Budget Limits Air Marshal Staffing

Air marshals are not able to offer maximum protection for an ideal number of flights because a tight budget has led to understaffing, the agency’s head said Tuesday.

“We haven’t had the budget to sustain [full staffing] for a variety of reasons,” Thomas D. Quinn, director of the Federal Air Marshal Service, said in a rare acknowledgment of potential vulnerability for the secretive agency.

“There is an impact,” Quinn conceded. But he downplayed the consequences.

“Is it a significant impact?” he asked. “It’s minimal.”

In a wide-ranging session with reporters, Quinn also defended the marshals’ dress code and personal grooming policy, saying he imposed the requirements after repeated complaints from flight crews about shabbily dressed, unshaven marshals who did not inspire confidence.

“The last thing I ever wanted to do is put out a grooming standard,” said Quinn, a former Secret Service agent. But many marshals say their neat, button-down appearance now makes it easy to pick them out.

The service has grown from a 33-person unit at the time of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks to a $600-million-a-year agency with “several thousand” agents protecting commercial airliners. The exact number of marshals is classified information.

Some independent entities with access to classified data about the agency have raised concerns about staffing levels.

The staff of the bipartisan Sept. 11 commission recommended an immediate assessment to determine “optimal” staffing levels for marshals and airport screeners.

Clark Kent Ervin, inspector general of the Homeland Security Department, said this week that he was concerned about how many flights were covered by marshals.

“We’ve got an issue there,” Ervin said, declining to elaborate.

With 33,000 to 35,000 commercial flights on a typical weekday, it would be impossible for marshals to protect all of them without very high costs.

Teams of marshals now cover more than 5% of flights, Quinn said, and a much higher proportion for high-risk areas such as Washington and New York.

He said agency managers analyze airline schedules to identify “high threat” flights, taking into account the origin and destination as well as the size of the aircraft. Intelligence information is also a factor.

“We narrow that to targeted critical flights, and we try to fly as high a percentage of targeted critical flights as our resources permit us to do,” Quinn explained.

The marshals did reach their fully authorized strength about two years ago, Quinn said, but they were covering fewer flights then because so many agents were in training.

The government is trying several approaches to increase the proportion of flights that have armed officers aboard. Immigration and Customs agents are being trained to work alongside marshals during security alerts. And the Secret Service has agreed to advise the marshals of its agents’ travel schedules for better coordination.

Quinn refused to cast blame for the budget restrictions, calling them the result of intense competition for scarce security resources.

He was forceful, however, in defending the dress code and personal appearance policy that has drawn criticism from rank-and-file agents.

“If [marshals] have to deploy aboard an aircraft to a position of dominance and engage tactically, with weapons in hand, they need to present an image such that the American public doesn’t have to wonder or guess if that is an air marshal,” Quinn said.

A disgruntled minority of agents is responsible for the complaints, he added.

Quinn said the dress code allows individual discretion by requiring marshals to dress professionally, but in a manner that allows them to blend in with other passengers.

Marshals say that has been translated into a mandate that they wear sport coats or suits.