WASHINGTON, May 2 (UPI) -- Airline passenger and baggage screeners still are not receiving the on-the-job training they need to spot firearms, knives and explosives, and federal authorities have no way of telling how many have completed the required courses, according to congressional investigators.
Inadequate training has been identified as a key issue in a succession of reports that have slammed airport screening -- finding it no more effective than it was before Sept. 11, 2001, despite the expenditure of $10 billion and the hiring of a 45,000-strong army of federal employees to check passengers and their bags for guns, knives and bombs.
A report from the Government Accountability Office published Monday said the Transportation Security Administration, which employs the men and women who staff the checkpoints at airports, "has taken a number of actions to enhance the training" they get "but has encountered difficulties in providing access to recurrent training."
Nearly half of local TSA managers "reported that there was not sufficient time for screeners to receive recurrent training within regular work hours," mainly because of understaffing, the report states.
Other problems included a lack of access to the high-speed Internet connections needed to access online training modules.
As a result, the report states, "(TSA) data for the fourth quarter of fiscal year 2004 reported that 75 percent of airports were averaging less than (the required minimum of) three hours of recurrent training per week per screener."
Moreover, the report found, "Because of a lack of internal controls" there was no way of telling whether "screeners are completing required training," and the Transportation Security Administration "does not clearly define responsibility for ensuring that screeners have completed all required training."
The report said that the TSA hopes to address these issues in the next month or two by introducing an online system for local managers to report training and by modifying management guidance to ensure that managers know they are responsible for ensuring that training requirements are met.
Additionally, the report stated that although measures of "screening effectiveness" had been devised by the agency, it had "not yet established performance targets" for its workforce in relation to these measures.
"Until such targets are established, it will be difficult for (the Transportation Security Administration) to draw more meaningful conclusions about its performance and how to most effectively direct its improvement efforts."
Investigators said that although the agency had beefed up its screener-training programs, almost all the improvements were only for passenger and carry-on baggage screening, not for the different machines and procedures that screen checked baggage.
As an example, the report cites the so-called Threat Image Projection system, which randomly superimposes images of "threat objects" like guns or knives on the monitors showing bags being X-rayed, to test screeners' ability to detect them. Although the system has finally been deployed, it is only being used on the machines that check carry-on bags, not those that scan checked luggage.
The agency "is taking steps to address the overall imbalance in passenger and baggage screening ... including working toward implementing the Threat Image Projection system for checked baggage screening," the report notes.
The Department of Homeland Security, which runs the Transportation Security Administration, said it "generally concur(red)" with the report's findings.
The report takes a slightly different tack from a recent critique of airline passenger screening by the department's own inspector general, which emphasized the lack of new technology at checkpoints as the key factor in explaining the poor performance of screeners.
That report last month was seized on by congressional critics of the agency in both parties who charge it has been too slow to introduce new technology -- continuing to rely instead on the 1970s-era magnetometers still used at most airports.
Rep. John Mica, R-Fla., chairman of the House Aviation Subcommittee, said too much money had been spent on creating "an army of screeners ... a Soviet-style, centralized bureaucracy that has resulted in great inefficiencies and inflexibility with little improvement in screener effectiveness.
"This money could have been much better spent on better ... technology," he added.
Rep. Peter DeFazio, D-Ore., a senior member of Mica's subcommittee, echoed those comments, blaming "stagnant bureaucracy (and) poor management" for the continuing failures.
"Screeners have done the best they can with the ancient machines they are forced to work with," he said. "It's time to give screeners 21st century tools to combat 21st century threats."
Both men urged the expedited introduction of new backscatter X-ray devices, walk-through explosive trace-detection portals and inline baggage screening systems.
About $20 billion dollars has been spent by the Transportation Security Administration since it was stood up in 2002, congressional officials say, almost half of it on passenger checkpoint screening.
TSA officials insist that screening is better now than it has ever been, citing the interception every year of millions of prohibited items like knives, firearms and explosives.
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