The TSA might be the least-effective agency in the federal government — and that’s saying something. The agency sucks about $8 billion per year out of the economy to cover payroll and overhead, then consumes billions more through lost productivity and lost ticket sales; countless Americans refuse to fly because they won’t allow the TSA to humiliate them. The inconvenience of air travel sends more and more people onto the country’s roads, where they are far less safe. “Researchers at Cornell University suggest that people switching from air to road transportation in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks led to an increase of 242 driving fatalities per month — which means that a lot more people died on the roads as an indirect result of 9/11 than died from being on the planes that terrible day,” Charles Kenny wrote for Bloomberg Businessweek last year.

The TSA has never stopped an act of terrorism, and it has never caught a single terrorist. Scientists have pointed out that TSA body scanners, which cost taxpayers billions more dollars, have deep flaws. Audits of the TSA have uncovered thousands of annual security breaches, as well as a lack of accountability in dealing with screener misconduct ranging from theft to sleeping on the job to allowing friends and family to bypass screenings. The TSA is a massive fraud perpetrated to fool the public into feeling safe.