Welcome to the Cato podcast. I'm Pat Eddington, senior fellow at the Institute.

And I'm Chris Edwards and economist and Kiltz family chair in fiscal studies.

And our topic for today is the Transportation Security Administration. I think something

that Chris and I both believe should not exist. So I will certainly admit my bias at the outset.

But I think we've got a really good case to make here. I'm going to just lead in very quickly,

at least as quickly as possible, with respect to how we got this monstrosity called the Transportation Security Administration, or TSA for short, a little bit about the multiple scandals that have plagued this organization since its creation.

And then Chris will talk about the fiscal impact here, and then we'll just kind of

have a discussion about, you know, where we should actually be essentially with, you know,

dealing with aviation security in a way that actually makes sense, both from a public safety

standpoint, but also from a fiscal standpoint.

So with respect to the history of TSA, of course, this is a direct outgrowth of the tragic 9-11 attacks that resulted in the deaths of nearly 3,000 of our fellow citizens, and literally turn this country upside down, put it on the path to war, not just in Afghanistan,

but ultimately in Iraq. Those are kind of separate discussions, but they're relevant here

because of the way that the creation of TSA and its expansive authorities that essentially it is

acquired has impacted the ability of folks to travel without

being needlessly molested by government agents. When this thing was originally created in November

of 2001, it was put under the Department of Transportation, which to my mind actually made some sense.

If you were going to do something like this, that was definitely the place to stick it. But within a couple of years,

uh, they decided to essentially, uh, take TSA out of the Department of Transportation and stick it

under this other newly created monstrosity called the Department of Homeland Security,

which itself, um, could be at least one podcast and probably more, based on its activities and rights violations and massive amounts of horrible, horrible, unnecessary spending.

But with respect to TSA, it has been plagued with scandals, basically from its very

beginning, explosive detection systems that have not worked, the rapid scan, backscatter X-ray body

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