Switching to a private security force and away from federal screeners at the nation’s 35 busiest airports would save taxpayer $1 billion over five years, according to a report released last Friday by a House transportation panel.
The report says these savings would be achieved if these airports, which account for 75 percent of commercial passengers in the United States, had security screening forces that operated as efficiently as the private screening force at San Francisco International (SFO) Airport. SFO is the only one of the 35 airports operating with private screeners, says the report, TSA Ignores More Cost Effective Screening Model, which was prepared by the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee Oversight and Investigations Staff.
The panel is chaired by Rep. John Mica (R-Fla.), a vocal critic of TSA Administrator John Pistole’s decision earlier this year to halt any expansion of the agency’s private screener program, called the Secure Partnership Program (SPP) (Defense Daily, Feb. 1). The SPP program is in place at 16 airports around the country, most of them small.
At the time Pistole said the SPP program hadn’t generated any obvious benefits.
The Government Accountability Office (GAO) in March said that TSA’s most recent estimates put the costs of using private screeners at airports at 3 percent higher than using federal screeners, an estimate that is significantly lower than the 17 percent cost differential the agency touted in 2007 (Defense Daily, March 10). However, GAO had said in 2009 that TSA has underestimated the costs of using federal screeners and in its more recent report said the agency still needs to improve how it does cost estimating.
“The facts speak for themselves,” Mica said in a statement accompany the release of the House report. “TSA cooked the books when conducting past cost comparisons of the two models, misleading Congress and the public by artificially inflating the costs to use private contract screeners. As our report reveals, when considering critical information previously ignored by TSA, the private-federal option is actually 65 percent more efficient and would increase taxpayer savings by at least 42 percent.”
Some of the other findings in the House report include:
· Taxpayers would save $38.6 million annually if Los Angeles International (LAX) Airport is allowed to adopt the SPP program;
· Private screeners at SFO process 65 percent more passengers per screener than their counterparts at LAX;
· Five airports whose applications were denied by TSA to join SPP would have experienced substantial cost savings by being allowed into the program; and
· Most of the world’s airports use private screening companies.