Transportation Security Administration: Safety in Numbers

To fulfill its mandates, the TSA needed to hire and train 30,000 passenger screeners and 26,000 baggage screeners for airports in the continental United States, Alaska, Hawaii, Puerto Rico and Guam. Some have called it the largest mobilization of a workforce in history, said Gale Rossides, chief support systems officer and former associate undersecretary for training and quality performance for the TSA. In July 2002, it started hiring up to 1,000 people per week. The final airport was federalized on Nov. 19, 2002, just one year after the ATSA legislation was signed to form the agency. By the time TSA had worked its way across the country, replacing the personnel who worked at the checkpoints and the personnel who worked as baggage screeners, it had replaced 85 percent of the workforce employed in the screener occupations in the airports, said Rossides.

“The ATSA provisions were very specific in terms of the deadlines and the mandates that we had to meet,” said Rossides. Most of these deadlines for hiring and training screeners had to be met within 12 months from the date of passage of the Act, or just six weeks beyond that.

Many people believed it was impossible. In December of 2001, the TSA had one employee, said Rossides, the first undersecretary, John Magaw. “He literally was the only person in TSA in December 2001,” she said. “I came on board in early January, and in the month of January there were only 13 permanent employees on TSA’s rolls. Then, by Dec. 31 of that same year, we were over 60,000 strong.”

To hire, train and equip that workforce, the TSA turned to partnerships with private-sector organizations. NCS Pearson was responsible for recruiting and assessing the screener workforce. Lockheed Martin trained the passenger checkpoint screeners and did the reconstruction and reconfiguration of the checkpoints across the country. Boeing worked with TSA on the explosive detection and ETD (explosive trace detection) equipment deployment, as well as training the screeners who would work in the checked baggage area. Vanity Fair worked to get uniforms for the screeners, and Unisys helped with the IT infrastructure. It was a complex process, with hundreds of steps to be completed for each airport.