John Mica: “At this point I was planning to offer to the House and to the committee for its consideration, as we consider one of the…”

“At this point I was planning to offer to the House and to the committee for its consideration, as we consider one of the most important appropriations measures that the House will consider, and that's for our homeland security, I was prepared to offer an amendment here at this juncture to limit some of the funds that are made available to the Transportation Security Administration. My intent is, I think, well founded in having had the opportunity to review TSA's operations, actually one of the individuals responsible for creating TSA back after the events of 9/11, when we had to put in place a transportation security measure and operation for the Nation which we didn't have prior to that. When we set up TSA, and particularly where we provided for a new way of aviation passenger screening, we actually created two models: one, a private sector model, which is the Federal setting of guidelines and all of the rules for conducting screening and then Federal operation of the screening; but also a second model, which was Federal Government setting the rules and the protocols for operation but using private screeners. We set up five models of different-sized category airports to test this and see how it would work, testing the all-Federal model against the Federal model with private operators.…”