“Is it warm, or is it just my nerves?” she asked him. “Both,” he said, laughing. Rossides was there for the debut of the largest agency launched to date in the history of the government–the Transportation Security Administration, which that morning began its rollout of federal security agents to replace the private guards that had screened (and often not screened) passengers at the nation’s 429 airports.
Rossides, who oversees training and quality-control programs at TSA, listened as the supervisor went over a checklist with his squad.
At about 4:15 they faced their first group of real passengers. The bleary-eyed road warriors were startled by the new crew, who actually called them “sir” and “ma’am” and studied their X-ray monitors with the energy of kids playing a videogame.
“Who are these people?” one passenger wondered out loud. Not without reason: TSA has been ridiculed in the press and in Congress since it was born. Yet with a Nov. 19 deadline for federalizing all airports fast approaching, guards wearing the TSA logo on crisp new white shirts are starting to arrive–and impress–across the country. “I’ve got to hand it to them; they’ve delivered on this,” says Larry Cox, the airport director in Memphis, who got his federal screeners in September. As late as July Cox was telling me it could never happen in time. Lately, the press, too, is starting to change, as are public attitudes. Local newspapers where TSA has now been deployed have been quoting travelers as impressed as Cox.
How TSA has made so much progress since April is an unusual story of civil servants like Rossides successfully teaming up with the private sector.
Rossides has the resume of a career bureaucrat. Her first job after college in 1978 was at the Treasury Department’s Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF), where she moved steadily up a ladder of unglamorous administrative and support-services posts. But Rossides was known at ATF as a workaholic who would run over, or cleverly sidestep, almost any obstacle.
Rossides came home the night of her first day at TSA and told her husband that it had been “12 hours of indescribable chaos.” But she loved it. She had discovered that a shadow TSA was already in place, in a war room filled with charts of deadlines and milestones manned by a squad of private-sector hotshots on loan to the government. Deputy Transportation Secretary Michael Jackson had quietly been assembling them since October, a month before the law establishing TSA was even passed.
Yet it seemed last winter and spring that every week there was another article or congressional hearing aimed at making these 12-hour-a-day civil servants and volunteers from the private sector look like slothful idiots. They were hammered for seeking to recruit 60,000 full- or part-time people, when the press stories that accompanied the passage of the law creating it all said they would need 28,000. But that lower figure was the product of a guess by a Senate staffer the day the bill passed of how many private screeners were currently on the job. He had forgotten to count the 20,000 or more people who would be needed to achieve the new task mandated by the law–putting all checked luggage through machines to screen them for explosives. Nor had he accounted for the drastic increase in current passenger screeners that would be needed to make the system safer, which, of course, is what the new law was all about.
TSA was also pilloried for security lapses when undercover journalists successfully sneaked weapons past the guards. But the guards were the old private guards, not the new ones that started arriving only on April 30 in Baltimore. The full rollout didn’t start until the late summer, and it still hasn’t reached many airports–including, until recently, those in New York and Washington that the national press frequents.
TSA brought a lot of this grief on itself, too. The man hired to head the agency, John Magaw, used to run the Secret Service. Although he had performed well there and at the ATF (where he had steadily promoted Rossides), Magaw had a Secret Service man’s tin ear when it came to dealing with the press, the aviation industry and Congress. He was aloof, seemingly inflexible and generally allowed himself to become a poster child for bureaucracy run amok. Thus, he got nailed for spending lavishly on his own office suite at a time when the agency was claiming it was running out of money. (In July, Magaw was replaced by James Loy, the highly regarded commandant of the Coast Guard, who now seems to have improved relations with Congress.) More important, the corporate-minded go teams, plus Deputy Secretary Jackson–a management superstar who will emerge a hero from this TSA surprise-success story, but who is a control freak–played it too close to the vest in communicating their rollout plans. Local airport directors, like Cox in Memphis, were left in the dark and complained freely about it to their frequent-flier congressmen and to local reporters. Thus, everyone assumed TSA must be sleeping, that it had no chance of meeting the seemingly impossible deadlines written into the law–this Nov. 19 for having the new federal screeners at all airports, and Dec. 31 for having systems to screen checked baggage for bombs.
In fact, the TSA people were quietly grinding out the details of a high-speed rollout that would begin in earnest during the summer and make the deadlines in the nick of time. Which is now what it looks like is going to happen: TSA is certain to make the Nov. 19 date for federalization, and will get those bomb-screening systems in place at all but 30 or 40 of the 429 airports, and could probably have gotten them everywhere, if a congressional budget deadlock hadn’t frozen funding.
There have been lots of hiccups along the way. The private contractor (a subsidiary of the company that owns London’s Financial Times) hired to do the recruiting and testing of these tens of thousands of screeners did a lousy job getting out there in advance at many locations to attract enough recruits. But Rossides and a go-team leader on loan from Federal Express stepped in and created a plan for advance outreach in dozens of metropolitan areas. The bottom line is that as of the end of October, TSA has recruited, tested and screened more than 70,000 applicants, and 44,000 were in training or already on the job in full- or part-time positions at 369 airports, with more moving quickly into the pipeline.
Meanwhile the two other giant contractors–Lockheed-Martin, which is training the screeners and coordinating their deployment across the country, and Boeing, which is running the program to install the checked-baggage bomb-screening systems–seem to be mostly delivering on the extravagant promises they made when they bid for this work.
When a unanimous Senate and Democrats in the House pushed for federalization of the screeners last fall, House Republicans, backed by the Bush administration, argued against it. They said it was a big-government answer destined to fail. There are still bound to be snafus as this giant agency stands up (including figuring out who’s responsible for the luggage that may get delayed or pilfered in the bomb-screening process), and there is a good policy argument to be made that Congress never should have mandated all this money and effort on one transportation mode–aviation–while spending relatively little on the others. But the irony now is that thanks to career civil servants like Rossides, working with those private-sector go-team leaders, and corporate contractors like Lockheed-Martin and Boeing, a Republican administration is about to prove that big government can work.
