications that the TSA's conflicting mandates are harmful to security and have resulted in the agency circling the wagons in relation to its own deficiencies. Tests that the TSA conducts on itself are classified, but in a rare instance, results leaked in 2015 showing a failure rate of 95% for detection of mock explosives and banned weapons. Much more recently, CBS reported in March that the TSA failed to respond, as required, to a classified inspector general's audit identifying continuing screening vulnerabilities.
Already, there are airports not using the TSA to conduct their screening. Twenty airports deploy private screening contractors under the Screening Partnership Program (SPP) that Congress established in 2004. Those airports were shielded from the surges in security staffing callouts that some other airports endured during shutdowns last fall and this spring.
The program, though, has limitations. The TSA, and not the airports, pick the private contractor, and the contractor is obligated to use TSA-owned screening equipment.
Those limitations are likely reasons that only a handful of airports have joined the SPP. But three more -- Tampa; Des Moines, Iowa; and Charleston, S.C. -- are set to privatize next year as part of a newly introduced TSA program called Gold+, under which the contracted screening company will own the screening technology. It is a program that the Trump administration says will free airports from protracted federal procurement processes, enabling quicker checkpoint innovation.
On its webpage promoting Gold+, the TSA says quicker adoption of new screening technology will improve both flyer experiences and safety. The agency also promises that it will retain robust oversight to ensure all operations meet federal standards.
Along with creating Gold+, the Trump administration used this year's budget proposal to call for all small airports to be required to enroll in the SPP program.
For now, I think that proposal is a bridge too far. But providing new incentives for airports to voluntarily privatize makes sense and would create a larger data set by which to judge broader policy action.
Key to privatization's success, of course, would be that the TSA comes through with the robust oversight it's promising. That's a big if. But just maybe the TSA will prove better at overseeing others than it is at overseeing itself.