Fedblog FedblogFedblog
Government Executive Editor in Chief Tom Shoop, along with other editors and staff correspondents, look at the federal bureaucracy from the outside in.

Agencies In Mainstream Culture

SHARE
ARCHIVES

I just saw the trailer for She's Out of My League (linked to, rather than embedded, for some crude humor), which, as far as I know, may be the first major studio release to have a major character who is a Transportation Security Administration employee. I've got mixed feelings about that. I do think it's good for "government employee" to be a broad category of employment that people have in movies, along with other tropes like architect, lawyer, journalist, etc. On the other hand, I think it's unfortunate that giving the main character in this movie a TSA job as a way of signaling that he's kind of a schlub. If, as I think makes sense, the Department of Homeland Security wants to create an increasingly professionalized, intelligence-oriented TSA that has more in common with, say, Israeli flight security, than the privatized efforts of yore, pop culture portrayals like this aren't going to help.

 
JOIN THE DISCUSSION
More from GovExec