[Infowarrior] - FAMS: ‘The most needless, useless federal agency"

[Richard Forno]

(c/o DS)

http://www.gsnmagazine.com/cms/features/news-analysis/2205.html

OPINION / Federal Air Marshal Service: ‘The most needless, useless
agency in the entire Federal Government’

By Rep. John Duncan Jr. (R-TN)

Published June 23rd, 2009

[Remarks delivered on the House floor on June 19, 2009.]

Probably the most needless, useless agency in the entire Federal  
Government is the Air Marshal Service.

In the Homeland Security Appropriations bill we will take up next  
week, we will appropriate $860 million for this needless, useless  
agency. This money is a total waste: $860 million for people to sit on  
airplanes and simply fly back and forth, back and forth. What a cushy,  
easy job.

And listen to this paragraph from a front-page story in the USA Today  
last November: “Since 9/11, more than three dozen Federal air marshals  
have been charged with crimes, and hundreds more have been accused of  
misconduct. Cases range from drunken driving and domestic violence to  
aiding a human-trafficking ring and trying to smuggle explosives from  
Afghanistan.''

Actually, there have been many more arrests of Federal air marshals  
than that story reported, quite a few for felony offenses. In fact,  
more air marshals have been arrested than the number of people  
arrested by air marshals.

We now have approximately 4,000 in the Federal Air Marshals Service,  
yet they have made an average of just 4.2 arrests a year since 2001.  
This comes out to an average of about one arrest a year per 1,000  
employees.

Now, let me make that clear. Their thousands of employees are not  
making one arrest per year each. They are averaging slightly over four  
arrests each year by the entire agency. In other words, we are  
spending approximately $200 million per arrest. Let me repeat that: we  
are spending approximately $200 million per arrest.

Professor Ian Lustick of the University of Pennsylvania wrote last  
year about the money feeding frenzy of the war on terror. And he wrote  
this: ``Nearly 7 years after September 11, 2001,'' he wrote this last  
year, "what accounts for the vast discrepancy between the terrorist  
threat facing America and the scale of our response? Why, absent any  
evidence of a serious terror threat, is a war to on terror so  
enormous, so all-encompassing, and still expanding?"

The fundamental answer is that al Qaeda's most important  
accomplishment was not to hijack our planes but to hijack our  
political system.

"For a multitude of politicians, interest groups and professional  
associations, corporations, media organizations, universities, local  
and State governments and Federal agency officials, the war on terror  
is now a major profit center, a funding bonanza, and a set of slogans  
and sound bites to be inserted into budget project grant and contract  
proposals.''

And finally, Professor Lustick wrote: ``For the country as a whole,  
however, it has become maelstrom of waste.'' And there is no agency  
for which those words are more applicable than the Federal Air Marshal  
Service.

In case anyone is wondering, the Air Marshal Service has done nothing  
to me, and I know none of its employees. But I do know with absolute  
certainty that this $860 million we are about to give them could be  
better spent on thousands of other things.

As far as I'm concerned, it is just money going down a drain for the  
little good it will do. When we are so many trillions of dollars in  
debt, a national debt of over $13 trillion, we simply cannot afford to  
waste money in this way.