Press Conference Today: Report to Call for TSA Reform

Washington, DC – Leaders of U.S House Committees will release a report and analysis tomorrow of the development, evolution, current status and need for reform of the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), ten years after the agency’s creation. 

The report, entitled “A Decade Later: A Call for TSA Reform,” will be released at an 11:30 a.m. press conference today at Reagan National Airport.  The analysis of TSA, a federal bureaucracy plagued by significant administrative and operational problems, was prepared by the majority staff of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee and the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.

WHO:             U.S. Rep. John L. Mica (R-FL), Chairman, U.S. House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure

WHAT:          Press Conference on release of TSA Report & Analysis –

“A Decade Later: A Call for TSA Reform”

WHEN:          11:30 a.m., Wednesday, November 16, 2011

WHERE:       Reagan National Airport

                        North end of the ticketing level (upper level), Terminal C

Please contact the Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority Public Affairs Office at (703) 417-8370 to make arrangements for parking live media trucks. All other vehicles must park in the garages or economy lot.

Background: The Aviation and Transportation Security Act, the legislation creating TSA, was passed by Congress ten years ago tomorrow, on November 16, 2001, and signed into law three days later.  Rep. Mica, who then chaired the Subcommittee on Aviation, was one of the authors of that legislation. 

When TSA was established, it was intended by Congress to be a lean security organization with the primary responsibility of analyzing intelligence, setting security policies and procedures, and overseeing a transportation security structure.  Since then, at a cost of $57 billion, TSA has mushroomed into a human resources bureaucracy of over 65,000 that has lost its transportation security focus.