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Behind Long Airport Lines, a Chain of T.S.A. Cuts, Missteps and Crises

Passengers waited to go through security screening this week at O’Hare International Airport in Chicago.Credit...Joshua Lott for The New York Times

More than 2.5 million Americans will head to airports this weekend dreading their encounters with a common adversary: people like Shekina Givens and the other employees of the troubled federal agency she works for, the Transportation Security Administration.

The T.S.A.’s uniformed screeners have become convenient scapegoats for the long lines, missed flights and general chaos that have frustrated airline travelers all month. And even if airports are relatively calm this weekend — and there is early evidence that may be the case — the agency itself has become a symbol of government inefficiency.

“To say customers are agitated is putting it mildly, and the public outcry has resonated,” Kerry Philipovitch, a senior vice president of American Airlines, told members of a congressional subcommittee on Thursday.

But Ms. Givens, a T.S.A. screener at Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport in Atlanta, says the anger is misdirected. She and her colleagues argue that the agency has been denied the resources it needs to contend with the expanding horde of passengers.

“We are doing more with less for years at this point,” she said, “and the long lines are proof of what’s been going on.”

The T.S.A.’s work force and budgets have in fact been shrinking. The agency’s rolls have declined to about 44,900 screeners today from 47,000 in 2013, even as passenger travel has increased by 15 percent. But it is also true that it has been plagued by mismanagement and other problems of its own making. An unloved stepchild of the Department of Homeland Security, the T.S.A. has suffered through continual turnover in leadership, repeated misconduct by senior managers, low staff morale and high rates of attrition among screeners.

“My opinion is that a structural change is needed,” said Thomas L. Bosco, director of aviation for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. “The current model that T.S.A. has is not sustainable.”

The Port Authority and other airport agencies are considering hiring private screeners instead of using the T.S.A. But the T.S.A. would still have oversight of the private screeners.

It is hard to find travelers who would disagree with Mr. Bosco.

“We know when people are coming and how many,” K. P. Reddy, a venture capitalist, said as he waited at Hartsfield for a flight to Scotland on Thursday. “It’s not like road traffic,” Mr. Reddy said. “It’s simple math to have enough people.”

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Peter V. Neffenger, administrator of the T.S.A. testifying before the House Homeland Security Committee this week at a hearing on the agency’s screening practices.Credit...Zach Gibson/The New York Times

Michael Boyd, president of Boyd Group International, an aviation consulting firm, has a harsher assessment. “Their job is to have enough people to make this work,” he said. “They don’t have enough people. Therefore, they failed.”

Peter V. Neffenger, the retired Coast Guard admiral who was appointed administrator of the agency last summer, admitted as much in an interview on Thursday. He described the agency he took over as “an organization in crisis,” both internally and in terms of public confidence in it.

“We really needed to step back and build the institution in a more deliberate way,” Mr. Neffenger said.

Created in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, the T.S.A. has long struggled to balance the efficient screening of passengers and their baggage with the paramount goal of ensuring safety.

There were problems from the beginning. The agency’s first administrator, John W. Magaw, was dismissed after six months on the job, after criticism that he did not work well with lawmakers or airline or airport officials. He was also criticized for long security lines resulting from the T.S.A’s screening methods.

Through a series of leadership changes, travelers continued to complain about invasive scanning machines and unfriendly screeners. John S. Pistole, a former deputy director of the F.B.I., arrived at the T.S.A. in 2010 and tried to emphasize the agency’s counterterrorism mission while seeking ways to speed the screening process.

Pre-Check, an expedited screening system conceived by Mr. Pistole, was supposed to alleviate long waits by clearing many passengers to keep their shoes and jackets on at checkpoints, and leave laptops and small containers of liquids in their carry-on bags. With those travelers ushered through exclusive Pre-Check lanes, screeners could devote more scrutiny to people the agency thought posed greater risk.

But agency officials relied on overly optimistic projections of Pre-Check’s appeal, estimating that millions of people would pay the $85 fee to enroll in it.

During a hearing, Mr. Pistole, who stepped down as the leader of the T.S.A. last year, told lawmakers that programs like it would not only save the agency money but also “result in a smaller, more capable work force focused on our counterterrorism mission.”

John Roth, the inspector general for the Department of Homeland Security, said that the subsequent cuts were a major cause of the slowdown that passengers were now experiencing.

“The reasons for the long lines we are seeing are not mysterious,” Mr. Roth said. “T.S.A. reduced its work force from previous levels because it believed that it would gain efficiencies from implementing what it called ‘intelligence-driven risk-based procedures.’ ”

With the lanes set aside for Pre-Check underused, the agency started selecting passengers who had not been preapproved to bypass the standard lines during periods of high traffic to go through the less rigorous screening. But the agency’s classified review of the program, which came to light in a recent congressional hearing, revealed significant security gaps.

An assistant security director disclosed that Sara Jane Olson, who was convicted in a plot by members of a 1970s radical group to kill Los Angeles police officers, was allowed to use an expedited inspection lane even after having been recognized.

Mr. Pistole defended his decision to reduce the work force at the T.S.A., saying the risk-based screening approach had worked. The problem, he said, was that the agency changed its detection methods.

“There are only so many options you can use to improve detection, and one is to be more thorough, which takes more time,” he said. “Thoroughness and increased passenger traffic created a perfect storm for what you see now.”

The agency also faced a number of whistle-blower lawsuits claiming that senior managers had retaliated against employees who reported security lapses and had awarded bonuses to supervisors who ignored their warnings. Other stories emerged that raised questions about the agency’s management.

One senior official, Kelly Hoggan, who was assistant administrator for the Office of Security Operations, received $90,000 in bonuses over a 13-month period, even though a leaked report from the Department of Homeland Security showed that auditors were able to get fake weapons and explosives past security screeners 95 percent of the time in 70 covert tests.

Mr. Neffenger drew the ire of many employees during a congressional hearing this month when he said he would not discipline or remove Mr. Hoggan, adding that he had no evidence of wrongdoing. But he has since replaced Mr. Hoggan, who is on paid leave, and put limits on the amount of bonuses that employees can receive.

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T.S.A. agents checking boarding passes at O’Hare this week. Congress has allowed the agency to retain 1,600 jobs that it had planned to cut this year.Credit...Joshua Lott for The New York Times

Not all the T.S.A.’s troubles can be blamed on missteps by the agency. The dysfunction has been compounded by an earlier 2013 bipartisan budget deal negotiated between Senator Patty Murray, Democrat of Washington, and Representative Paul D. Ryan, the current House speaker, to avert a government shutdown.

The deal set the security fee assessed on each segment of a plane trip to $5.60, but called for 60 cents of that fee to be diverted from the T.S.A. to pay down the national debt. This year, $1.25 billion in fees is going into the Treasury instead of paying for screeners and new equipment.

J. David Cox Sr., president of the union that represents the screeners, the American Federation of Government Employees, said that if the T.S.A. kept all of the fees, it could restore the 6,000 workers it had lost in the last five years, and pay them better. All screeners start out as part-timers, and some earn less than $15 an hour, Mr. Cox said.

The dwindling of their ranks, while the number of passengers keeps rising, has been deeply frustrating, Mr. Cox said. “They sort of feel like they’re at the ocean with a dipper every day,” he said.

Part of that is because of low morale and high attrition. To address the problem, Congress has allowed Mr. Neffenger to retain 1,600 jobs that the T.S.A. had planned to cut this year. Jeh Johnson, the Homeland Security secretary, has also asked Congress to allow the agency to redirect an additional $28 million to pay for shifting 2,784 part-time screeners to full-time work at the 20 busiest airports.

Hoping to avert a disastrous start to the summer, Mr. Neffenger said, he has sent a “surge” of additional officers and deployed most of the agency’s explosive-detecting dogs to those critical hubs.

Airlines are pitching in, too. In Atlanta, Delta Air Lines rolled out new equipment this week for sorting travelers’ carry-ons faster. At Kennedy International Airport in New York, a group of airlines pitched in $250,000 to hire workers, starting on Friday, to help T.S.A. security officers explain the rules and help out at the security checkpoints.

As the Memorial Day weekend began, those measures appeared to be making a difference. Travelers who got an early start on Thursday said they were pleasantly surprised by how short the lines at checkpoints were and how quickly they moved.

At O’Hare International Airport in Chicago, Erin Antonyzyn, 38, a teacher who was flying to Cincinnati to see her family, said she had arrived at the airport two hours early but made it through security in 10 minutes. And she had words for the T.S.A. that it rarely hears.

“I think they obviously made some smart decisions,” she said.

Jeanne Bonner and Mitch Smith contributed reporting, and Kitty Bennett contributed research.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section A, Page 12 of the New York edition with the headline: Behind Long Airport Lines, a Chain of T.S.A. Cuts, Missteps and Crises. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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