The TSA Has Been Under Constant Scrutiny Since Its Inception

What should be done with the TSA? The author of the legislation that created the TSA thinks they have gone far off track and should be pulled back, overhauled, and privatized. I commented on the TSA previously here and here.  This piece from Audrey Hudson at Human Events details his comments from a recent interview (HT: Josh Wood). Here are parts:

“The whole program has been hijacked by bureaucrats,” said Rep. John Mica (R. -Fla.), chairman of the House Transportation Committee.

“It mushroomed into an army,” Mica said.  “It’s gone from a couple-billion-dollar enterprise to close to $9 billion.”

As for keeping the American public safe, Mica says, “They’ve failed to actually detect any threat in 10 years.”

“Everything they have done has been reactive.  They take shoes off because of [shoe-bomber] Richard Reid, passengers are patted down because of the diaper bomber, and you can’t pack liquids because the British uncovered a plot using liquids,” Mica said.

“It’s an agency that is always one step out of step,” Mica said.

It cost $1 billion just to train workers, which now number more than 62,000, and “they actually trained more workers than they have on the job,” Mica said.

“The whole thing is a complete fiasco,” Mica said.

In a wide-ranging interview with HUMAN EVENTS just days before the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, Mica said screeners should be privatized and the agency dismantled.

Instead, the agency should number no more than 5,000, and carry out his original intent, which was to monitor terrorist threats and collect intelligence.

And later, after detailing some of the abuses:

Asked whether the agency should be privatized, Mica answered with a qualified yes.

“They need to get out of the screening business and back into security.  Most of the screening they do should be abandoned,” Mica said.  “I just don’t have a lot of faith at this point,” Mica said.

Allowing airports to privatize screening was a key element of Mica’s legislation and a report released by the committee in June determined that privatizing those efforts would result in a 40% savings for taxpayers.

“We have thousands of workers trying to do their job.  My concern is the bureaucracy we built,” Mica said.

“We are one of the only countries still using this model of security,” Mica said, “other than Bulgaria, Romania, Poland, and I think, Libya.”

Read the rest here. I’m not a fan of the TSA, and think that the restriction of our freedoms has really not resulted in a significantly safer flying public.