It will be increasingly difficult to fire the TSA agents who fail miserably.
Few government agencies elicit more outrage than the Transportation Security Administration (TSA). From surly agents to invasive pat downs, the TSA is not known for customer service or efficiency. A new collective-bargaining agreement between the TSA and its federal-employee union will make them even less helpful.
When the TSA was established after 9/11, Congress gave it some flexibility to recruit outside of the civil-service system and typical union mandates. An early TSA chief warned that “fighting terrorism demands a flexible workforce. . . that can mean changes in work assignments and other conditions of employment that are not compatible with the duty to bargain with labor unions.”
In 2011, Obama gave the TSA employees the right to unionize. In 2021, despite Democrats controlling the White House and both chambers of Congress, they could not reach an agreement to expand those rights. So the Homeland Security Secretary at the time, Alejandro Mayorkas, since impeached, expanded them on his own.
Continue reading the entire piece here at the National Review Online (paywall)
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Judge Glock is the director of research and a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor at City Journal.
Photo by Jeff Greenberg/Getty Images
