ERIN Digital & Phone net Tuesday October 1, 2024; Go HERE for Current SOI
a decade after the TSA was created following the September 11 attacks, the author of the legislation that established the massive agency grades its performance at ?D-.??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?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??We are one of the only countries still using this model of security,? Mica said, ?other than Bulgaria, Romania, Poland, and I think, Libya.?
