WASHINGTON, D.C. — Transportation Secretary Norman Y. Mineta today will outline what airlines must do to meet Friday’s deadline to begin screening all baggage, but that’s just a first step in the mammoth effort to build a new airport security system for the nation, the Washington Post reports.
Behind the scenes, “go-teams” of experts and consultants working to create the new Transportation Security Administration have already moved on to dozens of other topics. How do you evaluate a baggage screener? How do you spot a terrorist?
Their task is unique and daunting: to build the biggest new government agency since World War II while keeping millions of traveling Americans safe. They will have to hire 28,000 baggage screeners and thousands more air marshals, airport law enforcement officers and security managers.
Experts are evaluating technology for passenger identification systems and sizing up equipment that the government will inherit when it takes over security from airlines and contractors. They have to figure out how to get 2,000 nine-ton bomb scanners into all airports by the end of the year and how to keep travelers moving efficiently.
All the while, the groups meet with officials from airlines, airports, law enforcement agencies and other special interests in an effort to balance many competing needs.
At first there were eight teams; now there are 50, with at least 50 more planned. To staff them, the Bush administration has assembled all-stars from government and industry — bureaucrats from various agencies, executives on loan from private corporations, consultants from big-league management firms.
“I honestly have been working in the office until usually 1 o’clock in the morning,” said Darryl Moody, on assignment from KPMG Consulting in the cluttered airport-security “war room” at the Transportation Department. “My laptop is sitting on the corner of a desk, I have no chair, I’ve been on my feet running around all day. But that’s part of the fun of this job. . . . It’s unbelievable.”
Yet for all the excitement among the leather-briefcase set, the people who are still carrying out airport security — wage-earning bag screeners at private security companies — say they operate under tremendous pressure and uncertainty. And travelers say interim security measures continue to seem inconsistent from airport to airport.
One recent evening, about two dozen experts and consultants gathered in the “war room” on the 10th floor of the Transportation Department building. The walls were papered with schedules and deadline reminders. New team members join daily, so the group meets every evening to get progress reports and make assignments.
The informal leader of the sessions is Kip Hawley, a California software executive on temporary assignment. “Can we start off with the screener-training go-team?” Hawley said, kicking off more than two hours of briefings and updates.
Deadlines were a constant theme. At one point, Hawley insisted that the teams finish studying a topic seven days before any deadline. One consultant argued that his team hadn’t planned on moving that fast, but Hawley wouldn’t hear of it.
“There’s no backing off,” he snapped.
Several of the teams were racing to get ready for Friday’s deadline, including preparing information for Mineta’s speech today at a conference in the District.
In it, Mineta will explain that airlines must begin screening all bags that go onto airplanes by using some combination of hand searches, bomb-sniffing dogs, high-tech scanners or matching checked bags to passengers who get on a flight. The bag-matching component will be performed only on originating flights; bags transferred to connecting flights will not be matched again.
Airlines resisted some of those steps, especially bag matching, arguing that there will be flight delays and longer lines for passengers. But the government insisted.
Few of the government airport-security team members are security experts. Most are whizzes at planning and organizing who can adapt their skills to the task at hand. Moody, for example, specializes in management processes and is heading a team studying how to measure the performance of screeners and equipment.
Pam Pearson, a human-resources expert from the National Transportation Safety Board, is helping set up personnel policies.
The work ranges from the concrete — coming up with a job description for law enforcement officers so the Transportation Security Administration can begin recruiting — to the conceptual, such as developing an analytical model to predict the payroll and staffing impact of various policy decisions.
John Magaw, the undersecretary for transportation security who started work only last week, gets briefings from the group, as does Mineta and his deputy, Michael P. Jackson. The group is working to design the security agency’s organization, which they hope to make a flat management structure with few people in Washington and powerful security directors at individual airports.
Topics that seem simple on the surface often prove unexpectedly complicated. For example, the agency hopes to establish a single badge system for workers at airports around the country to get access to secure areas. A consultant investigating current practices found that there are roughly 100 separate credential systems in use at different airports.
The thought of unifying those into one common approach “is pretty awesome,” said the consultant, whose company would not allow him to be identified. He leads a team studying the issue, with a report due in 30 to 45 days on how to keep track of flight crews and ramp workers by putting fingerprints, iris scans or other forms of electronic identification on cards containing computer chips.
Some of the consultants and experts come from other parts of the country and are living in hotels, and many do not know one another yet. They charged through the evening meeting with the urgency of business travelers late for a flight, with acronyms and bureaucratic shorthand slinging furiously — Mineta was “S-One” and Jackson was “S-Two.” A pile of cookies and peanuts on a table in the back went untouched.
Another deadline looming Friday involves outlining an expanded training system for baggage screeners. Justin Oberman, from the Federal Railroad Administration, is heading a team on screener training and briefed the group about a workshop with security experts held last week.
An important theme that came out of the workshop, Oberman said, is that screeners need to understand they will be part of a “system of systems.” When a security alarm goes off, he said, a screener will be able to turn to a highly trained supervisor, who can get help from an armed law enforcement agent, who, in turn, can summon theairport security director.
The training requirement for screeners is being raised to 40 hours in the classroom from 12, and 60 hours on the job from 40. “The FAA made a really good start on the classroom portion of the training,” Oberman said, “but there’s some work to be done there.
. . .
And we need to spend some time on the on-the-job piece.”
There have been discussions about how to incorporate Internet-based training and about how to leverage various government training facilities around the country, Oberman said.
“Have you talked about training at the airport where they’re going to be working?” Hawley asked.
Oberman said the team is exploring that concept, which would allow new screeners to train in their actual work environment during off-peak airport hours.
Then Steve McHale, a former Treasury Department official, raised a topic that many experts say is key to creating better security screeners. “Beyond technology, is there a part of this that goes into observation and just intuitiveness?” he said, wondering if screeners will be trained to recognize potential troublemakers from subtle behavioral signs.
“We need to do a little more on that,” Oberman said. “We don’t do it much now. . . . The other thing is the importance of recurrent training, throughout their whole career, and performance-based training.”
He said he and another team member were going to work on a general outline of training intentions, and suggested eventually bringing in existing screeners for comments and ideas.
The next major deadline is Feb. 17, when the government will take over the contracts that airlines have with private security companies for bag-screening services. Then, in November, comes the big step: The agency will replace the private companies with a civil-service work force.
Hawley and others racing to create the Transportation Security Administration say they realize that things may seem chaotic at the moment, but that they’re working almost round the clock to get changes in place.
When a consultant mentioned at the meeting that his team was going to spend a “full day” at Dulles Airport, from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m., Hawley interrupted with a wry smile: “That’s half a day.”