DOGE PRIORITIES – END TSA

After 9/11, people were scared enough to accept any intrusion into their privacy and accept inconveniences and harassment when they tried to travel. And, if this agency had actually been able to intercept and apprehend dangerous people and their devices, it might well have been worth it. But they can’t, and they don’t. When agents put test objects thru the scanner, they have nearly a 95% failure rate in finding these objects. Having TSA (aka Thousands Standing Around) just doesn’t work.

Too Useless to Be Eliminated?

TSA now has 58,000 employees and spends around $11.8BB a year. That’s a lot of money to be so ineffective and intrusive. The justification for the ever-increasing prohibitions and restrictions doesn’t hold much water. Just because someone hid a small bomb in their shoe shouldn’t make each of us take off our shoes. The 3 oz liquid limit is enforced without common sense. I’ve seen people harassed for having a full-size tube of toothpaste that only has about two shots left in the tub. Instead, you are supposed to buy tiny products that cost more per ounce to satisfy the dictators in the line.

Pat-downs are no fun. I had to take a business trip just days after major surgery and the pat-down left me on the floor writhing in pain. The agent offered to help me to my gate; I wanted no more of her “help”. Papers they rifle through generally get ruined when they shove them back in your case. My husband arrived on a trip with a missing shoe. And when subject to extra screening, no provision is given to protect your valuables. You have to see them at a distance, hoping no one will accidently, or on purpose, take them.

Another peeve is their approach to “fairness.” Instead of using the kinds of investigative tools that cops use, they try to randomly grab people for enhanced searches, meaning that the 80-year-old barely able to walk has to stand for much too long, being groped and interrogated. Meanwhile, just weeks after 9/11, I was subject to a major search while six young Arab men passed through without a second glance. This is police work, not political correctness.

Don’t come through with any kind of medical issue. People with joint replacements are treated poorly and there is no sense in how they are scanned. I wore a short skirt revealing clearly not just that I had two knee replacements, but that there was nothing on my legs that should give them pause. I was still run through the slow scanner and patted. Worse, an elderly friend was taken to a room and ordered to remove her breast implant (the result of cancer surgery). Obviously, she couldn’t do that.

But we know—government agencies almost never get shut down, even when their utility is questionable, or even ridiculous.

Have they made air travel safer? I don’t think so. Business travelers call it airport theater for a reason. It looks like it makes sense, but it doesn’t. The one thing that did make a difference was the hardened, locking cockpit doors. Also, some few pilots have gone through the “waste-of-time” gun training so they can be armed with bullets that won’t go through the aircraft skin. But the FAA made it so risky and hard to get the training that few have done this.

Back to the Past

Prior to TSA, we went through simple scanners that didn’t add much time to your pre-flight planning. The more careful scans were of checked baggage and those can continue. They were cheaper and easier. and, as far as I was able to tell, were able to find more issues than TSA does. If you think things are safer, you are kidding yourself. Not long after 9/11, a pilot went on YouTube to show you how to kill someone five ways with a hotel pen. There are many ways to hurt a passenger or flight attendant with things you are still allowed to carry, if you wish to, but you won’t get in the cockpit to seize the plane.

Does this remind you of anything? The intrusive, invasive rules during Covid was yet another way the elites had to show us all that we are little better than serfs, living under their command. Power-trippers will continually offer “solutions” that are nothing but control, and if we keep buying into it, they will simply keep pushing harder. We’re too close to the CCP’s social credit system as it is. It’s time to push back and refuse to knuckle under to useless, egregious government control. DOGE can do this; it’s time to end the TSA.