Is TSA worth the cost?

Veronique de Rugy of the American Enterprise Institute wonders:

TSA's requested budget for FY2006 is $5.6 billion...

That's a lot of money for an agency whose main measure of success is to have "intercepted seven million prohibited items at airport checkpoints, including just over 600 firearms." What it really means though it that 0.008 percent of items intercepted are actually firearms and that 99.992 percent of intercepted items are tweezers, breath fresheners, and lighters. But is that a real measure of success?

It's a ridiculous measure: Easy to quantify, but meaningless. Better to ask: How many of those "over 600" firearms were going to be used to take over a plane? How many of those seven million prohibited items were going to be used to take over planes? If stopping seven million prohibited items is success, lets prohibit t-shirts and underwear: then TSA can raise their intercept numbers into the tens of millions and that will be "success." Big whoopee.

As an ex-con told me last week, any fool who has been in prison knows how to turn a toothbrush into a deadly weapon in about 30 seconds. After it has been converted, no screener in the world would realize it.

We still allow duty-free liquor in glass bottles aboard planes, and cracking two of those together makes a pair of pretty fine weapons. We can carry matches but not lighters. Our security is in the hands of charlatans.

Security experts argue that TSA's mandate is also poorly focused. The federal government has already spent over $10 billion of taxpayers' money on systems that screen every passenger to keep knives, weapons, and now lighters off of planes; what we really need, however, is to keep dangerous passengers out of airline cockpits. This can be accomplished with simple cockpit barricades, which the airline industry has now installed at a relatively low costs estimated between $300 million and $500 million over a ten-year period.

Another cost-effective security measure to prevent attacks of the 9/11 variety is to let pilots carry guns. Yet two years after TSA launched a program to train pilots to carry guns in the cockpit, lingering bureaucratic problems and unfriendly responses have dissuaded pilots from participating.

Screening for explosives makes sense. Keeping pilots from carrying guns does not. Letting passengers carry some deadly weapons but not others makes no sense at all.