You Can't Make This Stuff Up

March 27, 2013
Sequestration takes a left turn on the off-ramp to Strangeville

I promised myself I would not join the fray on sequestration or the prohibited items list, but I can’t help myself when such stories take a left turn on the off-ramp to Strangeville.   Let’s begin with a pop quiz: With sequestration causing huge budget cuts in every office of every Federal agency; FAA closing ATC towers, cutting essential air service to small markets, furloughing government employees one day per week - 20% of their income, and cancelling all White House tours to save the Secret Service a few bucks in overtime pay, what would you say is TSA’s latest contribution to cutting costs during the economic crisis?

Good guess!! A $50 million one-year contract to buy TSA screeners new uniforms, announced 2 days before the sequester took effect.  It goes to VF Imagewear, which owns the Lee and Wrangler Hero brands, (who make much of their product in Mexico); and works out to significantly more than $1,000 per apparently near-naked screener, each of whom must have worn their uniforms threadbare since the previous 3-year contract for $98 million.  You also may have deduced this means they went up by about $17 million for this year alone.  So the next time through an airport, you might want to commend them on their newly found sartorial splendor, which I assume might also improve both their attitude and their ability to find bombs and weapons, both of which have apparently been flagging, according to recent news stories about missing the fake bomb stashed down the inspector’s pants... after insisting I remove my comb and Chapstick from my pockets because “the machine will flag it”.

Which provides the segue to the prohibited items list, and the recent announcement that TSA is a big award winner from the National Association of Arbitrariness (NAA) for the new rule changes allowing small knives, baseball bats, hockey sticks, billiard cues and no more than two golf clubs.  One particularly intriguing theory was that the small knives are very difficult to spot in all the clutter – probably true - they thought they were missing a lot of them (hmmm – how do you prove that negative?), and were taking far too much hand-search time which could be better spent looking for the really dangerous stuff (see inspector, bomb in pants, above), and it’s assumed that inspectors don’t shove sharp things down their pants anyhow.  So rather than seeking to improve the technology and/or the protocols and/or the training to find what has been deemed an unacceptable threat for the past 11 years, let’s just change the rules.  Much less fuss. 

Even more inexplicably, the change is not effective until April 25, almost two months – one sixth of a year – past the date TSA officially and publicly declared them no longer worth the effort.   Consider also, now that such knives and sporting goods will be allowed, there will likely be a lot more of them.  Now imagine the well-trained TSO going nuts in his brand new spiffy uniform and with his official TSA-logoed micrometer (presumably a separate technology procurement contract) measuring many hundreds more blades each day for the 2.36 inch cut-off.  Yeah, me too....

The NAA was quoted as calling the list “very solid, from an arbitrariness point of view —especially when you consider that they are still banning bottled water.”  I want to talk to the guy who decided that carrying three clubs on board and checking the rest as luggage would be a dead give-away for terrorists, especially if one of the clubs is a sand wedge. Who the hell carries (only) two clubs on board – and why?  If that’s all he’s got, I think I can beat him.