WHITE HOUSE tells TSA to move more than 600 workers out of airports to border duty.
Lawmakers raise issues on staffing, vulnerability reports with TSA chief
Under direction from the White House, the Transportation Security Administration plans to divert more than 600 workers from airport security to enforce immigration policies along the southern border.
Meanwhile, several airport security vulnerabilities identified in numerous reports by the inspector general and Government Accountability Office remain unresolved, lawmakers heard Tuesday at a hearing of the House Committee on Oversight and Reform.
The hearing was intended to raise questions about the security reports and why they remain unresolved, and whether they were affected by President Donald Trump’s drive to secure the southern border against illegal immigration.
Nearly 200 TSA security personnel already have been dispatched, along with 172 federal air marshals, said the committee’s chairman, Rep. Elijah Cummings, D-Md.
Cummings said an additional 294 TSA employees — from an overall workforce of 63,000 TSA personnel — were about to be dispatched to the border.
“It will have no effect on aviation security,” TSA Administrator David Pekoske told the committee. “Border security is national security. This is a crisis. I have to balance off the risk at the southern border with the need to keep airports staffed.”
Said Cummings, “Today, nearly 20 years after the terrible attacks of September 11, 2001, we are holding this hearing to examine why urgent warnings from independent auditors about security vulnerabilities at the Transportation Security Administration have been languishing for years without being resolved.”
He pointed to a report released by the Government Accountability Office two months ago that said none of the “nine security vulnerabilities identified through covert tests” since 2015 “had been formally resolved” as of September 2018.
“Unfortunately, this is part of a larger trend,” Cummings said. “TSA also has failed to address warnings from the inspector general. As of this month, 37 recommendations made by the inspector general from 12 reports on aviation security remain open and unfulfilled. Several of those are many years old.”
Top Republican Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio responded: “The chairman is asking why the administration is sending TSA personnel to the border? Because there’s a crisis.”
Jordan said that a single drug bust on the southern border seized “enough fentanyl to kill 57 million Americans.”
Cummings questioned the White House’s priorities.
“The administration is not helping aviation security. They are harming it,” Cummings said. “Let me put this quite starkly: On the one hand TSA has dozens of security vulnerabilities that have languished for years, but the Trump administration is asking Congress for 700 more TSA screeners to handle huge increases in air travel. Yet on the other hand, the Trump administration is taking more than 350 of these critical TSA employees, diverting them away from their primary responsibilities … and sending them to the southern border.”
Rep. Gerald Connolly, D-Va., pressed the issue.
“I guess it seems counterintuitive that we would actually use TSA people to go
“It will have no effect on aviation security. Border security is national security. This is a crisis. I have to balance off the risk at the southern border with the need to keep airports staffed.”
— David Pekoske, Transportation Safety Administration chief
down to the border,” Connolly said. “What is it that they’re going to do down there? What is the expertise they bring to protecting or securing the border? Doesn’t it take away from your mission?” Pekoske said it did not. “We have a total of 350 or 400 people assigned to southwest border operations,” he said.
This is not the first time there have been reports that undercover operatives penetrated TSA checkpoints. In 2015, then-acting TSA Administrator Melvin Carraway was reassigned after the Department of Homeland Security revealed that undercover agents were able to slip by TSA checkpoints 67 times when carrying bogus bombs or illegal weapons.
Two years later, the Homeland Security Department inspector general’s office issued a classified report that showed “identified vulnerabilities with TSA’s screener performance, screening equipment, and associated procedures.”
In Tuesday’s testimony, Pekoske said: “Overall, the TSA has taken significant efforts to address the [Government Accountability Office] and [inspector general] recommendations as quickly as possible. We have already submitted to the [Government Accountability Office] requests for closure of four of the nine recommendations” on covert testing.
“As for the remainder, I’m committed to getting them closed as quickly as possible,” he said.