"Securing America's Airports and Waterways: The Role of the U.S. Department of Transportation"

Tuesday, March 28, 2002

Securing America's Airports and Waterways: The Role of the U.S.
Department of Transportation
By The Honorable Michael P. Jackson 
HERITAGE FOUNDATION LECTURE held on March 26, 2002
Produced by the Kathryn and Shelby Cullom Davis Institute for
International Studies
The Heritage Foundation


In 216 B.C., Hannibal invaded Southern Italy and it was a disaster. The
Romans were routed and Rome was not used to this. Rome was used to
winning the war and dominating its world.

So Cicero wrote about how this horrific event, this defeat, this
terrible battle, was received in Rome. He said: "The news was received
in Rome more heroically than any victory and without the slightest signs
of fear. Suggestions of peace did not exist."

I think this line of Cicero aptly characterizes the way the American
people have responded to the terrorist events of September 11. The
slaughter of our citizens and citizens of the world on that day by the
terrorists, the ones that President Bush has called "The Evil Ones," has
really been a source of growing together behind our common purpose to be
strong, to make our country stronger, and to fight back and ward off the
terrorist threat against our nation.

The President's determination to get the job done, I can tell you from
firsthand experience, is unshakeable and calm but determined. He is
determined to get the job done.

THE CHALLENGE

Secretary Norman Mineta and the Department of Transportation team have
tried to take that same type of enduring commitment to the task that I'm
talking about today, which is how to improve security in our
transportation networks--air, land, and sea. It is not something that we
can deal with by flipping a switch and making the problems go away. Our
system is vast and complex, and there are vulnerabilities in it that
must be narrowed, but we can never leach out all of the risk in our
world.

The first night after the terrorists had done their deeds, when we went
back up to the Department and began to try to figure out what we needed
to know before we let airplanes once again take off into our skies, we
were dwelling on this problem and thinking about this question of
narrowing vulnerability gaps and how you do it one step at a time.
That's the process that we began on the night of September 11: one step
at a time to analyze how to make it better, stronger, tougher, and more
impermeable. That's the job that we're about today.

So we have created a very large agency, the Transportation Security
Administration, with the Congress. We had some good vigorous debate in
the Congress about how to structure it, what to do, but we've come upon
a solid structure that will serve us well. It's multi-modally focused.
It is an agency which will have its focus on all modes of transportation
and strengthening all modes of transportation.

This agency will increase the size of the Department of Transportation
by over half again. So we have a very large deployment, a very large
mission, the largest new deployment of federal resources in a new agency
since World War II.

ORGANIZING TO MEET THE CHALLENGE

Today, I wanted to give you an update on how we're doing, what we're
doing, but within a context of talking about this issue: What are the
underlying principles and the underlying process that we are using to
take this challenge on? How are we doing it? What are the things that
drive us in our work?

First, an acknowledgement that the system needs fundamental change. The
old system was the wrong set of incentives to get the outcomes that we
needed, and the performance was just not good enough.

Second, we cannot do this overnight, but there must be an urgency about
our mission. We must have a pace of change which is not business as
usual. We have to build in the capacity to break china and the will to
do so routinely to get this job done.

Balancing Security and Service. We need what Secretary Mineta has said
we need: the balance between world-class security and world-class
customer service. People who routinely sit through these conversations
with the DOT staff are going to get tired, perhaps, of hearing about
this balance of world-class security and world-class customer service,
but we're not going to get tired of trying to deliver it and figure out
what that means and make that work, because it's only in this type of
balance that we're going to be successful in doing what we need to do.

If the lines at airports are two hours long, we will not have people
flying in our system. If people can't be confident that the hassle
factor is manageable, we will not have people flying in our system. By
the same token, if we cannot keep the "Evil Ones" off our airplanes and
deal with the terrorist threat, then we have no business being in
business.

Behaving Entrepreneurially. In addition, a principle that has guided us
is that, in the authority and structure of the new agency, we must build
the capacity to behave like an entrepreneurial organization. We have to
act like an entrepreneurial organization.

We are bolted to and must support commercial business operations. In the
rail industry, in the maritime world, in the airports, whether it's
pipeline security or Amtrak security, what we are about is making
commercial transportation networks work safely and efficiently. So we
have to understand that our job requires us to behave and to be
structured and have a culture that is not your normal government
bureaucratic organization. That is a challenge for us, and one that we
are working on.

Leveraging Innovation. To make all this work, we have to leverage a
spirit of innovation in the job that we have at hand. How are we doing
that? How do we reconcile these things? What are we up to?

First of all, we brought in, even prior to passage of the legislation,
the kernel of the team of advisers from around the government and from
outside the government who would help us think through how to do this.

The first things that we did were to take tools from the private sector,
from large corporations, from consulting firms that manage the merger of
large entities in the government and outside the government, and lay out
a process that was going to allow us to manage and grow. It had nothing
to do with the substance; it had everything to do with management
skills.

There have been piles of ink written about what it means to have an MBA
President, but I will tell you that when the DOT senior management team
briefed this President, he understood intuitively how we cross-walked
the process mapping tools that we were bringing to place with the
metrics and measurement tools that we were bringing not only to run the
stand-up of the agency, but to run the agency itself.

So we've tried to take these tools from the private world and bolt them
into an environment in which they do not typically live.

Deploying Study Teams. To do that, we set in place a whole process of
teams to study individual problems. We started out with about eight or
10 things that had to be resolved in the next two or three weeks after
passage of the legislation. They have now grown to some 40-plus teams,
working on various things from specific technology issues to specific
procurements, to research and development efforts, to human resources
issues, to management and structural organizational issues.

We have deployed a group of folks from, again, outside and inside the
government. We've taken people from multiple agencies, and we have also
brought in people from some of the largest corporations in the world.

We've brought a person from Intel to help us work on procurement. This
individual did Y2K compliance for Intel, a person who is used to a
pretty pressurized environment in which there was no variance around
success. We've got a quality person who helped Selectron win two Malcolm
Baldrige National Quality Awards and is now himself a Baldrige judge.
We've got people from Disney, from FedEx, from Marriott who are working
on measuring success and who are helping us take measurement tools and
quality processes and bolt them into the culture of this new
organization.

So the first thing that we've done is, we've tried to import a spirit of
innovation and excellence and build a quality process into this new
government entity. Then we've gone out and hired some terrifically good
people to work on this over the long haul.

These loaners from the outside will work for a while and go back away
into their real jobs. But we are bringing in John Magaw as Under
Secretary of Transportation for Security to head this new agency,
someone with tremendous law enforcement background experience, putting
this team together.

GETTING THE JOB DONE

How does this spirit of doing business in non-traditional ways manifest
itself in getting the job done? We have some crushing deadlines to meet,
and we are going to meet them.

So far, we have met every single congressional deadline that was written
in the statute, at 30 days, at 60 days, at 90 days. We will meet the
requirements to have all airports covered with a federal workforce by
the end of the one-year period since enactment on November 18. We will
also meet the requirement to deploy explosive detection equipment into
airports around the country by the end of the year. We have no choice
but to do that.

Let me talk to you about four or five big moving parts. First, let me
say a word about the news that was reported yesterday in USA Today about
probing of the system done by the Inspector General of the Department of
Transportation.

A New Way of Doing Business. After the events of September 11, we knew
that we would move to a new and transformed way of doing business in
airports. We asked the Attorney General, the President, the Inspector
General to undertake a comprehensive effort to probe weaknesses in the
aviation environment.

This was the ground upon which we would then construct a training
program, a vulnerability assessment, and a careful analysis of how to
improve this process. Did we find problems? Yes, we did. Did we know
that we would have problems? Yes, we did.

We are using that information. The Inspector General has said that he's
seen measurable improvement over the time that he did this. He completed
the round that we had requested in February when we managed the
transition to federal oversight of the existing contracts. This is
something that we set in motion ourselves, and we have welcomed the
results; it is an important tool that we're using to make the system
stronger and better.

How else are we using tools to manage this massive deployment? We have
five or so big procurements that are underway right now that I think are
transformational.

Security, Screening, and Training. First, we have hired a company to
manage the intake of applications for federal security directors, and
another to manage the intake of applications for the thousands and
thousands of screeners that have to be deployed in 429 separate airports
around the country. For both of these processes, we are managing the
input entirely on-line, using the Internet to gather information and
other tools to drive people to the Internet, such as job fairs and
kiosks in airports, to make it possible to manage this effectively and
efficiently in a cost-effective but useful manner.

We are also about to announce a procurement that will involve a third
party coming in to help us train these screeners, and to do so
systematically using processes and curricula designed by the Department.
We'll have individuals at the Transportation Security Administration to
hire, and then we will partner with some outside resources to do
training in local community colleges, high schools, hotels, airports,
meeting rooms, wherever we need to, all around the country as we bring
these people in and train them.

Then, when they have 40 hours of rigorous training in the school, they
will go out to the real world and have 60 hours of oversight. During
that period, we'll test, probe, and evaluate them. They will have to be
certified on each of the pieces of equipment that they will operate and
maintain. These are five times greater requirements than we have
previously had for the workforce in the airport environment.

The Single Integrator Concept. Next, we are using the concept of a
single integrator to bring the equipment and the training for the
equipment operators that we're going to hire for the explosive detection
systems that we'll be deploying around the country. We have undertaken
contracts with the two currently certified firms that make this
equipment and the explosives detection system, or EDS, machines. We have
also licensed the intellectual property so that we can assign that
intellectual property license to a single integrator, and that
integrator will in turn build equipment and also manage the production,
delivery, training, and maintenance of the equipment that the other
manufacturers will contribute to this puzzle.

If we took all of the capacity of both of the existing firms that
manufacture explosive detection systems, collectively, they don't have
enough capacity to build what we need this year. So the integrator will
help bridge that gap but also improve the product that we're trying to
deliver, make it more effective and make it more efficient.

That is a cornerstone component of it: a performance-based,
incentive-laden contract to improve efficiency and performance. I think
that this will be an indispensable portion of our success this year, and
we'll be working in close partnership with them and the other contracts
that I've just described.

Meeting the Engineering Challenge. Then we will have another set of arms
and legs that we are trying to leverage from the outside world to help
us plan for how you manage this single process and then customize it at
each location. We're sending engineers out to do floor loading analysis
of how we put this equipment into place. We are sending people who will
get local construction permits.

They come with a Gant Chart that says if this is the day in August that
we are going to stand up the Transportation Security Administration with
a full federal workforce, what date in June do we have to start placing
advertisements for employees? What date do we do the background checks?
What date do we get the construction permits to move the equipment
about? What date do we need to bring the deployment team in to begin
training these folks?

This is a significant engineering challenge, to manage it at hundreds of
places simultaneously, and we're using proven tools for large project
management to measure and to pace this work.

IMPROVING AIRPORT EFFICIENCY

There's been a little bit of frustration at the pace of movement in the
Department of Transportation, I think naturally, because we've been
using the first quarter of the year to plan and the second, third, and
fourth quarters of the year to execute. So there's been a lot of
analytical work undertaken that will begin to show its fruit in the
coming months. I'll give you one example.

Process Management. We created at Baltimore's airport, BWI, a laboratory
to test process management. So far, we've been working very intently in
one pier, Pier C, on how to move people through with better security and
more efficiency. We have gotten a 23 percent increase in the per-person
efficiency by tweaking not one thing or two things, but 22 things or 44
things.

There are little changes which collectively have yielded a capacity to
move in the same space, and with essentially the same workers, 500
people an hour moving to 700 people an hour through the same number of
machines. We think that we can make efficiency improvements while we are
making tangible security improvements as well.

Computer Assisted Passenger Screening. In addition, we are working on a
second generation of software tools that will help us more effectively
narrow the focus for who needs additional scrutiny in our airport
environment. This is the so-called CAPS, or computer assisted passenger
screening, program that we currently run, and we will be testing a new
generation of CAPS technology so that we don't have to see grandmothers
and infants being scrutinized as we currently do randomly--and quite
appropriately so, because the randomness is itself a core component of
the strategy that we have.

So we think that we can make significant improvements there which will
make for a meaningful improvement in the way that we do business in
airports.

THE BOTTOM LINE: WHAT WORKS?

There are a lot of moving parts here, and there is much work to be done.
This is just a snapshot of the principles that undergird our approach to
this issue; to our commitment to do it with a sense of urgency; to our
commitment to world-class security and customer service being made to
work in balance both equally well; and to leverage a spirit of
innovation.

This is not the way the government does business. We have been given
broad authority by the Congress to waive procurement, work rules,
employment rules, and to get the job done. We are going to seize all of
those tools, all of that flexibility, and we'll get the job done.

There will be bumps, there will be complaints, there will be griping and
moaning. But as Secretary Mineta has said, in this era, patience is a
form of patriotism. We're going to need folks' patience, but we'll also
accept and welcome and encourage their criticism, constructive or
otherwise, to help us focus on what we have to get done.

One simple question: What works? Nothing else makes a difference. What
works? That's what we need to know, and that's what we need to follow.

--The Honorable Michael P. Jackson is U.S. Deputy Secretary of
Transportation.

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