Shortage of Transportation Security Inspectors?

The Government Accountability Office released a presentation to Congress on Friday on the state of the Transportation Security Inspector workforce, the people who ensure security compliance at airports, foreign and domestic air carriers, and flight schools. The responsibilities of these workers have grown since they were transferred from the Department of Transportation to Homeland Security, but the number of workers has fluctuated, the GAO said. And the report noted that it was difficult to determine if there were enough workers to do the job because, as GAO wrote:

TSA was unable to provide information on the size of the TSI workforce prior to fiscal year 2005.

• TSA does not have a mechanism for tracking time TSIs spend on nonprogram activities. TSIs are to record the amount of time spent on duties related to conducting inspections, investigations, other

regulated and operational activities, and outreach in TSA’s regulatory reporting system. However, TSA does not have an activity-based time and attendance system that would allow officials to track time spent on other activities.

• TSA was unable to provide data prior to fiscal year 2008 reflecting TSI inspections completed relative to TSA inspection requirements.

It's tough to keep a group of workers on the job while moving them from one agency to another and changing their job functions. It's hard to do all three of those things while developing new performance metrics. But it's precisely because government rearrangements are possible, because the work that TSIs do is critical and requires continuity, because their job is evolving, that it's important to have metrics established in the first place.

Maybe Transportation didn't have established mechanisms for Homeland Security to build off of. Maybe adding flight schools to TSIs purview took precedence over developing metrics where none existed before. And I don't want to say that developing these workforce measurements should have taken precedence over getting security up and running. But this report is an argument for having strong human resources and workforce offices in agencies, so there's good data to evaluate the workforce under your supervision, and to hand off to a new department should part of the workforce get handed over.