From the U.S. Government Accountability Office, www.gao.gov Transcript for: Costs of TSA Screening Description: Audio Interview by GAO staff with Jennifer Grover, Director, Homeland Security and Justice Related GAO Work: GAO-16-19: Screening Partnership Program: TSA Can Benefit from Improved Cost Estimates and GAO-16-115T: Screening Partnership Program: Improved Cost Estimates Can Enhance Program Decision Making Released: November 2015 [ Background Music ] [ Narrator: ] Welcome to GAO's Watchdog Report, your source for news and information from the U.S. Government Accountability Office. It's November 2015. The Transportation Security Administration screens some 1.8 million passengers and their property at U.S. airports every day. In 2004, TSA began letting airports apply to hire private contractors for screenings rather than using TSA employees. A team led by Jenny Grover, a director in GAO's Homeland Security and Justice team, recently reviewed how TSA compares the costs of these two approaches. Jacques Arsenault sat down with Jenny to talk about what they found. [ Jacques Arsenault: ] When it comes to airport security I tend to think more about how long the lines are than who's actually doing the screening. Can you tell me about TSA's screening partnership program and how it started? [ Jenny Grover: ] Sure. It's a program that allows airports to apply to TSA to have private companies conduct the airport screening. The key principle really is that in making the switch it can't compromise security or cost-effectiveness relative to TSA operations. The private companies hire, they train, they manage the security workforce at their airports. They do have to follow TSA requirements and TSA still remains responsible for oversight of all of the airport security, and as far as how it got started, well, before 9/11 all airport screening was done by private companies. They contracted directly with the airport and they were responsible for following FAA security rules at that time and then after 9/11 Congress created the TSA and the workforce of federal screeners and shortly thereafter TSA established the SPP to give airports a choice of whether they wanted to have the private or the federal screeners. It originally started with 5 airports and now there's 21 out of 450 airports that participate, still mostly the smaller airports. [ Jacques Arsenault: ] Now it seems that cost would be one of the considerations and you mentioned cost-effectiveness being one of the requirements for an airport to use private contractors. How does TSA estimate or measure those costs, of private versus government screening? [ Jenny Grover: ] They use a cost estimation methodology which is a standard process to develop an estimate of what TSA's costs would be to conduct screening and then that's compared to the bids that are submitted by the private companies to do screening at a specific airport, so there is long-standing interest among members of Congress and others about this basic question of do we know whether there's a difference in cost when using federal or private screeners? [ Jacques Arsenault: ] So then what do we know? [ Jenny Grover: ] We did find improvements in TSA's cost estimates compared to our prior reviews but we still have concerns about their reliability for several reasons. One, for example, is that we found the cost estimates were not complete. They were limited to TSA costs, not total federal costs, and that has the effect of comparing the full private screening cost to partial federal cost so it's a biased comparison where the federal costs are consistently underestimated. And specifically, we found that TSA costs represent about 91 percent of total federal costs. Now in terms of what the estimates themselves show, the 13 most recent airports that had contracts awarded for private screening were about 11 percent lower than TSA estimated costs on average, so this raises questions about whether there could be potential savings with private contractors, but, this just reflects the difference at the time of contract award not over the life of the 5-year contract. TSA doesn't update the cost estimate and they don't track contractor cost versus TSA-estimated costs over the life of contract which is what would be necessary to answer the question about whether one or the other was less expensive. [ Jacques Arsenault: ] So the data that we have says that the private screening might be less expensive but we really don't know based on holes in their methodology or what they're tracking? [ Jenny Grover: ] Exactly. [ Jacques Arsenault: ] So then is GAO making recommendations to TSA in this report? [ Jenny Grover: ] Yes, one that TSA should modify the cost estimation method that they used to more fully align with best practices which would result in a more accurate estimate, and another recommendation is that they should monitor these contract values over time compared to TSA's estimated costs so that they'd be able to more accurately compare elective costs over time. [ Jacques Arsenault: ] So then finally for taxpayers and the traveling public, what would you say is the bottom line of this report? [ Jenny Grover: ] Well for the traveling public what I would point out is that in prior GAO work we have found that there are not significant differences in screener performance on actual security effectiveness but in terms of taxpayers, the question remains open about whether taxpayer money could be saved if more airports transition to SPP by improving their cost estimates and by tracking relative costs over time as we've recommended TSA could come closer to being able to answer this question. [ Background Music ] [ Narrator: ] To learn more, visit GAO.gov and be sure to tune in to the next episode of GAO's Watchdog Report for more from the congressional watchdog, the U.S. Government Accountability Office.