The Transportation Security Administration’s (TSA) plan to roll out a third party testing regime this year to help make sure security equipment being offered by various vendors is mature enough to enter the agency’s form test process may not solve any issues and instead may lead to higher costs and delays, an industry official said on Thursday.
TSA’s current test and evaluation processes already take “too long and unnecessarily wastes millions of dollars of government and industry,” T.J. Shultz, director of the Security Manufacturers Coalition, told the House Homeland Security Transportation Security Subcommittee. He said the current process “inhibits competition.”
TSA, working with the National Institute of Standards and Technology, is developing a plan to allow third parties to become part of the test and evaluation process for screening technologies used at airports. The plan is to roll out the Third Party Test Program throughout 2016 and be implemented by year-end, Jill Vaughan, assistant administrator at TSA’s Office of Security Capabilities, said at the panel’s hearing examining challenges in the agency’s acquisition process.
TSA will host an Industry Day in February to further discuss the third party testing program, which Vaughan said would “greatly increase the level of transparency so manufacturers and industry can better understand how mature their product is before they enter in our formal testing process.” She said the upcoming Industry Day will allow TSA to “socialize” its plans with companies and obtain feedback, adding that the third party testing will streamline and speed up the test and evaluation process.
The Government Accountability Office (GAO) in December 2015 cautioned that TSA had yet to finalize important parts of its third party testing plan, including not knowing how many testers might be able provide services, which if not enough could lead to higher costs. GAO said TSA believes that the program will result in less retesting having to be done but also cited agency officials as saying there are no guarantees that the acquisition process will be shortened.
Shultz said the SMC, which represents a number of companies in the security detection space, endorses GAO’s findings. He cautioned that it’s not known if TSA would accept the findings of third party testers and asked Congress to monitor the program and provide the “resources TSA needs to set up and support a workable system.”
The Department of Homeland Security is currently responsible for all aspects of testing of transportation security technologies.
Vaughan in December and again on Thursday said her office is working on an overall systems architecture aimed at increasing interoperability and commonality among detection technologies at the checkpoint so that the various technologies can “talk together.” She said that this “open architecture” and “system of systems” approach would enhance competition by enabling third parties, including more small businesses, to have a chance to compete to have their technologies included as part of screening systems and create a more flexible and adaptable approach to enable these systems to evolve to meet changing threats.
Shultz said that as TSA moves ahead with its systems architecture that industry needs to be “closely involved” because companies have “spent tens of millions of dollars” in research and development to create better technologies. Standardizing the security equipment “could indeed stifle innovation,” he said.
Security equipment manufacturers are also concerned about losing their proprietary data related to their respective systems.