The Transportation Security Administration has a new strategy for improving its woeful performance in catching airport security threats — and it will likely mean longer lines and more government bucks.

A month after the TSA was embarrassed by its almost-total failure in a covert security audit, Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson has ordered the agency to pursue an improvement plan that will require more hand-wanding of passengers, more use of bomb-sniffing dogs and more random testing of luggage and travelers for traces of explosives. It will also consider reducing travelers’ chances of being sent through the expedited PreCheck lines at airports.


Increased reliance on PreCheck is just one strategy TSA has used to become slimmer and swifter in the past few years, drawing buckets of praise from a Congress that’s otherwise largely criticized the agency. It has also relied more on technology like body-scanners and analyses of specific travelers’ risks while leaning less on labor-intensive methods like pat-downs, allowing the TSA to save manpower costs and shrink its workforce.

But then came the leak of a still-classified inspector general report in June, which found that TSA agents had failed to find fake explosives and weapons 67 out of 70 times during covert testing — and that the screening technology often just doesn’t work. The 96-percent failure rate drew sharp rebukes from Capitol Hill, led to the immediate ouster of then-acting Administrator Melvin Carraway and caused much shuttle diplomacy between lawmakers and the agency’s top brass.

Now the response threatens to gum up airport checkpoints.

“In light of the 96 percent failure, they’re probably going to slow things down,” House Homeland Security Chairman Mike McCaul (R-Texas) acknowledged in an interview. He added that “the technology failure was a big part of the problem” and that the DHS inspector general pointed to the agency’s policy of funneling travelers from regular security lines through the less-intensive PreCheck queues as one of the “big weaknesses.”

Kevin Mitchell, chairman of the Business Travel Coalition, agreed that air passengers will probably feel the impact of the latest changes. “Things are going to slow down, and consumers are going to get increasingly frustrated,” he said.

Johnson said this month that he had ordered TSA to start doing more manual screening, such as using handheld metal detectors and doing more random tests for trace explosives, and to take a second look at the agency’s policy of selectively diverting non-vetted travelers into the PreCheck lanes.

“Some of those things he’s talking about are going to slow the lines down,” the House Homeland Security Committee’s ranking Democrat, Rep. Bennie Thompson of Mississippi, told POLITICO. “So the question is: What’s this going to do to throughput?”

While Thompson says he supports adding more manual screening and being more selective about which travelers get expedited treatment, he’s concerned about how this shift reflects on all the work the agency has done to move away from slower procedures.

“If walking back allows us to identify more vulnerabilities, then that’s good. But what does that say for all the tens of millions of dollars that we’ve spent on technology that was supposed to move us forward?” Thompson said. “It’s clear that our technology that’s being deployed — either because of the machines or the operators — failed us.”

Johnson also said this month that he has directed the TSA to rethink performance standards for the screening equipment implicated in the inspector general’s report. He noted that the CEO of the company that manufactures the machines has said he will help make the technology more effective.

Although Johnson didn’t directly pin the blame on the scanning machines, McCaul and Rep. Kathleen Rice (D-N.Y.) say the IG’s report noted that the body imaging technology has an unacceptable failure rate and that the manufacturer guarantees threat detection accuracy at well under 100 percent.

Because the report is still classified, the agency hasn’t disclosed exactly which types of equipment were involved or how they failed. But McCaul and Rice identified them as the millimeter-wave body scanners, made by L-3 Communications Corp., that force passengers to pose inside a booth with their arms raised. The machines are supposed to find both “metallic and nonmetallic” objects hidden under passengers’ clothing, including guns and explosives, and “can detect a wide range of threats to transportation security in a matter of seconds,” TSA boasts on its website.

McCaul said his panel is looking into how much of the failure rate can be attributed to technology issues versus human error. He plans a hearing on the issue this month with testimony from new TSA Administrator Peter Neffenger, who assumed his post July 6 after being confirmed by the Senate.

The current plan, McCaul said, is for DHS to update the imaging machines’ software. “Jeh Johnson’s a smart guy,” the chairman said. “He and I talk a lot. And he knows that updating that software is probably going to reduce the failure rate.”

What’s less clear is how the department is going to handle vulnerabilities in its PreCheck program, which allows travelers to pass through security checkpoints with their shoes and belts on, and without removing laptops and liquids from bags.

The main problem, many lawmakers say, is TSA’s “managed inclusion” policy of giving that special treatment to travelers who haven’t gone through the program’s vetting process. To enroll in PreCheck, passengers must provide fingerprints, undergo a background check and pay an $85 fee.

One purpose of steering non-enrolled passengers into the PreCheck lanes has been to give travelers a taste of what life could be like if they signed up for the expedited screening program, said David Inserra, a homeland security policy analyst at the Heritage Foundation. It also makes more efficient use of TSA’s screeners when the speedier lines are drastically shorter than the regular queues.

“You’ve got these people working these lines, and sometimes they’re going to be doing nothing, or we can use them for something,” Inserra said. “But that’s not really a good security mindset. That’s really an efficiency mindset.”

Patricia Rojas Ungár, vice president of government relations at the U.S. Travel Association, says the “managed inclusion” program “really has run its course.” Now, she said, it’s important for TSA “to double down in getting people enrolled in the actual program.”

The agency’s standard security policies were born of credible threats and real terrorism plots, such as Richard Reid’s attempt to detonate explosives packed in his shoes on a flight from Paris to Miami just three months after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

Lawmakers first started to challenge the “managed inclusion” policy after learning this spring that TSA screeners had allowed a known former domestic terrorist through a PreCheck line last year. And the issue has only gotten more attention since the IG’s report was leaked.

“The inspector general highlighted that one of the big weaknesses was managed inclusion,” said McCaul, whose committee approved a bill last month that would bar the agency from allowing most non-vetted travelers into PreCheck lines. “Do we want to be kicking in people who may be a threat? I don’t know. Obviously we’re not going to target the grandmother and the baby. … It has to be risk-based, but with security in mind, because the terrorists — unfortunately — they still want to blow up airplanes.”

In his 10-point plan for the TSA, Johnson has also directed the agency to reassess whether it should allow non-vetted travelers into PreCheck. But Thompson, who wrote the bill that would prohibit the policy, says there’s no doubt the practice is weakening security and should already be changed.

“If you know a system you have deployed creates a vulnerability, you fix it,” Thompson said. “If throughput is one of the objectives, it should not be the sole objective.”

Homeland Security officials often reiterate that individual aspects of physical security screening, or even the whole checkpoint process, are only layers of a vast aviation security system that includes behavior detection officers, bomb-sniffing canine teams, federal air marshals and reinforced cockpit doors. And it’s the strength of those layers in combination that will ultimately thwart terrorist attacks, says Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Chairman Ron Johnson (R-Wis.).

The Senate chairman said he views the new steps the TSA is taking as “kind of Band-Aids” to try to provide some interim security improvements while Congress and the department consider bigger changes, such as expanding the role of air marshals to give them more law enforcement and investigative power.

“We’re obviously far from 100 percent secure. I mean, far from 100 percent secure. So we really need to look at a layered approach, think outside the box,” he told POLITICO. “There’s so many different facets of this problem that we need to look at, but I think security’s got to be multi-layered — some visible, some invisible.”