A recent investigation issued jointly by the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform and House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure reports that TSA bought $184 million in screening equipment that it stored in warehouses and tried to prevent Congress from learning how many machines were there. TSA attempted to hide unused machines from visiting investigators: when asked why so few workers were at warehouse at 3 p.m., a manager said he had sent them home because they had been working since 6 a.m. to remove 1,300 pieces of equipment. Some of the key findings:
- 85% of the current inventory had been stored for longer than six months; 35% for more than one year. One piece had been in storage more than six years – 60% of its useful life.
- The Committee staff discovered TSA had 472 Advanced Technology 2 (AT2) carry-on baggage screening machines stored, with more than 99% in storage for more than nine months; 34% of AT2s have been stored for longer than one year.
- Limited use of direct shipping from manufacturer to deployment location resulted in excessive annual deployment costs of somewhere between $50-$100 million.
- TSA possessed 1,462 ETDs in storage - worth $44 million, with 492 of them (34%) in storage for longer than one year.
- TSA officials had no deployment plan for the ETDs, but noted that “[w]e purchased more than we needed in order to get a discount.”
I suspect the bulk discount may have been far outstripped by the waste. This is not stuff you buy at CostCo, and keep the extras in the basement behind the case of chicken soup and the 20-pack of T.P. - TSA spent $3.5 million a year to lease and manage a warehouse for 5,700 pieces of unused equipment. Let me repeat that with some context: TSA has approximately 16,000 pieces of screening equipment deployed to 463 airports nationwide. They also have 5,700 additional pieces of new, unused equipment [about 36% of total deployment] sitting idle, some of which has no deployment plan, and some that I would wager is probably already outdated. TSA has an entire department whose primary task is determining the useful life cycle of equipment, in order to establish a more efficient replacement program for technologies which are themselves rapidly changing. Apparently after ten years and a bunch of puffers still in boxes, the lesson still hasn’t sunk in.
There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all. [Peter Drucker, Management Expert]
The report also suggests that TSA probably broke the law by "knowingly providing [a] materially false warehouse inventory report to Congressional staff." It's an election year, and one should correct for political bias in the Congressional report, even though the facts remain pretty bad. What’re the odds that things will change….?
The full report is found at:
