Got an email today from the airport where we fly our little planes:
Due to recent cost increases by the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) for the security threat assessment (STA), the Massport board of directors have approved a fee increase for SIDA badge related costs.
Perhaps this reveals a bright side to the government running nearly 50 percent of the economy: they can prevent deflation.
Background: Our airport, which had never experienced any security threats or problems (in fact the U.S. Air Force was comfortable leaving its planes unguarded and unlocked out on the ramp), after 9/11 decided, in conjunction with the TSA, to implement the same kind of security badge system in place at America’s largest commercial airports (the DFW airport explains the process). Never mind that we had only five commercial flights per day, each one on an ancient 19-seat turboprop; far busier airports managed the same problem by painting a red stripe on the ramp and telling their general aviation pilots not to walk over the red stripe. The airline went bankrupt in 2007 and since then we’ve had no commercial flights, but we still have the badges, the card readers, the keypads, the fingerprint readers (never got those to work), etc. Hangar rents were doubled and I’m not sure that the extra funds were sufficient to pay for all of the new security gates. The “security threat assessment” mentioned in the email is the TSA checking to make sure that Joe, the guy who has been a flight instructor at the airport for 20 years, has not been convicted of murder, rape, or extortion in the preceding two years since his last STA (this application shows the complete list of crimes).
[I’m not sure why the cost of checking for murder convictions has gone up, actually. I don’t think that the TSA has the energy to visit every courthouse in the U.S. Therefore they are probably checking it on a computer system. So basically we are paying for someone at TSA to type in a person’s name in a search box and click “submit”. Why the airport itself could not do this is unclear. Presumably giving access to the fancy computer system to an airport employee would not be as effective as having the trained professionals who approved Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab for his coat-less luggage-free trip to Detroit do the typing. Anyway, regardless of who types the query, shouldn’t the cost of a computer search come down slightly every year? Nearly everything in private industry that is computer-based has gotten cheaper.]
On top of that, Gov. Patrick is again trying to establish an aircraft sales tax.
They failed in prior attempts as recently as 2008.
As of 2006, TSA wasn’t involved with the checking of who was issued airside badges at airports. An industry organization had an agreement with the FBI to do the processing using a bunch of government contractors to pass the data through to the NCIC databases. TSA has a poor record of doing personnel screening; there was at least one incident at LAX in 2002 where TSA was supposedly doing all of the background checks for their own employees, and they authorized a non-trivial number of convicted felons for SIDA access.