Friday
9 Feb 2007
Air Marshal Budget? Sorry Folks, That’s Classified
By Annie Jacobsen in category Federal Air Marshals
Thanks to government transparency, the FY 2006 salaries of all Department of Homeland Security (DHS) employees has been made public. The average salary was $56,334 per employee. The DHS office with the highest-average salary was US-VISIT — with its 115 employees averaging $151,197 a piece. The TSA took home the lowest-average salary award — with its 51,275 employees averaging $36,387 a piece.
Christian Beckner of Homeland Security Watch determined the averages based on raw data he analyzed from a 2,933 page document now available online. Beckner writes:
You can see the full analysis by downloading the spreadsheet which contains the complete analysis. Note that the Federal Air Marshal Service is not included within the scope of this analysis, because statistics on its workforce are classified.
That’s odd. Thanks to government secrecy, the statistics on the Federal Air Marshal Service — and the Federal Air Marshal Service alone — have been classified. What this means is that oversight committees do not have access to how many air marshals have left the beleaguered service, nor are they allowed to know what’s happened to the money that was once earmarked for those air marshals’ salaries. Those positions, according to a series of interviews conducted with former Special Agent-in-Charge (SAC) of the Atlanta field office, Don Strange, have not been back filled — and number as high as twenty-five percent.
Today’s Wall Street Journal article on the Federal Air Marshal Service offers headquarters’ version of those numbers (numbers they — and only they — are allowed to view):
Some marshals say many of their colleagues have quit, although agency officials say defections have been minimal. But Dana Brown, the current director, concedes that the program’s $700 million budget wasn’t enough to sustain any new hires between July 2002 and fall 2006.
But what if Don Strange is right? A twenty-five percent employee loss in a law enforcement agency is hardly minimal, particularly if those positions remain unfilled. No wonder the Federal Air Marshal Service wants to keep its budget secret. And why the special, secretive treatment? Even nuclear budgets and budgets to protect the President are made public.