By 6:50 a.m. the first wave of travelers had made it through and at that point the TSA checkpoint was back to normal.
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Congress has already shifted $34 million to let the TSA hire 768 new officers and cover overtime pay for existing screeners.
Instead of speeding the screening process for everyone, critics say the TSA PreCheck is worsening the delays by taking up resources for a small group of travelers.
Appearing before the House Homeland Security Committee, Neffenger said staffing levels have been cut 12 percent since he was assigned to his post past year.
Rep. Michael McCaul, the panel’s chairman, was unconvinced.
“So if someone resigns for any reason, I can immediately get someone in to backfill them”, said Kevin Frederick of the TSA.
This weekend, also known as Memorial Day weekend, is the start of the summer travel season in the U.S. Americans will fly to visit families or go on vacations. “But it looks like the airport’s pretty empty, so it’ll just be a nice breeze through”, Goodman said. The TSA’s website has a list of 160 participating airports and 12 participating airlines. Dozens spent the night in the airport, and the incident brought national attention to increasingly long wait times. “It’s because the TSA bureaucracy has gotten weaker”. The head of the TSA told Congress that the agency must find a way to efficiently deal with the high volume expected in airports this summer. The number of passengers is estimated to be about 740 million this year nearly a million more than the 643 million last year.
When the program launched in 2013, TSA primarily relied on “word of mouth” to promote it, said Charles Carroll, senior vice president of identity services at MorphoTrust USA. Kelly Hoggan was removed Monday and replaced by Darby LaJoye, a former federal security director in Los Angeles and NY. Some critics claim that the TSA is understaffed because it is busy providing security for presidential candidates during presidential primaries but TSA officials deny this. Neffenger, who has been in the job a year now, told CNN on Thursday he was “outraged” when he learned Hogan had received a $90,000 bonus.
As Chicago’s airports prepare for a busy holiday travel weekend, the agency in charge of security there is reporting an improvement in the time in takes to pass though checkpoints. Neffenger said insufficient funding and lack of manpower are to blame.
David Inserra, a policy analyst at The Heritage Foundation, has studied TSA issues and joined Rob Bluey for a Facebook Live discussion on Friday in Reagan National Airport to talk about solutions.
TSA says it also wants to provide Congress with a staffing model that keeps up with airline industry’s record growth.
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So last week, an embattled and noticeably addled Peter V. Neffenger, the TSA administrator, was warning anyone who was still listening to him that passengers would most likely continue to experience longer than normal wait times because of an expected increase in summer travel.
