Gathering Evidence for TSA Effectiveness

Over at AOL News, Sharon Weinberger has an interesting find: the Transportation Security Administration has brought in the American Institutes for Research to study whether or not the Behavior Detection Officer program works. Behavior Detection Officers work sort of like detectives: they're TSA officers trained to look for travelers who are behaving in ways that indicate they might be threats. While the program gets criticized, it's also a major effort to turn TSA's workforce into a highly professionalized law enforcement corps. That said, it's very smart for TSA to open up the program to an outside research group.

It might seem unrelated, but one of the major criticisms of--and challenges to reestablishing--the labor management partnership councils that existed during the Clinton administration, was that there weren't multiple studies clearly demonstrating their benefits, or lack thereof. Advocates for rebuilding the councils had to rely on one study about cost savings at Customs and Border Protection, and anecdotal evidence. That failure is a useful model for any program that agencies want to be able to expand or defend. You have to muster evidence that your programs work, and make sure that evidence is credible, objective, and directly responsive to policymakers' concerns. And you can't muster that after a program has shut down: you've got to start studying programs as soon as you stand them up.