I’m getting a little impatient waiting for Elon Musk to get to the two behemoths of government waste, fraud and abuse, so I’m dropping these in the suggestion box: Please hurry up and zero-out the CIA and TSA.
I attribute the continued existence of these pestilences to Hollywood movies, the imaginary place where CIA agents are competent, and the fact that no one in a position to decide the TSA’s fate flies commercial. The president and members of Congress should all be required to fly out of JFK at least once.
To give the devil his due, the CIA is finally on the cusp of determining whether the Ayatollah Khomeini poses a threat, and what posture the U.S. should take toward the shah. The agency expects to have a report on the president’s desk by the end of the week.
In case you’ve forgotten, just months before Khomeini’s Iranian Revolution overthrew the shah, this multibillion-dollar spy agency concluded that “Iran is not in a revolutionary or even a pre-revolutionary situation” and that “the shah is expected to remain actively in power over the next 10 years.”
Similarly, about a year before the Soviet Union imploded, the CIA reported that the USSR was in good shape and, indeed, “the Soviet economy significantly improved last year.”
The CIA analysts whose job it was to monitor India’s progress on a nuclear program found out India had successfully detonated nuclear blasts the day after it happened, when they woke up and read about it in The Washington Post.
Then there was that shining exemplar of competence in 1999, when the U.S. accidentally bombed the Chinese embassy in Belgrade because the CIA had failed to update its addresses of foreign embassies. (In its defense, the CIA did mail the Chinese embassy one of those “Haven’t heard from you in a while!” postcards prior to the bombing.)
What good are we getting out of the CIA? Its defenders claim that we never hear of all the dastardly plots it foiled. So why don’t they tell us? Sorry, that’s “classified.”
The agency sure missed a few big ones. It didn’t see 9/11 coming, much less the next dozen terrorist attacks on U.S. soil committed with foreign assistance.
The CIA’s most successful mission was against its own country, meddling in the 2020 presidential campaign by publicizing that not-at-all-political letter, organized by CIA acting director Michael Morell and signed by “51 intelligence officers,” warning Americans that Hunter Biden’s laptop was “Russian disinformation.”
USAID was bad, but it cost only $40 billion in U.S. taxpayer money every year to make the world a gayer, blacker, more transgender and matriarchal place. The CIA burns through nearly 2 1/2 times that much money every year, and we’d be better served if the agency literally burned the money.
With the savings from getting rid of this useless agency, we should hire the Israeli intelligence guy who came up with the exploding beeper idea. We can pay him whatever he wants — up to $106 billion.
Want to be popular? Abolish the TSA. Mostly a full employment program for “body positive” gals who didn’t work out at Target, TSA is doing something that doesn’t need to be done and failing at it.
The 9/11 attacks were a sucker punch that can never be repeated. Now, passengers know that hijackings don’t always end with a safe landing in Cuba. They aren’t going to sit quietly while vastly outnumbered terrorists try to turn the plane into a missile.
As the TSA itself admits, it is guarding against a threat that doesn’t exist. In classified legal filings from 2013, the agency acknowledged that terrorists “are not known to be actively plotting against civil aviation targets or airports” and “there have been no attempted domestic hijackings of any kind in the 12 years since 9/11.”
The only protection we ever needed was hardened cockpit doors and the knowledge that there are lunatics in the world who would use a commercial flight for a kamikaze attack. (Another great defensive measure would be to stop letting those lunatics come into our country.)
Every year, Homeland Security agents posing as passengers try to get mock weapons and explosives through TSA screening, and every year, 80% to 95% of the handguns, hacksaws, sticks of dynamite, surface-to-air missiles and other banned items get through. (Luckily, the government took quick action to remedy this catastrophe: It now hides the results. Yes, the TSA’s pass/fail rate is “classified” information.)
TSA screening accomplishes nothing except to waste 400 million hours of Americans’ time every year. Four hundred million hours. Over 20 years, that’s 8 billion hours of the government irritating us that could have been spent enjoyably or productively, at the beach, playing with children, curing cancer or colonizing the moon.
Here’s an idea I came up with in less than 400 million hours: Let the airlines do their own screening. They don’t want their planes crashing into buildings, but they also don’t want to annoy the crap out of their customers. (Except Delta, where “Annoying the Crap Out of Customers” is their motto.) The vast majority of passengers are already known to them. More than 80% of flyers are in frequent flyer programs.
I recognize that good policies can have negative consequences that spill over into innocent lives. With that in mind, we’ll have to make sure any grandmothers who still want to be anally probed for no reason whatsoever can be accommodated, but that’s precisely the kind of thing the free market can deliver.
