This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Tuesday, May 10th, 2016.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Even by the standards of federal agencies, the Transportation Security Administration is strongly disliked.

The agency's antics with respect to the regulations they want to foist upon travelers

are no less concerning.

The Competitive Enterprise Institute has filed a lawsuit over the agency's

strip search machines. Mark Scribner of CEO and Jim Harper of the Cato Institute

discussed TSA's problematic behavior. In 2008, the TSA started rolling out these body scanners and airports and what they didn't

do was go through the proper rulemaking requirements that they're required

to do under the Administrative Procedure Act.

So a lawsuit was filed in 2010 and then in 2011 a court ruled that in fact TSA had violated the Administrative Procedure Act and had to produce

this regulation. Now we only got that regulation in March 2016 and took

them they spend a great deal of time rolling this out,

and you would think that they would have done

the proper analysis to support their decision to deploy body scanners.

However, as our lawsuit alleges, they did not do that and what we are pointing out a major

deficiency in their analysis is they failed to account for the some number of travelers who are

deterred from flying because of the onerous nature of these machines, the invasiveness of these machines, and the perceived

delays and things like that, regardless of their reason, they decide to drive instead.

Given that driving is much more dangerous than flying,

some number of those people then die on the highways.

And this is known as modal substitution.

...