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WASHINGTON – The acting head of the Transportation Security Administration has issued a memo warning that 131 of the country’s largest airports will face staff shortages this month and is calling on office workers to volunteer to help with airport controls.
Darby LaJoye, who stands in for the agency’s administrator, wrote that help is needed as travel numbers are expected to surge over the summer. The volunteers, who were expected to work for up to 45 days, could not check the passengers, but could help with the management of lines and with administrative tasks.
“With this increase in volume [the Transportation Security Administration] must maintain operational readiness and ensure screening personnel are available to perform screening functions, “LaJoye wrote in the memo dated Jan. 30, received by the Washington Post.
The request is a move the agency has taken over the past few weeks to address staffing shortages as U.S. airlines record their highest passenger numbers from the pandemic. The agency has also promised $ 500 recurring monthly bonuses to control officers at airports with significant staff shortages, allowing part-time workers to work full-time, adjusting shifts, and increasing the use of overtime – including requiring officers to take their days off to work, said the union leaders.
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The agency said it hired 3,100 new employees in the past few months and plans to add another 3,000 by the end of summer, but recent moves to expand its existing workforce show the scale of the challenge it faces when air traffic moves from all-time lows recovered.
In a statement, the agency said it was confident it had the resources to get travelers through checkpoints and onto planes.
“The Transportation Security Administration is well positioned to cope with the increasing travel volume this summer,” the agency said in a statement. “The agency started a concerted recruiting effort last winter in anticipation of increasing volumes and is in line with the established benchmarks in order to meet the recruitment targets.”
When it announced a recruitment drive earlier this year, the agency announced that it would recruit 6,000 civil servants “by summer,” but later said that number was its target for the fiscal year ending in September. The move was hampered by a rocky transition to a new information technology system that required officials to rely on manual workarounds to handle recruits.
Hydrick Thomas, president of the American Federation of Government Employees Council 100, the officers’ union, said the agency was staring at the peak summer travel season and “realized they couldn’t hire the 6,000 as they promised”.
“People will travel, they will come to the airport and see these long lines and wonder what is happening,” he said.
That was Fareeda Ali Bullert’s experience on Friday when she arrived at Austin-Bergstrom International Airport for a flight to New York. Bullert said as soon as she walked into the terminal it was clear something was wrong, with large crowds and no instructions from security checkers.
“There were a lot of passengers helping passengers and sharing how long they had to wait,” she said. “The lines wrapped around and almost crossed.”
After waiting about an hour – followed by a lot of running – Bullert said she made it to her flight in about five minutes.
“It felt like a game show,” she said. “You had to hit someone to make it your flight.”
In Charlotte, hundreds of people recently missed flights after getting stuck in long lines.
According to an agency assessment obtained by the Post, the agency was missing at least 2,500 officials by June, with some of the largest airports losing more than 100 officials compared to projected staffing needs.
Five of the country’s largest airports were missing at least a tenth of the forecast staffing required: Detroit Metropolitan, Denver International, Dulles International outside Washington, St. Louis Lambert International, and Boston Logan International.
In total, the analysis found 235 airports with at least 5% staff shortages and officials entitled to $ 500 in bonuses every month. In a memo from the agency about the three-month program, it says: “We are trying to offer the airports as many incentives as possible so that they can run their operations successfully.”
Thomas, the union leader, said the prospect of bonuses is welcome, but mandatory overtime won’t be as popular with officials.
“It’s kind of stressful,” he said. “It works better to ask for volunteers than to try to hire someone.”
While the Transportation Security Administration hired 3,100 new officials, agency spokeswoman Alexa Lopez said about 2,090 workers have left since the beginning of the year. Lopez said that many of those who leave are working part-time, while a greater proportion of new hires are full-time.
Agency data shows an increase in the number of travelers in recent weeks. On Memorial Day weekend, more than 1.9 million people passed security checkpoints on Friday and Monday, the highest number since the collapse in air travel demand in March 2020 when the coronavirus spread across the United States. Last weekend was another day with more than 1.9 million passengers.
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