Fourteen years post-9/11, the U.S. has committed no small amount of treasure and lives in the Global War on Terror (GWOT). Almost a decade-and-a-half in, it is difficult to say if the effort has been worth the cost. Government was reorganized, creating the Department of Homeland Security out-of-hide from several other departments. DHS’ creation brought to life an entirely new creation: the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) and its 55,000 + employees (2014 numbers) with an annual budget of almost $7.4 billion (also 2014 numbers). In their book Terror, Security and Money, Mueller and Stewart claim that U.S. expenditures in the first decade after 9/11 exceeded one trillion dollars.
The Federal Air Marshal Service (FAMS) was reborn in this post-9/11 reboot of government. Now firmly ensconced as part of TSA (after some initial shuffling among agencies), the FAM Service represents a significant portion of the overall TSA budget. Rep. John Duncan (R-Tenn.), a key member of the House Oversight Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, has been quoted referring to the Federal Air Marshal Service (FAMS) as “one of the least needed organizations in our entire federal government.” He has called the program “ineffective” and “irrelevant.” (Serrano, LA Times, October 2015) According to Duncan, the benefit has not been worth the estimated cost of $9 billion over the past decade.
If this last number is to be believed, there is no doubt the FAMS is an incredibly expensive piece of government. What is hard to pin a number on, however, is an authoritative cost-benefit analysis of the FAM program. In their book Mueller and Stewart make an effort to quantify the amount of risk the Federal Air Marshal Service buys down in the transportation sector. Since most numbers associated with the program are not in the public domain (if they are even known at all), the authors had to make a great many assumptions in order to describe the financial costs of the program and balance them against the financial benefits. They concluded that the Federal Air Marshal Program fails a cost-benefit analysis, meaning it is more expensive than it is worth.
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