Federal Times: House passes bill to demote some TSA officers
 

Mark Sanford, the former SC Governor who claimed to have been Hiking the Appalachian Trai and who is now a Congressman from SC ("Servicing South Carolina's Lowcountry", according to the top of his official House webpage), claims that passing the following bill would save $17 million a year:

Federal Times:
House passes bill to demote some TSA officers
July 23, 2014

A short quote of the article:

Congress should also make it a crime to designate a TSA employee who is not an actually badged and sworn law enforcement officer as an "officer" of any kind.

To me, all such employees are just that - employees. Nothing more, probably much less.

How about a bill that demotes all TSA agents who are unnecessarily surly and power-tripping? After all, they do make life so unpleasant for the passenger. Oh wait, that would mean 95% of all TSA agents would be demoted then...:)

Cut to the chase... A bill that terminates TSA forever. :cool:

Correction is needed
 

Mark Sanford was misunderstood. He didn't say he "was hiking the Appalachian Trail", he said he "was having some Argentinian tail". Somehow somebody heard it wrong, I guess....

Congress should also require TSA hirelings (TSAlings?) who inspect checked luggage to include their full name and staff number on the notice of inspection form that they put in each bag. Currently there is no way to know who inspected a checked bag.

Is that like the kid visiting a French count? Remember that old joke?

I thought that was the point. It sounds like it would be a promotion for them instead. ;)

Quite agree, plus a video of the TSA employee "working" at inspecting the bag, upon request.

Bags should only be opened in the presence of the owner or with the owner's explicit consent. "Unlock it or it will be broken into" is a criminally insane policy. :td:

This. 1000%

Hehehe. Yes, well, I prefer a more direct and blunt bill. ;)

Seriously though, I agree with the earlier post and I would not be sad to see the whole TSA become history, or at the very least, see the whole lot of them get demoted, their pay severely curtailed, and just make them feel they can't treat passengers like vermin. :)

It's All About Premium Pay
 

From the article:

This issue is all about qualifying for various types of premium pay, most notably stand-by pay. A real federal cop can earn up to 25% of their salary in these two types of premium pay. Stand-by pay is paid to cover real federal cops doing things like being deployed for a stake-out or for diplomatic protection duties where you have to be basically on-call at a moment's notice. (Stand-by pay is also paid to federal firefighters who are deployed to a fire house or temporary location during a big forest fire.) There are other premium pay opportunities of which the TSA takes full advantage. I'm only addressing stand-by pay here.

Kippie unilaterally reclassified clerks as "officers" when he instituted his intimidation campaign back in ~2007. Personnel shops and the TSA union jumped on the bandwagon and rewrote TSA clerk jobs as "federal law enforcement officers" or at least reclassified clerk jobs into the same civil service job classification series. Once you're in the series qualifying for stand-by pay, you're in. Heck, it's only taken Congress 7 years to do something about this. I'm sure the bill won't go anywhere in the Senate.

TSA clerks don't deserve stand-by pay any more than I do.

Doesn't mean a thing unless the Senate passes it and the President signs off etc etc. and I hate to think how often that happens !!!

Bob H

Not to get too OMNI/PR, but this could very well be a case where there's agreement. The TSA is a Bush-era legacy, not Obama. They may very well look to agree, and not get to partisan bickering over the role of government.

However, this doesn't seem to be the most major piece of legislation. How much press is it really getting outside of FT?

And even if they did, there would still be plausible deniability. Someone could forge someone else's name and staff number on a notice of inspection form (or just steal a whole stack of pre-printed forms). Also, as has been noted ad nauseum, someone else (either employed by TSA or the airlines) could always open a passenger's bag outside of the luggage inspection process.

I know it sounds like a great idea in theory ... but in practice, this wouldn't help to identify many suspected thieves.

All you need is an AFS-type to get up during the debate and start yelling stuff like "Why are you cutting the pay of the brave men and women who are protecting our skies from terrorists?". The security establishment seems to cut across party lines pretty strongly.