[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 155 (2009), Part 12]
[House]
[Page 15770]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                      FEDERAL AIR MARSHAL SERVICE

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentleman from Tennessee (Mr. Duncan) is recognized for 5 minutes.
  Mr. DUNCAN. Madam Speaker, probably the most needless, useless agency 
in the entire Federal Government is the Air Marshal Service.
  In the Homeland Security Appropriations bill we will take up next 
week, we will appropriate $860 million for this needless, useless 
agency. This money is a total waste: $860 million for people to sit on 
airplanes and simply fly back and forth, back and forth. What a cushy, 
easy job.
  And listen to this paragraph from a front-page story in the USA Today 
last November: ``Since 9/11, more than three dozen Federal air marshals 
have been charged with crimes, and hundreds more have been accused of 
misconduct. Cases range from drunken driving and domestic violence to 
aiding a human-trafficking ring and trying to smuggle explosives from 
Afghanistan.''
  Actually, there have been many more arrests of Federal air marshals 
than that story reported, quite a few for felony offenses. In fact, 
more air marshals have been arrested than the number of people arrested 
by air marshals.
  We now have approximately 4,000 in the Federal Air Marshals Service, 
yet they have made an average of just 4.2 arrests a year since 2001. 
This comes out to an average of about one arrest a year per 1,000 
employees.
  Now, let me make that clear. Their thousands of employees are not 
making one arrest per year each. They are averaging slightly over four 
arrests each year by the entire agency. In other words, we are spending 
approximately $200 million per arrest. Let me repeat that: we are 
spending approximately $200 million per arrest.
  Professor Ian Lustick of the University of Pennsylvania wrote last 
year about the money feeding frenzy of the war on terror. And he wrote 
this: ``Nearly 7 years after September 11, 2001,'' he wrote this last 
year, ``what accounts for the vast discrepancy between the terrorist 
threat facing America and the scale of our response? Why, absent any 
evidence of a serious terror threat, is a war to on terror so enormous, 
so all-encompassing, and still expanding?
  ``The fundamental answer is that al Qaeda's most important 
accomplishment was not to hijack our planes but to hijack our political 
system.
  ``For a multitude of politicians, interest groups and professional 
associations, corporations, media organizations, universities, local 
and State governments and Federal agency officials, the war on terror 
is now a major profit center, a funding bonanza, and a set of slogans 
and sound bites to be inserted into budget project grant and contract 
proposals.''
  And finally, Professor Lustick wrote: ``For the country as a whole, 
however, it has become maelstrom of waste.'' And there is no agency for 
which those words are more applicable than the Federal Air Marshal 
Service.
  In case anyone is wondering, the Air Marshal Service has done nothing 
to me, and I know none of its employees. But I do know with absolute 
certainty that this $860 million we are about to give them could be 
better spent on thousands of other things.
  As far as I'm concerned, it is just money going down a drain for the 
little good it will do. When we are so many trillions of dollars in 
debt, a national debt of over $13 trillion, we simply cannot afford to 
waste money in this way.

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