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Airport Screeners Do Poorly, Panel Told

By Sara Kehaulani Goo
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, April 23, 2004; Page A08

Airport security screeners employed either by the federal government or private companies do not detect weapons as they should, a government investigator told a House panel yesterday.

Department of Homeland Security Inspector General Clark Kent Ervin said the two groups "performed about the same, which is to say, equally poorly."

Ervin's testimony was part of two government reports discussed before the House Transportation and Infrastructure's aviation subcommittee yesterday that described the strikingly similar performance between federal security screeners and those working for private companies in a test program at five airports.

A second report, conducted by consulting firm BearingPoint, found that at one of the test airports, Kansas City, private security screeners performed better than their federal counterparts. The study concluded that overall "there is no evidence that any of the five privately screened airports performed below the average level of the federal airports."

Although the number of weapons screeners detected was not made public, a member of Congress familiar with the results said the BearingPoint study showed that screener performance had not improved since the 2001 terrorist attacks.

"The failure rates are comparable from 1987 to today," said Rep. Peter A. DeFazio (D-Ore.). He said he introduced legislation to improve aviation security in 1987 after learning about poor screener performance at that time. That year, screeners failed to detect 20 percent of prohibited items that undercover agents tried to sneak through checkpoints, according to a General Accounting Office report.

House members were so stunned by the reports that they called for a meeting with top Homeland Security officials within two weeks. "We have a system that isn't working," said Rep. John L. Mica (R-Fla.), chairman of the aviation subcommittee. "We need to sit down and see how we can develop a more effective system. This is a very serious situation."

David M. Stone, the acting head of the Transportation Security Administration, agreed to the meeting but said he was encouraged by recent gains in screener performance, citing a 70 percent improvement in the past 18 months. He also said screener testing today is much more rigorous than it had been. "Testing in the '90s was in no way even comparable to what we do," Stone said.

Ervin said he had never before heard of the results indicating a 70 percent performance improvement.

Yesterday's hearing was held to discuss a forthcoming "opt out" program this November, in which more U.S. airports will be eligible to use private screeners. Unlike the security system in place before the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, the private security firms employing the screeners work directly for the TSA, not the airlines.

The TSA, which was created after the attacks and employs the airport screeners, did not dispute the performance findings yesterday and said that the results would be used to develop the "opt out" program.

Researcher Margaret Smith contributed to this report.

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