Aviation security agency gets off the ground

From the January issue of Government Executive.

In an office suite on the top floor of Transportation Department headquarters in Washington, the new era of big government has just begun. Here, Transportation's top executives are taking on a challenge unprecedented in recent memory: building a massive federal bureaucracy from scratch on a tight deadline.

For Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta, Deputy Secretary Michael Jackson, undersecretary nominee John Magaw and top consultant Kip Hawley, creating the new Transportation Security Administration (TSA) may well be the biggest management challenge of their careers. By year's end, the new agency must:

• Hire and train more than 30,000 federal employees.
• Conduct passenger and baggage screening at the nation's airports and perform criminal background checks on 750,000 employees with access to secure areas at airports.
• Oversee a patchwork quilt of federal, state and local agencies, and private companies that provide security at 361 seaports and along more than 130,000 miles of rail track.

And then there are the deadlines. In all, the law contains 10 major deadlines that the TSA must meet within a year. Within weeks after the law was passed, Mineta prompted an outcry on Capitol Hill by saying the new agency would not be able to meet one of its key mandates: to inspect all checked baggage for bombs by mid-January. "I didn't say that we weren't going to try to do it, but it is a tough task to do," Mineta says. The TSA has until late August to hire and train the new screeners and until November to certify their deployment at airports.

The law gives Mineta and Co. a unique combination of personnel flexibilities and mandates to build the agency. The TSA is exempt from civil service rules contained in Title 5 of the U.S. Code and has no limit on how many people it can hire. But until November 2004, when airports can petition the TSA to use contract screeners, the agency can use only federal employees as baggage screeners at all but five airports. The curb on contractors runs counter to the last 40 years of agency design, which has generally held that new agencies should be largely reliant on the private sector.

"This is privatization-in-reverse-federalization of a function formerly in private hands," says Donald Kettl, a public administration scholar at the University of Wisconsin. "This isn't something that has happened in recent memory, if ever. It's contrary to the organizational instinct of the last century."

It also forces Mineta to launch a massive federal hiring campaign he sought to avoid. As the Bush administration's point man for the aviation security negotiations, Mineta lobbied for a House bill that would have allowed the TSA to use contractors as screeners under federal supervision. When asked whether his task would be easier if the TSA could use contract screeners, Mineta demurs. "I'm not going to fight that battle now," he says of the dispute that tied up Congress for weeks. "I've got to deal with the legislation. That's behind us now."

What's ahead for the TSA is a series of management tests that would make any executive quiver. How will the agency redesign screening jobs to prevent the 100 percent annual turnover that was common when they were in the private sector? Or recruit, hire and train 30,000 employees in nine months?

But Mineta minces no words when discussing why the agency must not fail. "Since the 11th of September, the confidence level in the economy, confidence in air travel. . . I mean these things are all in the tank. The question is, how do we rebuild them?"

Mission Control

First and foremost, the TSA will be a front-line service agency that interacts with tens of thousands of travelers at airport security checkpoints every day. It also will include federal air marshals-who serve as a covert anti-hijacking force on airliners-because these officers move from the Federal Aviation Administration to the TSA under the new law. Finally, the agency will have significant intelligence gathering and disaster response duties, because the TSA will be responsible for coordinating the transportation system during national emergencies.

At its core, the TSA is a law enforcement organization, but one that includes customer service as part of its mission. Mineta's search for an official with a strong law enforcement background to head the agency led to Magaw, a former head of the Secret Service who rebuilt the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms following its ill-fated encounter with the Branch Davidian sect in 1993. But Magaw cannot ignore the service aspect of the job as he assembles the new agency, Mineta stresses. "We have a customer service orientation that we have to deal with as well as safety and security," he says. "The way to build confidence in the [aviation] system is to be able to move goods and people safely. And at the same time, people want to make sure they won't have to wait two hours to get something done."

From the first days of the aviation security debate, the Bush administration favored moving security duties out of the FAA and into a new agency in Transportation that would handle security for all modes of transportation. The FAA supported the move, even though it knew it would lose some employees to the TSA, according to administrator Jane Garvey. "I would not characterize [our position] as reluctance at all," she says. "We were strongly advocating for an agency that had a single focus of security."

The TSA's security mission is clear: The agency has direct operational control over passenger and baggage screening. The aviation law also makes the TSA the lead agency for security at ports and on the nation's railroads, highways, and public transit systems. But don't look for TSA agents at rail stations. The agency will not push to assume day-to-day security duties for other modes, because it would mean taking jurisdiction from state and local governments and industry, according to Mineta. "Our responsibility in other areas is not as deep as it is in aviation," he says.

First Steps

DOT began planning for the new agency in late October, when Deputy Secretary Jackson tapped Hawley to outline a potential management structure for TSA. Hawley, who, like Jackson, served at DOT during the first Bush administration, is now the coordinator of a core team heading up the management effort. He is slated to stay at DOT for six to nine months to set up the TSA before returning to his job as executive vice president of Arzoon, a shipping logistics firm based in San Carlos, Calif.

Under the direction of the core team, eight "Go Teams" are tackling management challenges, such as finding training sites for baggage screeners, accelerating background checks, and deploying bomb-screening machines. A Go Team for the air marshal program, for instance, is trying to speed up officer training, which has been taking 14 weeks for candidates without law enforcement backgrounds, according to Mineta. The team is working with the Justice and Treasury Departments and private firms to come up with a new training course. "The normal process. . . is not going to yield the. . . quantity of people in the time that we need them," says a DOT official. Go Teams are staffed by a mix of employees from DOT, other agencies, and the private sector.

Other teams are hashing out the nuts-and-bolt issues of setting up the TSA, including determining how much office space the agency will need and how its administrative operations should work. And process teams are creating methods for securing passengers, cargo, infrastructure and operators across different transportation modes. For airline passengers, this means mapping out how to protect travelers at each step in the flight process. "What happens at the reservation point? What happens at the point when you check in your bags? The threat . . . can be posed by what the President calls the evil ones at each of these points along the way," says the DOT official. The TSA will use these processes to decide what equipment to buy and how to deploy staff at airports.

This corporate-style structure is producing performance standards for the screening program. Mineta has said that no passenger should wait more than 10 minutes at a screening point and that the TSA will deploy thousands more air marshals by summer, goals that DOT is tying to individual employees. This is in line with the performance management approach endorsed by the aviation law, which authorized bonuses for high-performing managers and requires the TSA to set performance goals for employees and the general organization.

Hiring Challenge

By the time the TSA starts taking applications for screener positions in January, the agency will have had about a month and a half to prepare to hire thousands of federal employees. Then it will have to start training the new workers to be efficient, effective screeners. That may seem like a daunting task, but it's not without precedent.

On Aug. 5, 1981, President Reagan fired thousands of air traffic controllers who had gone on strike two days earlier. That left the FAA virtually no time to put in place a system to hire and train a new set of controllers. "No one that I know expected 11,600 controllers to be fired in one day," remembers Gene Weithoner, a former associate administrator for administration at the FAA who led the effort to hire new controllers 20 years ago. To train the new employees, the agency quickly arranged with the University of Oklahoma to supplement its teaching staff at the FAA Academy in Oklahoma City, which went to 24-hour-a-day operations for more than a year.

Training requirements for air traffic controllers and baggage screeners are vastly different-it takes a year or two to train a controller, while screeners need only 40 hours of classroom training and 60 hours on the job under the aviation law. But the hiring challenge now facing Transportation officials may be more difficult than the FAA's challenge in 1981, says Weithoner, because DOT must design the screening job while building an agency from scratch.

Because the aviation law requires a federal law enforcement officer to be stationed at each screening point, the TSA must actually hire for three different jobs: baggage screeners, law enforcement officers and air marshals. Screeners will be recruited regionally and trained at sites with the capacity to handle large numbers of people, such as closed military bases, according to Mineta. The TSA plans to train air marshals and law enforcement officers at separate sites, which could include the FAA's technical center in Atlantic City, N.J., and federal law enforcement training centers in Glynco, Ga., and Artesia, N.M. Since DOT has only a handful of employees in its human resources office at the department level, the TSA will rely on personnel officers from the FAA and other agencies.

The front-line baggage screening job can be tedious, so TSA plans to train the screeners it hires to perform a variety of tasks in addition to monitoring carry-on luggage, including performing security checks on airplanes and inspecting checked baggage, a DOT official says. Likewise, if air marshals and law enforcement officers are cross-trained, they could occasionally swap duties, the official adds. Air marshals need the variety, says Weithoner, who notes the FAA has given them office work in the past to help break the monotony of their jobs. "They've got to do something to break that job up, because it's going to be boring," he says.

Transportation has picked U.S. Investigations Services Inc. (USIS) to perform background investigations for screeners, according to Richard Ferris, associate director for investigations at the Office of Personnel Management, who chairs the TSA Go Team for background checks. USIS, an employee-owned private firm that was formerly part of OPM, is also conducting background checks on prospective air marshals, who need a higher level of clearance than screeners. USIS will aim to finish investigations on screeners within 75 days, Ferris says, although screeners can start training after a day if they pass a preliminary background check. Most of the investigation process is automated, so USIS will have no trouble with the volume of checks it has to do.

DOT is planning to offer federal screeners better pay and benefits than those who worked for private security firms, where screening was often a minimum wage job. OPM is helping Transportation devise a compensation package, a system for grading job applicants and a labor relations strategy, according to Steve Cohen, senior adviser to OPM Director Kay Coles James. Since the TSA is exempt from Title 5, which sets down the basic rules for the federal workforce, Transportation officials have the authority to set pay and benefit levels for screeners and to decide whether they can join unions. Most of these decisions will be made by early January, when the TSA will begin taking screener applications.

Highways, Rails and Seas

While the TSA will take a hands-on approach to managing the airport security workforce, it will operate differently in monitoring railroads, highways and public transit systems. The agency will coordinate the efforts of private firms, state and local governments, and federal agencies that handle security for these modes, much as DOT agencies have done since the Sept. 11 attacks, says Mineta. Transportation agencies will yield some portion of their security duties to the TSA, according to a top Transportation official. "We are going to bring together some parts of the agencies at the department that have had disparate responsibilities for security into this consolidated agency," the official says. The TSA plans to begin coordinating security for all modes by June 2002, said Jennifer Dorn, administrator of the Federal Transit Administration, at a Dec. 13 Senate Governmental Affairs Committee hearing.

Other officials say DOT will consider transferring some field employees at agencies such as the Federal Railroad Administration and the Federal Highway Administration to the TSA. This would create two sets of field agents in the department: one at the TSA devoted to security, and another at existing agencies for handling safety inspections of trucks, trains and boats. Some department veterans argue it would make more sense to leave the safety employees in their home agencies and train them to handle security, too.

"[DOT agencies] have existing field forces dedicated to safety. While they need some augmentation, security duties are a natural fit [for these employees]," says Mortimer Downey, deputy transportation secretary for the Clinton administration and now principal consultant with pbConsult Inc. of New York City, a wing of the construction firm Parsons-Brinkerhoff. Downey would keep the primary responsibility for security with existing DOT agencies under the direction of the TSA.

Transportation's recent history with dividing safety chores on the nation's roads is cause for concern. In 1999, Congress carved the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) out of the Federal Highway Administration to oversee safety for trucks and buses, long a weak spot within FHA. The highway administration is still responsible for overall safety on the roads, while a third agency, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) handles auto safety. The relationship between the three is no testament to interagency cooperation, according to a senior Transportation official.

"It could not be more inefficient, because the [FHA] people building and operating the highways have little input into safety," says the official. "NHTSA and FMCSA are always looking over their shoulders."

Even with a clear mission, the TSA's relationship with other Transportation agencies will be difficult to sort out. The aviation law divides federal responsibility for aviation, putting the TSA in charge of security while leaving airline safety and operations with the Federal Aviation Administration. Garvey envisions creating formal agreements between the two agencies to make sure they communicate. On the maritime front, the Coast Guard will retain the lead role for port security and keep virtually all of its personnel, who carry out missions besides security, says Adm. James Loy, commandant of the Coast Guard. But sea marshals, positions created after Sept. 11, who board and inspect ships before they enter port, could be candidates for moving to the new agency, Loy told the House Subcommittee on the Coast Guard and Maritime Transportation at a Dec. 6 hearing. "There may be some day when sea marshals don't have to be in Coast Guard uniforms," he said.

Congress may also weigh-in on the TSA-Coast Guard relationship. Senators Ernest Hollings, D-S.C., and John McCain, R-Ariz., who led the fight to federalize airport security, are now pushing maritime legislation that would, among other things, create maritime security teams at DOT to respond to terrorist threats against U.S. ports. The bill envisions locating such personnel in the Coast Guard, but lawmakers could reconsider whether they belong at the TSA, says Tandy Barrett, an aide to Sen. Bob Graham, D-Fla.

If nothing more, the TSA undoubtedly will shoulder much of the burden for coordinating existing maritime security efforts, which itself is a Herculean chore. Sixty federal agencies have a role in inspecting imports, but the lead agency, the Customs Service, has less than 100 machines to scan cargo at the nation's 361 ports. Just 2 percent of ship-borne containers are ever inspected.

Amtrak and commercial freight lines have taken the lead on rail security, where the TSA's potential role is less clear. The agency also needs an approach for securing public transit, where the federal responsibility has traditionally been minimal. "There's no federal safety presence to build on [in transit] even though there is a clear vulnerability," says Downey.

Management Models

DOT officials point to the Coast Guard as a model for the can-do spirit they hope to create at the TSA. But the FAA is likely to have the biggest influence on the new agency.

The first employees of the TSA are the 1,300 workers at the FAA's Civil Aviation Security Office, which was transferred to the new agency by the aviation law. These are the field agents and investigators who kept watch on private companies that handled airport security in the pre-Sept. 11 world, with varying levels of success. While it is unclear whether they will have the same role under the TSA, one West Coast civil aviation employee looks forward to a security system in which the airlines play no role. Under the private-run system, airlines were often able to negotiate reductions in fines levied by the FAA for infractions by security contractors, says the agent, who asked not to be identified. Garvey says FAA's experience with airport security illustrates the need for the TSA to have direct control of the system.

Besides inheriting the FAA's mission and some employees, the aviation law also suggests that the TSA model its personnel and procurement systems after the FAA, which was exempted from most civil service rules in 1995 and 1996. FAA redesigned both systems and became faster at making hires and awarding contracts. But the effort hasn't been an unblemished success.

In the contracting area, a move to bring engineers and other program staff into the acquisition process has foundered because the FAA's various offices are still wary of working together, according to a 2000 report by the DOT inspector general. On the personnel side, FAA's pay decisions occasionally have hurt morale. In 1998, Garvey implemented a new pay system for supervisors at field facilities in the air traffic control system, but not at regional offices or headquarters. The result was a structure that gave supervisors different pay for similar work, a June inspector general report found.

The TSA may have an easier time implementing reforms like pay banding because as a new agency, it will have little cultural resistance to overcome. As Mineta and his team build a culture for the TSA, however, the key will be staying focused on their original mission, experts say.

"From a straight mission standpoint," Downey says, "it's now essential to have somebody who's fully accountable for security and nothing else."

-George Cahlink contributed to this article.