This went on for months at Honolulu International Airport, according to an audit released by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Inspector General. It gets better. Supervisors from the DHS agency in charge, the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), admitted they knowingly violated the rules.

In some cases TSA officers “were not screening any bags at all” for overseas flights, TSA Administrator John Pistole admits. Pistole also agrees with many of the abhorrent things his agency watchdog uncovered, acknowledging “widespread and frequent failures” in security at Honolulu Airport. Dozens of TSA officers and supervisors have actually admitted they knew they were blowing off the rules.

So now what? TSA says it fired more than 30 workers, including its Hawaii-based security director. In its report the DHS IG recommends the obvious; that the TSA better supervise and monitor staffers in Honolulu and that supervisors ensure assigned staff are performing screening duties in accordance with all standard operating procedures. This goes without saying and shouldn’t have to be put in writing by an agency watchdog.

The report is simply the latest of many outlining serious problems with airport security. Congress created the monstrous, 65,000-employee TSA after the 2001 terrorist attacks to secure the nation’s transportation system—mainly aviation—yet the agency’s transgressions have been well documented in a variety of federal audits.

Over the summer a congressional audit revealed that the TSA is so inept the country remains inexcusably vulnerable to a repeat of 9/11. That’s because, according to the probe, the TSA fails in one of its key missions; to properly vet foreign flight students before they can take lessons or get a pilot’s license in the U.S. Remember that Islamic terrorists trained as pilots at U.S. aviation schools before intentionally crashing planes into the World

Over the years the TSA has also committed a number of other transgressions, including regularly missing guns and bombs during random tests at major U.S. airports and failing to meet federal standards by not screening cargo and passengers on hundreds of thousands of planes. Last fall a scathing report issued by a House Transportation Committee called for an overhaul of the TSA, saying that the bloated agency has failed miserably to fulfill its mission. The TSA has “grown into an enormous, inflexible and distracted bureaucracy” that has lost its focus on transportation security, according to the committee’s report. It further states that the TSA “lacks administrative competency” and “suffers from bureaucratic morass and mismanagement.”

In another zinger earlier this year, the former head of the TSA called the agency a national embarrassment that’s hopelessly bureaucratic and disconnected from the people it is meant to protect. In a newspaper article promoting his new book about the agency’s inner workings, former TSA had Kip Hawley assures that “airport security in America is broken” yet it has transformed air travel into an “unending nightmare for U.S. passengers and visitors from overseas.”

It’s as if Abbott & Costello are in charge of airport security in the United States. Otherwise how could one explain the many transgressions of the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), the monstrous agency created by Congress to secure the nation’s transportation system—mainly aviation—after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. It’s generously funded to the tune of billions annually and has 65,000 employees yet can’t get the job done.

Just a few months ago a federal audit trashed the TSA, essentially saying that the DHS agency is so inept, the country remains inexcusably vulnerably to a repeat of 9/11. That’s partly because it doesn’t adequately screen luggage and passengers but mainly because it fails to properly vet foreign flight students. Remember that the Islamic terrorists who intentionally crashed planes into the World Trade Center and Pentagon trained as pilots in U.S. aviation schools and the TSA is supposed to make sure it doesn’t happen again.

Other mishaps include approving background checks for illegal immigrants to work in sensitive areas of major U.S. airports, guns and bombs regularly getting past officers during random tests and failing to meet federal standards by not screening cargo.  When a loaded gun slipped through “security” at Los Angeles International Airport last fall, the TSA appeared particularly stupid, saying it was another agency’s “issue” because its “mandate is to screen baggage for explosives” not loaded guns.

Considering this history, it may not seem all that surprising that the agency hired a defrocked priest with a shady history as a security officer at a major U.S. airport. The man, Thomas Harkins, was removed from the ministry by the Diocese of Camden over allegations that he had molested a pair of grade-school girls, according to the news report.  He was never criminally prosecuted but the diocese doled out nearly $200,000 to settle civil lawsuits.

At Philadelphia International Airport Harkins, who earns $75,600 a year, oversees screening operations for checked baggage but he once patted down airline passengers as they went through the facility’s security checkpoint. The TSA admits in the story that it never completed his background check. Here’s why; he was hired at a time when the agency was initially “staffing up” to protect airports from terrorists and background checks were often not completed.

That’s essentially what the latest of many federal audits reveals about the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), the massive, 65,000-employee Homeland Security agency created by Congress after the 2001 terrorist attacks. The seemingly elusive mission is to secure transportation by adequately screening luggage, passengers and properly vetting foreign flight students.

After all, Islamic terrorists, trained as pilots at U.S. aviation schools, intentionally crashed planes into the World Trade Center and Pentagon. When Congress created the TSA a year later, one of its key duties was to scrutinize all foreign flight students before they can take lessons or get a pilot’s license in the U.S. This is essential because the al Qaeda terrorists who piloted the jetliners in 2001 trained in schools in Florida, Arizona and Minnesota.

As the 11^th anniversary of the attacks approaches, the TSA’s Alien Flight Student Program (AFSP) still fails to screen foreign nationals who enroll in U.S. flight schools, according to a report published this week by the Government Accountability Office (GAO), the investigative arm of the U.S. Congress. In fact, the agency isn’t even keeping its database of background checks up to date and investigators found that records were missing for 25,000 foreign nationals who trained as pilots here.

It gets better. The TSA’s special program doesn’t even bother to determine if the candidates are in the country illegally. This has been reported before. In fact, well over a year ago a flight school in Stow Massachusetts, a rural community about 25 miles west of Boston, made headlines because it was operated by an illegal immigrant who somehow got a U.S. pilot’s license and more than 30 illegal aliens, cleared by the TSA, were enrolled and training to fly planes.   

Pilots are actually licensed by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), but the agency relies on the TSA for criminal and immigration background checks. The TSA is also responsible for clearing airport workers who enter secure areas. In previous years the agency actually approved background checks for illegal immigrants to work in sensitive areas of busy airports in various parts of the country.

Considering this, the GAO puts it way too diplomatically by saying “weaknesses exist in the vetting process” for “identifying flight students who may be in the country illegally.” Investigators recommend that the TSA “identify how often and why foreign nationals are not vetted under AFSP and develop a plan for assessing the results of efforts to identify AFSP-approved foreign flight students who entered the country illegally.”

Don’t hold your breath. It’s been more than a decade and the TSA can’t get its act together, despite being generously funded by Congress. The agency’s many transgressions have been well documented over the years and include regularly missing guns and bombs during random tests at major U.S. airports and failing to meet federal standards by not screening cargo and passengers on hundreds of thousands of planes that fly over the U.S. annually.

Last fall a scathing report issued by a House Transportation Committee called for an overhaul of the TSA, saying that the inept and bloated agency has failed miserably to fulfill its mission. The TSA has “grown into an enormous, inflexible and distracted bureaucracy” that has lost its focus on transportation security, according to the committee’s report. It further states that the TSA “lacks administrative competency” and “suffers from bureaucratic morass and mismanagement.”

In another zinger earlier this year, the former head of the TSA called the agency a national embarrassment that’s hopelessly bureaucratic and disconnected from the people it is meant to protect. In a newspaper article promoting his new book about the agency’s inner workings, former TSA had Kip Hawley assures that “airport security in America is broken” yet it has transformed air travel into an “unending nightmare for U.S. passengers and visitors from overseas.”

It’s simply one of many shameful lapses for the monstrous federal agency created after 9/11 to protect the nation’s transportation system, mainly aviation. With 65,000 employees and a virtually unlimited budget, the TSA has made headlines over the years for regularly missing guns and bombs during random tests at major U.S. airports, approving background checks for illegal immigrants to work in sensitive areas of busy airports and clearing dozens of illegal aliens to train as pilots just as several of the 9/11 hijackers did.

Just last month, the former head of the TSA said the agency is a national embarrassment that remains hopelessly bureaucratic and disconnected from the people it is meant to protect. Less than a year ago a House Transportation Committee called for an overhaul of the TSA, referring to the agency as inept and bloated. The congressional panel determined that, a decade after its creation, the TSA “lacks administrative competency” and “suffers from bureaucratic morass and mismanagement.”  

This week an alarming federal report, issued by the Department of Homeland Security Office of Inspector General, reveals top ranking TSA managers are not telling the head office about nearly half of the security breaches at the country’s major airports. This compromises security by making it more difficult to spot dangerous weaknesses in the national fight against terrorism, according to the DHS inspector general.  

The facilities and the actual number of breaches were redacted for security reasons, but the audit covers unreported security violations at six major U.S. airports over a 16-month period. The average rate of reported breaches among the six facilities was only 53%, according to the DHS IG investigators. The only airport identified is New Jersey’s Newark Liberty because a senator from that state, Democrat Frank Lautenberg, ordered the probe after reading about a series of security breaches at the facility in his hometown paper. 

In a statement posted on his website, Lautenberg, who is Vice Chairman of the Senate Homeland Security Appropriations Subcommittee, said the new report identifies a “gaping hole” in airport security. He reminds that “the recent attempt by al-Qaeda to take down a U.S.-bound airliner showed us that terrorists are still determined to exploit aviation security gaps in order to attack America.”

What is causing this gaping hole in airport security? Get ready for this; the TSA doesn’t have a comprehensive oversight program to gather information about all security breaches, according to the IG, and therefore can’t monitor trends that could improve security. Furthermore, the TSA doesn’t provide the necessary guidance and oversight to ensure all breaches are consistently reported, tracked and corrected. As a result the agency doesn’t have a “complete understanding of breaches occurring at the nation’s airports and misses opportunities to strengthen aviation security.” This is more than a decade after the worst terrorist attack in U.S. history! 

That harsh assessment comes from the former head of the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), the 65,000-employee agency created after 9/11 to protect the nation’s transportation system. Instead it is best known for compromising national security and invasive, genital-groping personal searches of innocent citizens.

Over the years the TSA has made headlines for regularly missing guns and bombs during random tests at major U.S. airports, approving background checks for illegal immigrants to work in sensitive areas of busy airports and clearing dozens of illegal aliens to train as pilots just as several of the 9/11 hijackers did.

Last year the agency missed a suitcase filled with explosives that blasted after a three-hour domestic flight and it came under fire when a veteran commercial airline pilot exposed grave security flaws at San Francisco Airport. The pilot actually posted video on the internet showing ground crews entering the airfield without undergoing any sort of screening process.

 The TSA has also been blasted for failing to meet federal standards by not screening cargo and passengers on hundreds of thousands of planes that fly over the U.S. annually. This could allow a terrorist to explode a plane with a dirty bomb, biological or nuclear weapon, according to a veteran U.S. intelligence operative who assessed the matter.

In November a scathing House Transportation Committee report called for an overhaul of the TSA, referring to the agency as inept and bloated. Titled “A Decade Later: A Call for TSA Reform,” the report outlines the Homeland Security agency’s endless transgressions and concludes that it has “grown into an enormous, inflexible and distracted bureaucracy” that has lost its focus on transportation security. The TSA “lacks administrative competency” and “suffers from bureaucratic morass and mismanagement,” the report further states.

No wonder the one-time head of the TSA, Kip Hawley, calls it a national embarrassment in a newspaper article promoting his new book about the agency’s inner workings. “Airport security in America is broken,” he says. “The crux of the problem, as I learned in my years at the helm, is our wrongheaded approach to risk. In attempting to eliminate all risk from flying, we have made air travel an unending nightmare for U.S. passengers and visitors from overseas, while at the same time creating a security system that is brittle where it needs to be supple.”

Hawley points out that the TSA’s mission is to prevent a catastrophic attack on the transportation system, not to ensure that every single passenger can avoid harm while traveling. Never again will a terrorist be able to breach the cockpit simply with a box cutter or a knife, Hawley writes, because the cockpit doors have been reinforced, and passengers, flight crews and air marshals would intervene.

A variety of suggestions are offered by Hawley to improve airport security, but the bottom line remains; he no longer heads the TSA and those who do should work to improve the situation. After all, the agency gets monstrous amounts of taxpayer dollars to fulfill its mission. Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano asked Congress to increase the TSA’s budget this year by $459 million to a whopping $8.1 billion. 

This is hardly earth-shattering news about the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) since its many lapses have been exposed through the years in a variety of government probes and media reports. What singles out this particular report, released this week by a House Transportation Committee, is that it goes a step further by calling for an overhaul of the 65,000-employee agency.

Titled “A Decade Later: A Call for TSA Reform,” the report outlines the Homeland Security agency’s endless transgressions since its creation and concludes that it has “grown into an enormous, inflexible and distracted bureaucracy” that has lost its focus on transportation security. The TSA “lacks administrative competency” and “suffers from bureaucratic morass and mismanagement,” the report further states.

TSA’s operations are outdated, more than 25,000 security breaches have occurred at U.S. airports since congress created it and the agency has failed to develop and deploy effective technology despite wasting $39 million to procure special machines that could not consistently detect explosives. The TSA also blew $212 million on a failed passenger observation program that allowed terrorists to board planes on nearly two dozen occasions. This information was attributed to a separate government report published earlier this year.

It’s not like the TSA lacks manpower. Its workforce has swelled by 400%—from 16,000 to 65,000—since it was created and it’s larger than many other agencies, including the departments of State, Labor, Energy, Education and Housing and Urban Development. The TSA has also received nearly $60 billion to secure the nation’s transportation network.

The committee’s recommendations for reform include setting performance standards for passenger and baggage screening operations based on risk analysis and common sense, prioritizing screening resources based on risk rather than a one-size-fits-all system, dramatically reducing administrative personnel and offering the public more transparency involving performance. Sounds rather simple, especially the “common sense” part.  

The bottom line is that the TSA must “refocus its mission based on risk and develop common sense security protocols,” says the Florida congressman (John Mica) who helped write the legislation that created the agency a decade ago. Mica also chairs the House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure that produced the scathing report. In a separate statement he said the TSA “has mushroomed into a human resources bureaucracy of over 65,000 that has lost its transportation security focus.”