Terrorized into absurdity: the creation of the transportation security administration.

• Author: Roots, Roger

"Emergencies" often cry out for drastic and expensive changes in public policy that later, on reflection, seem ill-conceived. Government responses to the Great Depression, for example, drastically altered the U.S. system of limited government and took an immense toll on American liberty and private-property rights--a toll that has never been repaid (Roots 2000). Declaration of a national emergency in 1933 facilitated the creation of a number of colossal government programs that survived long after the Depression had ended, even if they had done nothing to end the Depression (Roots 2000, 267 n. 44). A similar climate of hysteria regarding alleged runaway drug use in the late 1980s prompted government officials to fill U.S. prisons with casualties of the war on drugs, but the laws passed in response to that hysteria produced less-than-satisfactory advances against actual drug use (Goode and Ben-Yehuda 1994, 205-23).

Consistent with this pattern, U.S. policymakers responded to the terrorist suicide hijackings of September 11, 2001, with "the biggest expansion in federal powers and the most free-handed new spending of federal dollars in decades" (Page 2001, A4). Congress and the Bush administration expanded the powers of federal law enforcement to detect and arrest terrorists, increased U.S. investments in counterterrorist intelligence, placed thousands of National Guard troops at airports, and expanded the use of armed air marshals on domestic flights. By far the most ambitious reform, however, was the creation of a huge new federal agency, the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), to perform security screening at U.S. commercial airports.

The airlines previously operated the screening system under Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) regulation. The FAA required each airline to screen passengers at each gate at which passengers boarded its planes. In practice, most airlines contracted with private security firms such as Argenbright Security, International Total Services, and Globe Aviation Services. In some cases, airlines entered into joint agreements for the hiring of security firms. The airline with the most flights on an airport concourse typically was responsible for managing the security screening on that concourse (McCartney, Lunsford, and Armstrong 2001). Bidding for screening contracts produced strong incentives among security firms to maintain low labor costs. The FAA dictated overall security standards and occasionally tested gate security by means of mock attempts to smuggle weapons onto airliners.

Contrary to many news reports immediately after the September 11 attacks, the U.S. system of screening air passengers was very similar to the systems used in most European countries. Indeed, some of the same security firms contracted to perform screening services on both continents (McCartney, Lunsford, and Armstrong 2001). The only major difference between the European and U.S. systems was that the private security firms contracted with the airports in Europe but with the airlines themselves in the United States.

The private-contractor system of passenger screening had many critics (Drew and Wald 2001; Morrison and Stoller 2001, A4). Prior to September 11, however, U.S. airport screeners were finding and confiscating approximately two thousand knives and guns from passengers each year (Drew and Wald 2001), and the U.S. airline industry had not experienced a major security incident in nearly a decade (McCartney, Lunsford, and Armstrong 2001). Contracting out screening services allowed airlines that otherwise were saddled by expensive union contracts to provide security screening at relatively low cost and thus to keep fares low (Adams 2002).

On November 16, 2001, Congress nationalized the nation's twenty-eight thousand airport screeners, creating an agency that by itself had more personnel than the Department of Labor and the Department of Housing and Urban Development combined. Soon after the TSA was launched, however, a spokesman for the Department of Transportation (DOT) estimated that the agency would need more than seventy thousand employees to screen U.S. air passengers and baggage fully (Salant 2002). As of this writing, Congress has approved funding for at least forty-five thousand screeners, and TSA officials insist they need at least twenty thousand more. If Congress grants funding for the additional personnel, the TSA will rival or surpass the personnel strength of the Social Security Administration (some sixty-five thousand) and will dwarf the personnel of the legislative and judicial branches of the federal government combined. In any event, the TSA is the largest new federal agency Congress has created since the 1930s.

The expense of the government screening operation was estimated initially at $1.8 billion annually but later increased by $4.4 billion after the TSA had been created (DeLollis 2002). By comparison, the airlines paid approximately $660 million to screening firms in 2000 (DeLollis 2002). The explosion in funding for the TSA has enticed hundreds of federal workers to leave other agencies, such as the Border Patrol and the Secret Service, to take advantage of the TSA's $36,900 to $83,900 annual pay scale (Johnson 2002).

The Group Dynamics of Crisis Policy Making

Creation of the TSA occurred in an environment of rare bipartisanship, a climate uniquely hostile to rational policymaking. Like the national emergency declared in 1933, the Aviation and Transportation Security Act (1) for the most part was handled outside normal committee processes. Scholars of group dynamics have known for a long time that in circumstances of extreme crisis "group contagion occasionally gives rise to collective panic, violent acts of scapegoating, and other forms of what could be called group madness" (Janis 1982, 3). Crisis policymaking can take on moblike characteristics typified by mindless conformity and collective misjudgment of risks (3).

Irving Janis (1982, 9-10) has identified a number of defects in decision making that commonly occur at times of such strong group solidarity. Discussions are limited to a few alternative courses of action and fail to mention nonobvious drawbacks (such as the more than fourfold increase in expense that will accompany Congress's chosen solution) (DeLollis 2002). Policymakers under such duress spend little time deliberating about how the chosen policy might be hindered by "bureaucratic inertia, sabotaged by political opponents, or temporarily derailed by the common accidents that happen to the best of well-laid plans" (such as future difficulties with unions and an inability to discipline employees effectively because of civil service laws) (10). In practice, of course, workers performing boring jobs often grow complacent no matter how well trained or well paid they may be, and neither government nor private workers can give absolute guarantees (for example, that no weapon ever will get through)--even prison wardens are unable to make such guarantees, notwithstanding their conducting full-body (and occasionally even body-cavity) searches.

"Antiterrorism" as a Moral Panic

Passage of the Aviation and Transportation Security Act exemplified policymaking at its worst: frenzied, panicked, and overreactionary. Like floodplain residents who purchase flood insurance only in the immediate aftermath of a flood but let their policies lapse as their memories fade, Congress succumbed to what some psychologists call the "availability heuristic" (Sunstein 2002a, 1126). This leads people, for example, to fear shark attacks, tornadoes, and homicide in response to news reports but to underestimate drastically the risk of death from asthma, diabetes, and emphysema (1119, 1127).

The term moral panic, coined by sociologist Stanley Cohen in 1972, also might be used to describe what happened to Congress in November 2001. A moral panic is the response to a "condition, episode, person or group of persons" that society defines as a threat to societal values and interests (Goode and Ben-Yehuda 1994, 24). Moral panics, such as the various Red scares of the twentieth century and the more recent war on drugs, ride waves of national hysteria as society mobilizes vast resources against the targeted threats (Cohen 1972, 9). A moral panic is "predicated on an exaggerated fear, `taking alarm without due cause,' or, at least, taking more alarm at a supposed threat than is warranted by a sober assessment of the evidence" (Goode and Ben-Yehuda 1994, 111; also, with specific regard to terrorism, see Congleton 2002, 56-66).

The group dynamic generated from such moments of social unity often yields startlingly extreme results. Policymakers tend to reject even the "mean" of their individual opinions and to adopt the most extreme position available to them--a tendency that probably lay behind the deeds of the September 11 terrorists themselves: "shared identity helps fuel movement toward extremes" (Sunstein 2002b, 433).

As Americans have come to expect, the media played a major role in bringing about the federal takeover of U.S. airport security. The media stressed a government solution from the very first day of coverage of the September 11...