Will This Herald An Era Of Kinder, Gentler TSA Agents?

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On the whole, TSA agents don’t have a good reputation. The descriptors for them are usually, “unfriendly,” “not helpful,” “too loud,” “they don’t listen,” “grumpy,” “no patience,” “on a power trip,” etc.

Of course, there are some agents who are great. They’re kind and professional. They try to make the process less stressful (like this guy), or who will actually be helpful (like this amazing lady). But for the most part, those kinds of TSA officers are, unfortunately, few and far between.

There are admittedly lots of reasons why TSA agents tend to be so…not nice. Here are a bunch of them, based on an audit the Department of Homeland Security had done in 2019.

As you can see, one of the multiple problems the audit found was salary. With salaries for new hires ranging from $21.13 – $28.38 per hour, TSA agents are some of the lowest-paid government workers out there, according to the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE), the country’s largest federal employee union.

Well, apparently the TSA is trying to fix that. They recently announced that, if approved by Congress, they would receive a 2023 budget of $9.7 billion, which is a $1.4 billion increase from the previous year.

The money is earmarked to be used for more security technology, expand collective bargaining rights for TSA officers, and (this is the important part) update the agency’s pay structure to ensure employees are adequately paid for their service.

Besides setting aside $243 million to increase the TSA workforce by 2,540 positions,  President Joe Biden’s budget includes $871 million for additional personnel compensation and benefits.

TSA officials suggest the expanded budget would positively impact all TSA employees, including uniformed officers, federal air marshals, canine handlers and management to administrative and professional employees.

I pulled out my calculator and did some Googling and some math.

During the 2020 fiscal year, there were roughly 54,200 TSA employees. That included:

• 47,000 uniformed officers
• 3,000 air marshals and
• 1,000 canine handlers
• which would appear to leave about 3,200 administrative and professionals

$871,000,000 divided by 54,200 people = $16,000 per person.

“One of the long-standing challenges at TSA has been the pay gap between TSA’s frontline workforce and their counterparts in the rest of the federal government,” said TSA Administrator David Pekoske. “Equitable compensation and sufficient pay progression support TSA’s ability to meet mission requirements in the recruitment and retention of employees and positively impacts employee morale.”

Would $16k more in salary and benefits help to make happier, and therefore “kinder, gentler” TSA agents? I dunno.

I mean, extra money is always nice, but there would still be so many things going against being a TSA agent. There’s little chance to go up the career ladder. And the audit did say that the TSA isn’t very good at screening their people. So they’re hiring the wrong kinds of people for a high-demand job that deals with a public who, for the most part, doesn’t always know what’s going on (<– this post is specific to MCO, but the different demographics are found at every airport, every day). They also appear to have nothing in place to call out workers who appear to be “grumpy” or “power-hungry” and therefore offer poor customer service, like what would happen with other jobs where people work with the public. So how do they expect things to change?

Obviously, as the old saying goes, money doesn’t buy happiness. True, $16k a year might buy some happiness for the TSA workers whose biggest gripe is salary. But I suspect there’s a whole mess of dysfunction at the TSA that would have to be dealt with before we could see the majority of TSA officers begin to be kind and courteous (and even then, I think it might be iffy).

Still, it’s nice to dream, right?

Feature Photo: DHS.gov

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