Silk Plants and Air Security

It's getting hard to find even a lousy bag of pretzels on an airline flight these days. But the penny-pinching spirit had yet to arrive in 2002 at the Transportation Security Administration, the federal agency in charge of air security. A draft of an upcoming Inspector General's report from the Department of Homeland Security charges that the agency's sleek Transportation Systems Operation Center, which opened in the Washington suburbs in 2003, was plagued by mismanagement and overspending. The report charges that some of the $500,000 listed under "equipment and tools" was spent on silk plants and decorative artwork. And in addition to outfitting the building's four kitchenettes with swanky Sub-Zero refrigerators, the report cites 58 cases in which the project manager allegedly circumvented government spending rules by splitting credit-card transactions so that each would come in under a limit of $2,500. None of the officials accused are still with the agency.

The new building legitimately upgraded what a former TSA official describes, in a rebuttal to the report, as the "completely inadequate" command-and-control system the agency had in its early days. The rebuttal recounts two events in Los Angeles on July 4, 2002--when a small plane crashed into a crowd of picnickers a few minutes after a man opened fire inside the airport--when TSA officials were stymied because they could not stay in constant contact with their staff in L.A. TSA spokesman Mark Hatfield, who would not comment on the unpublished report or rebuttal, says the new headquarters has improved operations. "The climate back then was that of an urgent start-up security agency," he says, "that bears little resemblance to the mature operation of the TSA today." --By Sally B. Donnelly