An emphasis on passenger convenience, low workforce morale, hesitancy of screening officers regarding physical contact with passengers to resolve alarms, and other factors help perpetuate aviation security risks, a Transportation Security Administration (TSA) official that oversees airport and airline compliance with transportation security regulations told a Senate committee on Tuesday.
“Over the recent years the TSA has hired into leadership positions a number of former airline executives and others who place more emphasis on customer service and passenger wait times than on security and detection rates,” Rebecca Roering, assistant Federal Security Director for Inspections at TSA, told the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee.
Roering didn’t mention Homeland Secretary Jeh Johnson’s recent directives to TSA to reexamine the effectiveness of its screening technology and improve the training of its screening officers after he received a briefing from a department auditor pointing to severe shortcomings in these areas, but she said only in the past few weeks has “detection of improvised explosive devices has become a topic of discussion in TSA.” She said this was prompted by covert testing that showed “detection rates that caused great concern.”
Roering said that when passenger wait times are “deemed excessive” by agency leadership, “immediate reporting” must occur that precedes analysis and corrective action while “conversely the local monthly testing of our officers to determine their ability to detect weapons and explosives is not associated with any performance metric. When this testing results in a failure to detect the item, there’s a basic remedial training required before the officer may return to duty.”
But, Roering continued, Transportation Screening Officers (TSO) may never be tested covertly. She said this observation is based on the number of covert tests assigned monthly by various federal entities including TSA, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Inspector General, and the Government Accountability Office, combined with the numbers of TSOs which are in the thousands across the nation’s airports, and limited resources available.
“This lack of realistic testing on a regular basis leads to complacency in our workforce,” Roering said.
The poor detection rates at TSA that surfaced publicly have prompted TSA leaders to recognize that this is due in part “to the poor morale that exists across our workforce,” Roering said.
DHS consistently ranks low on workforce morale compared to other federal departments and last year TSA received its “fair share of low marks” as well, Roering said.
The DHS IG in late May briefed Johnson on classified preliminary findings of its covert testing of TSA screening procedures and equipment that led to the acting director of the agency being reassigned and for the new directives to be issued (Defense Daily, June 2). The report to Johnson followed testimony earlier in May by John Roth, the DHS IG, who told a House committee that ongoing covert testing of body scanners, which are called AIT machines, raised issues related to the effectiveness of the systems (Defense Daily, May 13).
Roth’s testimony to the Senate panel on Tuesday was far more circumspect than what he told the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform last month. Regarding the covert tests, which he said were performed by some of his auditors, Roth on Tuesday stated that “We identified vulnerabilities caused by human and technology-based failures.” While the test results are classified, Roth said he is willing to brief the committee on the findings in a closed session.
Regarding morale, Roering said that TSOs believe they are doing important work but feel “they are not valued by our leadership.” She said that there is a “culture of fear and distrust” in TSA that impacts morale and performance of employees.
Pressure from Johnson combined with the negative media reports around the IG’s covert testing investigation has led TSA to start a new initiative to have its Federal Security Directors to be more proactive with agency employees to improve morale and boost detection rates, Roering said.
Roering testified that she is a fan of TSA’s risk-based security program, noting that more than 99 percent of the traveling public doesn’t pose a risk to aviation security, but said the PreCheck trusted traveler program has been expanded at the expense of proper vetting of many of the travelers receiving the expedited screening benefits associated with the program. She said that the agency “is handing out PreCheck status like Halloween candy” by expanding the privilege to large populations of known travelers that receive less robust background checks through the Secure Flight database.
Some passengers also receive PreCheck benefits at the airport security lanes through the Managed Inclusion program, which typically relies on either Behavior Detection Officers (BDOs) or bomb-sniffing dogs to help single out travelers to enter the trusted traveler lanes. Roering said through her discussions and observations the canine-based entries offer greater confidence than relying on random selection using BDOs, adding though that there are no “methods to validate the effectiveness of techniques used by the BDOs.”