Securing the Air
The Founders would have approved.

ew of the millions of Americans who made their way through airport security over Thanksgiving weekend could fail to notice the green-uniformed, automatic-weapon-totting men and women who stood behind security checkpoints around the country. These National Guard members represent the first wave of federal employees ordered to secure airports and other key transportation facilities. When President Bush signed a bill creating the Transportation Security Agency a week ago, many conservatives were unhappy: A small-government president agreed to create a new federal agency bigger than anything Bill Clinton had pushed through Congress. But Bush did the right thing. A single, national airport-security force will provide better service than the market ever could and falls well within the federal governments' constitutional powers.

Before September 11th, airport-security standards were terrible. Slinging lattes at Starbucks paid almost twice as much and required four times more training than inspecting bags at an airport. In 1998, the trade journal Access Control Systems Integration pointed out that airport security was one of the least-skilled jobs in entire the labor force. Even in the post-September 11th environment, private contractors screw up with alarming frequency: This past Saturday air traffic snarled all around the western United States when someone switched off a metal detector in the Seattle airport. While the Senate passed a bill calling for an all-out federal takeover of transportation security, conservatives in the house rallied around a proposal that would have given the federal government the job of overseeing private security contracts and compromised on a bill that allows some limited experiments with private contractors.

If the law allows such experiments, some might ask, why not allow private contractors to run the whole security operation? At a glance this approach seems attractive: free-market competition, after all, produces "better" products. Since so few people try to sneak through security with the intention of hijacking a plane, however, even the worst inspection system can go years without experiencing a catastrophic failure. While most airlines and airport authorities probably realize that the long-term costs of a failure outweigh the benefits of cheaper security, the chances of getting caught with lax security are so low that the quest for lower costs will, in time, give some market player an incentive to cut security. Given that an airplane hijacking anywhere would have catastrophic results for the entire economy, the nation can't allow this possibility.

While federal agencies such as the FBI and DEA have earned ample criticism in recent years, such federal agencies still lead the nation in recruiting the technically skilled and well-educated men and women American needs for airport security. Even the best local police departments call in the feds when they need to set up a complex wiretap or trace a drug cartel's money. Transportation security requires lots of technical skills: Airport-security workers will conduct CT scans, identify concealed knives and explosives and detect bombs based on miniscule chemical traces. An agency with national reach, likewise, will have the best chance of attracting and retaining skilled men and women; no private contractor can offer the career possibilities or prestige of a federal law-enforcement agency.

A look at the Constitution shows that running airport security falls well within the Founders' restrictions on federal power even without reference to the overused interstate commerce clause. Specifically, the Constitution gives the federal government the power to "to define and punish Piracies and Felonies committed on the high Seas." Many federal and state laws define hijacking as "air piracy" and it takes only a moments' thought to realize that airline hijacking and sea piracy are the same crime committed on a different sort of vessel.

The Founders took their anti-piracy responsibility seriously and the new nation's first major foreign operation involved protecting Mediterranean shipping from 18th century Middle Eastern terrorists known as the Barbary Pirates. In the short term, the government could have mitigated the problem by paying the pirates tribute on an ongoing basis. Instead, however, the U.S. took the high-cost long-term solution of building alliances and naval warships capable of taking on the pirates. The buildup worked and by 1805, the U.S. had beaten back the pirates. This successful campaign established the new nation as world power and freed American commerce to expand around the globe.

The modern airways are far safer than the high seas of yore but the costs of failing to secure them remain very steep. President Bush and Congress have made the right move in reasserting their constitutional role in protecting the safety, security, and freedom of the nation's vital transportation systems.