TSA to Ignore Highway Hazmat Security

Yesterday the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) made an apparently routine announcement of their web site that the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) was withdrawing an information collection request renewal (ICR) that it had submitted in July. The ICR in question deals with the Corporate Security Review (CSR) program for trucking companies; an ICR I briefly covered back on July 7^th.

Now there are any number of reasons that an agency might withdraw an ICR renewal, but usually they would deal with a change in policy that concerned the covered program. It appears that that is the case here. In the last line of the OMB announcement we find the following ‘short statement’:

“TSA is no longer conducting CSRs on Hazmat entities [emphasis added]. TSA will only conduct reviews on non-Hazmat entities. Therefore the burden has decreased [to just 100 CSRs].”

There was nothing in the initial 60-day ICR notice or the follow-up 30-day notice that indicated that the TSA was reducing the scope of this program. On the contrary the initial notice indicated that TSA was intending on “conducting 500 visits per year” (76 FR 23238); an increase over the 400 visits projected when the information collection program was previously approved by OMB.

Now, I fully understand that the TSA surface security program is severely under staffed and unfunded and shame on Congress for that. But, why anyone would spend their limited resources looking at the security practices of non-hazmat related transportation companies while ignoring those companies that haul potential chemical terrorist weapons is completely unexplainable. Hopefully that is why this modified ICR was withdrawn.