Word: tsa
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...shooting rang other bells for Baumgartner. For months he has been wrangling with the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), the new federal agency in charge of the nation's air security, over the baggage-screening machines the TSA has ordered to be in operation at all 429 U.S. airports by the end of the year. Denver will ultimately need 50 of these bulky machines, which weigh 10,000 lbs. apiece and stand about five feet high, and the TSA wants them placed in the main terminal, next to the ticket counters. The mere thought of this makes Baumgartner's fleshy face...
...Behind the scenes, however, Denver International is struggling with many of the same security issues facing all the other U.S. airports. The screening process for passengers (handled by two private security firms at Denver and supervised by the TSA) is cumbersome, arbitrary and questionably efficient. (In a TSA study of 32 airports, not including Denver, nearly one-quarter of all fake weapons carried by undercover TSA agents were not detected.) The fact that most checked luggage is still not being screened for explosives remains a glaring lapse, and there's a raging dispute over the machines the TSA has selected...
...What's more, the new federal agency that was supposed to help solve these problems is increasingly at odds with local airport authorities. Baumgartner and others criticize the TSA-run largely by Secret Service veterans with little aviation experience-for cluelessness, inflexibility and a bull-in-a-china-shop approach. "They may be fine folks at the TSA," says Baumgartner, "but they don't know anything about building an airport-security system or running an airport." William Pickle, a former Secret Service official who has just taken over as the TSA's top man in Denver, acknowledges the tensions...
...arguments. The leaders of the House and Senate will be busy quelling the turf fights that have already begun. The biggest losers will be the Treasury Department, which would give up the Secret Service and Customs, and the Transportation Department, which would shed the Coast Guard and the TSA...
...business with them and their patrons on Capitol Hill. Even before the President gave his speech Thursday night, House Transportation Committee chairman Don Young served notice on Speaker Dennis Hastert that he had no intention of giving up his committee's jurisdiction over the Coast Guard and the TSA. And California Democrat Ellen Tauscher, who supports most of the Bush plan, insists his decision to include her district's Lawrence Livermore nuclear-weapons lab in the new department is a mistake and that the lab is better off as part of the National Nuclear Security Administration. (All the nuclear labs...