CNN "Anderson Cooper 360 Degrees" - Transcript

Interview

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Representative Darrell Issa is leading this investigation. He's the head of the House Oversight Committee, a Republican. I spoke with him earlier this evening.

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COOPER: Congressman Issa, $184 million of equipment sitting around in warehouses not being used. That seems like just on the face of it an enormous waste of money.

REP. DARRELL ISSA (R), CALIFORNIA: Well, Anderson, it's a small amount of money considering the $13 billion plus dollars of expenditure, but it's part of the sort of tip of the iceberg of what's wrong with TSA. They have over 65,000 employees, over 4,000 that just work here in Washington doing administration.

It's an organization that doesn't seem to have ever developed their plan. Their own inspector general made it clear that they're not making a lot of progress toward efficiency. And their buying practices seem to be more about buy a lot of stuff to look like you're doing well rather than finding out whether a particular piece of equipment will work properly and then fielding it more economically. COOPER: They say, essentially, well, look, a lot of the airports weren't ready for the equipment or didn't have the personnel to staff the equipment.

ISSA: Well, you know, Anderson, I spent a lot of time doing the logistics of a comparatively small company, but a couple of hundred million dollars, as you learn something, one of them is, your vendors are more than happy if you'll prepay to hold the goods and drop ship directly to locations. There's lots of logistic ways to deal with it.

But what we heard today was that in some cases two years after delivery they still hadn't identify the airports for things to go to, which means they bought them without knowing if or when they'd go anywhere. And in the case of what many people remember these so- called puffer devices, they spent a billion, they never worked, and then they didn't know how to dispose of them so they sat in storage for a couple more years.

COOPER: You say the TSA did not even want your investigators to show up. What happened when you showed up on site at the warehouse?

ISSA: The inspector general today has agreed to look into this more thoroughly. But what appears to have happened is that they gave us a list in advance of what was in the warehouse and a dollar figure. And then in the hours, two or so, days before they got there, they brought in extra work early and they liquidated at least 1300 pieces that were not on that inventory that they didn't want to show us.

In other words, they cooked the books to make it look better but did it after they gave us an inventory list. Something that at least in my background in the army, if you tried to smuggle stuff around before an inspector general inspection, you'd go to jail. And so we're deeply concerned that this kind of hiding of flaws is exactly what you don't want when you're doing oversight, whether you're the Congress, inspector general or General Accountability Office.

COOPER: The TSA I know, for their part, said that they weren't trying to hide anything, that the equipment was already scheduled to be moved. Do you not buy that?

ISSA: Well, I can only say what my own employee said to me, which was that he talked directly to warehouse managers who when he asked why there weren't any employees there, he said well, we brought them in especially early to get all this stuff out and so they're gone. In other words, these were not segregated and planned to be gotten rid of. But they had to work overtime to do it.

Again, we've turned that over to the inspector general. It's a distraction because it's not the cover-up in this case, it's what we now know, which is this is an organization that buys before it plans, that hires before it trains, and that uses as an excuse that they don't have enough training when in fact even our Democratic members pointed out that when it comes to morale and effectiveness of leadership, TSA is almost at the very, very bottom of all federal organizations.

We're not talking about the employees, we're talking about the morale of the employees because of bad management.

COOPER: Supporters of the TSA will say that this report is biased that, that Chairman Mica who led the investigation with you has it out for the TSA, wants to privatize the screening. To that you say what?

ISSA: Well, Chairman Mica may have a lot of things and I can't know that. What I can say is that my investigators found an organization in need of improvement with an extremely important job. One that we believe could be done if done by federal workers could be done with less federal workers, better organized with better morale, paid well, trained well with good equipment.

And that's the goal unless Congress and the president change their mind that we're working toward is an organization that instead of being ninth from the bottom in morale and training, in fact starts to look where it needs to be if we're going to keep America safe and people flying efficiently.

COOPER: This obviously comes right on the heels of the discovery of a terrorist plot to blow up an airplane. Should Americans have faith that the TSA is capable of doing what's necessary to keep them safe?

ISSA: Well, Anderson, I think in the case of that failed bombing attempt, we should be proud that the restructured CIA that has been rebuilt in the last decade in fact proactively had agent involved, found this and uncovered it before we ever had to ask the question of would TSA have found it with their equipment, that you may or may not have gone through.

So I'm happy to say CIA did their job. My job is to make sure that the men and women of TSA have the tools and the training they need so that we can be more confident that our fliers are safe. And by the way, we'd like to get them through the lines a lot faster, too.

COOPER: Chairman Issa, I appreciate it, thank you.

ISSA: Thank you.

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