There is so much going on this year and it is only January! The United States has a new president and he is busy firing and installing a new administration. The head of the Transportation Security Administration and the leader of the Coast Guard are among the first to be fired. David Pekoske, administrator of the TSA, was fired on the first day of his second presidency, even though Trump had appointed Pekoske in his first administration.
Pekoske oversaw a November notice of proposed rulemaking that would require a slew of pipeline, freight railroad and passenger railroad owners and operators to establish cybersecurity risk management programs that aim to help the surface transportation landscape respond to digital incidents.
It followed earlier rounds of TSA cybersecurity rules under Pekoske, born out of the 2021 Colonial Pipeline hack that motivated the former Biden administration to invigorate the U.S. cyber posture.
The Coast Guard commandant, Admiral Linda L. Fagan, was also fired before her term was up on the newly sworn in president’s first day in office. Admiral Fagan was the first female uniformed leader of a branch of the armed forces and was generally lauded by her predecessors and other leaders in the Coast Guard. It was reported that Fagan learned she had been fired while waiting to take a photo with Trump at the Commander in Chief Ball on Inauguration Day.
Vice Commandant Adm. Kevin Lunday will take over as acting commandant, according to a Coast Guard internal message. Lunday confirmed he took over as acting commandant in a message to the service. “Our duty to our nation and the American people we serve remains unchanged, and the Coast Guard remains Semper Paratus.”
Will these rash firings weaken our security status or will their replacements come in strong? Stay tuned.
On an unrelated and slightly less serious note, I wanted to mention a movie I saw recently on Netflix called Carry-On. While the movie is full of plot holes and inaccuracies, I mention it because the dedicated people who work as airport screeners are not often the subject of Hollywood movies. But, this is exactly the case in this movie. The hero, and he is a hero, is played by Taron Egerton and he is spurred to be a better man when he finds out his girlfriend is pregnant. But he picked a bad day to start.
Egerton’s Ethan Kopek is a TSA screener and his partner Nora, played by Sofia Carson, is a bit higher up the food chain at LAX and she encourages him to reapply for the police academy, a dream he had given up on. A criminal-for-hire, played by actor Jason Bateman, needs something smuggled through airport security and due to Ethan’s striving to do better, he ends up behind the scanner on the line the evildoer has targeted.
Ethan becomes the new mark and finds himself in possession of an earpiece. Bateman’s character, referred to as the Mysterious Traveler, tells him that he must let one bag through in exchange for Nora’s life. A classic dilemma. A game of cat-and-mouse ensues, in which Ethan tries to disrupt this scheme. The bag, a suitcase filled with a lethal and incurable nerve agent, is intended to make it on board a flight on which a member of Congress is traveling to JFK. She is the target, and they intend to kill her for political reasons.
Now, I don’t want to overhype this movie. As I mentioned, it’s full of plot holes and inaccuracies — it reminded me of a made-for-TV movie from the ’80s. It was a bit cartoonish in parts. But one thing they got right in the movie has stuck with me since watching it and I wanted to share it with you. This movie portrays the men and women who undertake the daily grind of the frontline screening of passengers as competent, serious and sincere in their desire to protect the traveling public.
Every once in a while, it’s good to remind ourselves of our mission and why we do what we do. For the many people working in airport security, that mission is “to protect the nation’s transportation systems to ensure freedom of movement for people and commerce.”
TSA mentions integrity, respect and commitment as core values and hard work, professionalism and integrity as expectations in the workforce.
Surprisingly, this movie does a pretty good job of showing those values. You can check it out, as mentioned, on Netflix.