Save the Budget, Cut the TSA

By Austin Johansen Monday, July 11, 2011

Don’t TSA me, bro!

Air travel in post-9/11 America just plain sucks. It’s hard to tell what’s worse between the tedious lines

at baggage check-in to even more tedious lines at security; there’s no getting around the incessant line-

waiting, impatient weight-shifting and phone-checking that goes into every trip to the airport. But to

nearly anyone who’s required to fly on a regular basis, three simple letters are enough to cringe and

gnash teeth: TSA.

The Transportation Safety Authority is known for all the wrong reasons. Notorious for their excessive

pat-downs, frisking of children and elderly leukemia patients in wheelchairs, sometimes it feels like they

do more harm than good. Are we really preventing another major terrorist attack by making me take off

my shoes and put them in a separate bin?

When they’re not taking their jobs and miniscule authority too seriously, they’re not taking them

seriously enough, or even bothering doing their jobs at all. Take for instance the hilariously terrifying

TSA foul-up last Friday, as a cleaning crew at Newark Liberty Airportdiscovered a stun gun tucked into a

seat after a late-night flight from Boston to Newark. Not only did someone get through TSA with the

stun gun, they enjoyed their entire flight undisturbed before, it seems, accidentally leaving it wedged in

their seat.

But no need to worry, after the weapon was reported to Port Authority police, it was immediately

turned over to the TSA–yes, the same guys who should’ve found the weapon in the first place were

entrusted with its confiscation. If they weren’t so busy checking Nana’s diapers for explosives, maybe

they would’ve noticed that guy waddling like he has a stun gun tucked against his taint. Is anyone

getting fired over this?

The answer is no, because TSA is saving their firings for employees like Nelson Santiago, who was

terminated after being caught stealing an iPad from a passenger’s luggage and shoving it in his pants,

storing it to be sold later online with other electronics he’d stolen—$50,000 worth to be exact. Now we

need to protect our luggage from the people protecting our luggage? Can we reallocate Grandma’s pat-

down to luggage-handling agents now, please?

It’s bewildering that despite the oppressive, rigorous screenings everyone has to go through at airport

security, glaring mistakes are still made by the agents we’re expected to entrust with our safety. It’s no

secret that government agencies can be wasteful, but when we see such a string of overt failures to

ensure public safety, it’s time to analyze the effectiveness–or even the very purpose of the TSA’s

ridiculous antics.

You can’t argue the utility of an agency that feels it necessary to screen a 6 year-old girlwith her mother,

while Olajide Olwaseun Noibi boards a flight from New York to Los Angeles using only an expired

University of Michigan student ID and a boarding pass in someone else’s name. It’s just one of those

things we’ve been forced to tolerate due to post-9/11 fear-mongering, making us believe that the

extensive security measures are keeping us safe. After countless instances of mace, pocket knives and

stun guns getting through security, it’s obvious they’re merely slowing down our travel time for the sake

of a false sense of security, defending ourselves retroactively from an airline attack that’s not likely to

happen again in the same way.

In the ongoing debates about necessary budget cuts, the TSA needs to be under the microscope if it’s

not already. If you’re going to justify spending over $700 billion on defense, at least allocate some of

those funds to a better-functioning TSA. Or do the budget, along with the entire country, a favor and nix

the agency entirely, because right now it seems like malfunctioning underwear bombs have a better

chance at stopping the next attack than the TSA.