TSA faces staffing disparities at airports
Initial administrative staffing plans "lacked coherency," leading to inconsistencies across airports, inspector general says.
The Transportation Security Administration needs to create uniform guidelines to address inconsistencies in staffing levels of administrative employees across airports, auditors said in a new report.
"TSA's initial staffing actions lacked coherency and resulted in some cases in significant disparities in staffing at airports," the report from the Homeland Security Department inspector general stated. The tasks assigned to administrative personnel and screeners often overlap, which makes it difficult to determine how many workers an airport might need and how employees are classified, the auditors said.
The report was completed Sept. 26 in response to a summer 2005 request from Rep. John Mica, R-Fla., chairman of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Subcommittee on Aviation. But it was not released publicly until this week.
Mica has been critical of TSA management, and cited an abundance of high-paying supervisor positions as the impetus for his inquiry. In a July 2005 memorandum to DHS Secretary Michael Chertoff, fellow lawmakers and DHS Inspector General Richard Skinner, he stated that TSA's "staffing is redundant and duplicative." He wrote that he did not want "to create substantial administrative bureaucracies."
The inspector general report partly substantiated this concern; "TSA hired and deployed too many administrative staff at some airports and too few at others," it stated.
But TSA is developing a policy, known as the "Hub-Spoke Realignment and Reallocation Plan," that will help "render staffing ratios nationwide more uniform," the IG said.
The plan entails classifying major airports as hubs and others as spokes, and centralizing staff at the larger airports. TSA would retain the ability to assign workers as needed to smaller airports. Agency officials told the IG the plan will require 139 additional positions, but cited a lack of funding to make the hires. The report did not specify the capacity in which these extra employees would serve.
TSA was scheduled to complete the plan by Sept. 30. Spokeswoman Amy Kudwa said it was finished on time, but is "not public record." She declined to comment on where the agency stands in regard to the 139 positions officials said are needed, and related funding matters.