Government Must Put Safety First, Profit Second

Take your bag to the counter or the curb at any major airport. Hand it over to the attendant. Wave goodbye as it disappears onto the conveyor belt.

If you’re flying domestically, here is the full list of the security checks that are performed on that bag from the moment it leaves your hands until it is stowed in the belly of your flight: Nothing.

There’s a small exception to that rule. If you are one of the tiny minority--no more than 3% to 5% of all fliers--who fit the profile flagged for further review by the airlines’ computerized passenger screening system, your bag is supposed to be scanned for explosives. But, in practice, federal investigators say the airports have failed to scan even the bags of all those selected as the most likely threats. And the bags from everyone else move unimpeded onto the plane without anyone checking them.

“If you are not a selectee, the present policy means the bag goes onto the plane almost always without any explosive detection or screening, and it will stay on the plane even if you are not on the plane,” says Arnold Barnett, a statistician at MIT who has studied the issue.

This is going to get better. In the final aviation security bill Congress approved Friday, airports will be required to process all checked bags through high-tech explosive-detection equipment by the end of next year. But it’s going to take intense congressional vigilance to ensure that the Transportation Department and the airline industry come anywhere close to meeting that goal--and provide reasonable security on checked bags in the meantime.

What’s really remarkable is how little the security of checked luggage has improved fully 13 years after a bomb hidden in a bag not connected to any passenger destroyed Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988. The failure of the industry--and its indulgent regulators at the Federal Aviation Administration--to respond before Sept. 11 offers important lessons that extend well beyond airline safety. Indeed, in an era when federal regulation is often disparaged as little more than meddlesome red tape, the long struggle to ensure bag security shows why regulation is indispensable to protect Americans from health and safety hazards--not only threats like exploding airplanes, but also more common dangers like pollutants in the air and unsafe cars on the road.

Two broader lessons leap from the checked bag saga. One is so obvious it’s often forgotten, especially in an administration, like President Bush’s, eager to limit government: Industry’s first responsibility is to maximize profit, not public safety. Without prodding and mandates from government, business’ inevitable tendency is to resist measures that increase public safety but reduce profits. Only government can make safety the highest priority.

In the 13 years since Lockerbie, the domestic airline industry, concerned about costs, has fought almost every significant initiative to toughen the scrutiny of checked baggage. After the crash, European countries responded in two ways: a requirement that all checked bags be matched to a passenger on the plane and the rapid introduction of explosive-detection equipment.

In the United States, though, the airlines have successfully fought off bag matching by arguing that it would produce too many delays. And they have displayed a kind of passive resistance to the use of the high-tech explosive-detection devices. Since TWA Flight 800 exploded after takeoff from John F. Kennedy International Airport in 1996, Congress has appropriated about $455 million to install 142 of these machines at 47 airports around the country.

The catch is that, while the public pays to purchase and install the machines, the airlines must pay to operate them. And so they haven’t provided the staff to operate these machines at more than a small fraction of their capacity. Federal investigators recently found the machines were checking, on average, 350 bags a day. Their capacity is 225 an hour.

After Sept. 11, the FAA required air carriers to operate the machines continuously. But the Transportation Department’s inspector general revealed last week that 73% of the machines were still not in constant use. Airlines, of course, don’t want their planes exploding. But they also want to hold down costs. And that pressure moves them to strike a different balance between cost and safety than most fliers would. It’s worth remembering that simple equation when companies complain of “over-regulation” on other health and safety dangers.

Here’s the second broad lesson in this story. Since President Reagan’s administration, federal regulators have been required to prove that the benefits of new regulations justify the costs. But the checked luggage debate shows how difficult it can be to accurately measure the benefits of health and safety regulation. In 1999, when the FAA first proposed to require the airlines to scan the bags only of passengers flagged by the computer system, the agency explicitly acknowledged that it would be “more effective in countering the threat” to require that all checked bags were matched to a passenger. But it concluded the additional benefits wouldn’t justify the cost to industry (mostly in delayed flights).

Needless to say, the benefits--economic, social, even psychological--of avoiding another attack on an airplane now look a lot greater than the FAA calculated back then. Which is why the new aviation security bill requires that until all bags are screened by explosive-detection systems, airports examine all of them through other means--including hand searches and the very bag-matching the FAA rejected as too costly in 1999. “I think cost-benefit tests are going out the window as a means test for airline security precautions,” says one Senate GOP aide.

Maybe cost-benefit is out in the skies. But it still looms over rules meant to protect against dangers in the water, or the workplace, or the roads. Government obviously needs to maintain some proportion between the costs and benefits of its actions. But too often the true cost of inaction isn’t apparent until there’s a calamity. That’s a lesson Washington should apply not only to the catastrophic threat of terrorism but also to everyday dangers--from arsenic in the water to smog in the air--against which government also provides the last line of defense.

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Ronald Brownstein’s column appears every Monday. See current and past Brownstein columns on The Times’ Web site at: https://www.latimes.com/brownstein.