Transportation Security Administration (TSA) executives are as likely to die in office as to be fired, since the embattled agency has canned one executive and just one executive has died in office over the last five years.
As passengers face increasingly long airport security checkpoint lines and the agency faces intense scrutiny from Congress over TSA officials’ failures, NBC News obtained U.S. Office of Personnel Management data showing the TSA only fired one executive over a five-year period.
The data also shows that during the same period, 57 TSA executives retired, 27 quit, five transferred to other agencies, and one died. TSA in the same time-frame fired 6,889 non-executive employees in an agency of more than 65,000 employees.
The firing rate across the federal government is low, as The Daily Caller News Foundation previously reported. The odds of a federal employee being fired in a given year are one-in-500, according to the Government Accountability Office. Compare that with private sector workers’ roughly one-in-77 chance of being involuntarily terminated — in a given month.
The TSA has consistently flopped on security tests. Last year, it failed to detect 67 of 70 — or 95 percent — of mock weapons. The House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform (HOGR) railed on TSA executives for giving TSA head of security Kelly Hogan over $90,000 in awards and bonuses over 13 months, on top of his $181,500 base salary. TSA, under public pressure, placed Hogan on paid administrative leave pending reassignment, but did not fire him.
Employees of TSA have also ranked the agency one of the worst places to work in the federal government, and HOGR members railed on the agency for its “chilling” culture of retaliation for reporting security lapses and misconduct.
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