If the Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy-helmed Department of Grifting Executives (D.O.G.E) in the coming presidential administration want to cut governmental inefficiency, there is a big, obvious target with which they can start: the Transportation Security Administration, or the TSA. With Christmas on the horizon, TSA checkpoints will be a factor many Americans will contend with.
The TSA has been groping away American freedoms since Nov. 19, 2001, when the Aviation and Transportation Security Act was signed into law by Congress and established the agency as a direct response to the tragic events that occurred on the eleventh day a couple of months prior.
According to its website, the TSA is committed to “serve our country and uphold our mission to protect the nation’s transportation systems to ensure freedom of movement for people and commerce.”
What a crock.
For $12 billion a year and change, the American taxpayer is tasked with employing some 58,000 drones under this agency, which creates a complex and ever-changing list of stupid human tricks with which to subject airline passengers all in the name of security.
Most studies conducted on airport security have demonstrated that the TSA is utterly ineffective, engaging in what one article, published in 2022, essentially referred to as “security theater,” or the simulacrum, if you will, of safety; the illusion, or feeling, that passengers are safer.
According to YouGov.com: “Homeland Security conducted an investigation in 2015 which found that undercover investigators were able to successfully smuggle mock explosives and banned weapons through Transportation Security Administration checkpoints in 95% of trials.” In 2017, the TSA improved its performance, but still failed 70% of the time. If you’ve ever waited in air travel purgatory wondering why TSA agents are so rude and seemingly incompetent, well, there’s statistic backing for the latter.
Aside from its ineffectiveness, there is also the factor of TSA nonsense creating more complex choreography for travelers. Air travel used to be a simple thing, pre-TSA checkpoints, and now, travelers have to budget for two or three hours before a flight in order to be fondled and be made to remove shoes, and throw away water bottles and other “contraband” items.
Think about Amtrak or Greyhound. There’s no intrusive, ridiculous security protocols on their trains or buses. Passengers simply wait to board the vessel and enjoy the ride to wherever they’re going. Same thing with metro trains in cities like Dallas or Seattle.
The best defense, post-9-11, for airports, would have been to beef up their private security staffs, but alas, get the government involved, and incompetence reigns supreme.
Violence on an airplane, statistically speaking, is never going to come from some guy smuggling a bomb in his tighty whities, but from some drunken lout who is tired of being cooped up in a metal tube with a few hundred other folks.
So, yeah, if Elon and Vivek are gearing up to take the hatchet to government waste, there’s an obvious target awaiting the blade.
