Before you answer - consider the Status Quo prior to 9/11, it was private security, run by individual airlines or groups of airlines as needed. It was not (always) centralized and often was only done at the gate point.
Is the issue with TSA or TSA policies?
I think we can relax TSA policy some, certainly at least on shoes - though many travelers will still need to remove shoes before the shoe has an internal metal support.
9/11 was not a result of lax security in airports, but lacking security measures onboard planes themselves which have since been addressed with reinforced locking cockpit doors being sealed before departure, etc.
It's been proven time and time again even by other government agencies that it is trivially easy to sneak "dangerous" things (including knives and firearms) through TSA checkpoints onto planes. The current state of airport "security" in the USA is 110% theatre which taxpayers and travelers pay through the nose for.
I'm not even gonna go into if lax security was at the root of 9/11, I think it was certainly contributory but definitely not causal.
That does not answer my question - we dismantled the previous system and subsumed private sector expertise in airline security into TSA - so if not TSA, who should be doing it and how should it be done?
Like I think we could just as well have TSA doing it with policies returned back to 2000 (though I'm skeptical of rolling back the clock that much)?
Like, I don't disagree with the idea that TSA is about 50% theatre - it is, its meant to make Bob and Eileen from Cedar Rapids who fly twice a decade feel safe.
The two things that have made airplane travel safer since 2001:
1. reinforced cockpit doors
2. widespread knowledge among passengers that you have to actively fight the hijackers instead of letting them alone (previously, the assumption was that they just want to fly to Cuba or something and it was safer to let them do that and get off the plane)
That's it.
TSA screening is worth nothing, costs taxpayers and businesses enormous amounts of time and money, and is a gigantic abuse vector. Dissolve it and replace it with a simple metal detectors and X-ray machine regime to check for obvious cases of idiots carrying firearms onto the plane; anything more than that is a waste of taxpayer money.
I would be supportive of a smaller, better selected, better trained, better compensated cadre of TSA agents. I think a lot of the reason why the TSA is so ineffective, and why so much of the airport experience is just theater, comes down to the fact that it is just a jobs program for people who could not get a job guarding the local mall.
I don't actually think TSA can shrink by a substantial amount and still carry out even the reduced mission we've discussed here. You still need roughly the same number of people operating X-Ray and Magnetometers that you have operating body scanners and X-Rays now, it would go somewhat faster, but not vastly faster, the flow thru say, PreCheck and Regular TSA is within 15% of each other.
I think there is an assumption here that the 'theatre' component adds lots of people to TSA, and I don't think that's the case, just from my own observations - and having some understanding of how you move volumes of people thru a space.
For efficiency - I'm gonna make the assumption that we're still gonna keep a distinction between the airside and landside, and not put ID check back on the airlines at the gate.
Lets look at the staffing of a single TSA checkpoint -
1) Before the queue, you have a guy filtering precheck vs not - that guy could prolly go away. so -1 here.
2) At the end point of the queue, you have the guy doing ID verification and boarding pass check, that step is probably still needed here. So 0 - no change.
3) Pre Magnetometer Assist - This is the person helping pax put their belongings on the belt for going thru the magnetometer, its not always present, but usually is when they're busy. So 0 - no change.
4) X-Ray Operator, the person operating the X-Ray. So 0, no change.
5) Team of two people operating the magnetometer. I see no way to reduce this, you need someone to do a pat down for those who fail the magnetometer, so it's usually a pair of men and women. Again 0 - no change
6) 1-3 people to perform hand inspections of bags that look questionable on the X-Ray. You maybe could reduce this? it depends on the particulars of the details of the inspection.
7) Supervisor. Even in an ideal world, you still need a supervisor, plus the supervisor probably helps give breaks and fills in missing coverage on the short term when people are late.
Now while I can believe that the people at the checkpoints are just the tip of the proverbial TSA iceberg, This is the part that seems even harder to reduce, in any meaningful way.
The long and the short of this, is I don't think TSA can reduce its size in any meaningful way, airlines used to do all this threat analysis themselves in some level of isolation. Now its all centralized, without a probable meaningful level of change in employment.
I wonder if there'd be fewer abuses by the TSA (especially theft, but also assault and harassment) if they had the resources to hire better people. Maybe there is still an opportunity to reduce staff if the quality of the staff still increases.
I wonder what the actual incidents of these are, I suspect it's very low - figure that ~2m people fly in the states every day. Also, its not just TSA that has the chance to steal, airline employees do too, because they ferry the bags to the inspection and from it.
The issue for me isn't that TSA does bad things, it's like the whole debate over LE in the US - Law Enforcement Agencies cannot be held to reasonable account when their employees do bad things. Thats the real issue at hand here.
There was one - count it - case of an attempted shoe bombing, which failed dismally. Billions of travelers have had to take off their shoes and have them scanned by x-ray ever since. This is wildly, pathologically irrational.
I don't disagree with the idea that TSA is about 50% theatre - it is, its meant to make Bob and Eileen from Cedar Rapids who fly twice a decade feel safe.
my shoes must be removed anyhow, because they will cause the magnetometer to go off.
Generally I agree with you - like we don't make people with PreCheck take them off - so why make everyone else?
The OP called for disbanding or curtailing. Allowing for a single agency to carry out the 9/10 status quo would be curtailing. And I think that would be sufficient.
Or you could phase back into airport authorities running the security, but allow for centralized policies and audit. Having local authority subject to central audit and consequences might be a lot better than central authority subject to central audit and no effective consequences.
I flagged on disband, not on curtail and was questioning that - but its clear some of the parallel commenters do want disband - not just curtail.
Yeah, I'm fine with getting rid of the millimeter wave body scanners, the rules on liquids, all of that noise. I think it should be a little more stringent (meaning still centralized scanning, and you can't go thru unless you can go thru a magnetometer clean or get a pat down) than pre-9/11 - but much less than the theatre we have now.
Before you answer - consider the Status Quo prior to 9/11, it was private security, run by individual airlines or groups of airlines as needed. It was not (always) centralized and often was only done at the gate point.
Is the issue with TSA or TSA policies?
I think we can relax TSA policy some, certainly at least on shoes - though many travelers will still need to remove shoes before the shoe has an internal metal support.