Between July and September, thousands of Transportation Security Administration supervisors, in cohorts no bigger than 24, are set to fly from all over the country to Nevada or Georgia and stay overnight in a hotel for a special training on advanced threat detection.
The training is only four hours.
An internally shared schedule for the training has confused TSA officials as to why the agency is requiring in-person attendance for such a short seminar, and left current and former employees questioning whether the decision runs afoul of the Trump administration’s efficiency goals.
“My gut says it’s neither reasonable nor worthwhile, given the scope of the TSA mission,” a current employee of the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center said.
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The TSA officers, who serve as front-line managers to airport screeners, are expected to travel to either Brunswick, Georgia — home to the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center, the main campus for instruction for more than 100 agencies and subcomponents — or Las Vegas for the classes.
Current and former employees questioned why TSA could not instead have trainers travel to meet staff where they are, noting all the equipment would be available at any large airport. The supervisors said they were happy to receive the mandatory training, but reluctant to travel for such a short program.
A TSA spokesperson said the agency places a high value on the training and development of its employees, but would not comment on specific procedures in order to “protect the integrity of our security operations.”
The notice said the training was designed to equip the supervisory officers “with the knowledge and skills needed to make informed, risk-based decisions and enhance their ability to identify potential threats.”
A longtime TSA training manager who recently retired after more than 30 years of federal service said they could not recall ever seeing the agency flying staff around the country and putting them up in hotels for such an abbreviated training. They struggled to come up with a reason TSA may have taken that approach.
“The topic is pretty standard,” the former TSA training manager said. “Traveling to a training center for a half-day class isn’t the norm.”
They added: “If something is an obviously inefficient or bad idea, there’s often a less obvious rationale for doing it.”
The current Federal Law Enforcement Training Center employee said there could be some exigent circumstances that require flying somewhere for a brief training, as the Federal Emergency Management Agency did after activating employees across government to respond to Hurricane Sandy in 2012.
“This doesn’t sound like that, though,” the FLETC employee said, noting that “flying anywhere for a four-hour training is generally going to be foolish.”
The employee said it was unrealistic to believe that equipment “too large, complex or delicate” to transport for training would also take only four hours to learn to operate.
Chuck Kielkopf, a former senior attorney at TSA who retired in 2024 after two decades at the agency, said the travel “is just fraud, waste and abuse.” It was unlikely, he said, that TSA could work any “practical exercises” into a four-hour block.
“That is a total waste of money,” Kielkopf said. “It can be easily done by sending trainers to the airports for a couple of days and get a huge number of senior TSOs trained at once.”
Another former TSA senior official who retired last year said the half-day training was “an obvious case of ‘let’s just do this remotely.’”
TSA opened the Las Vegas training facility in 2023 after a push by then-Administrator David Pekoske. Kielkopf and the former senior official speculated the new training was created in part to justify the spending on the facility.
The former TSA training manager also suggested the training may have been organized to fill classroom seats.
The agency has shed 3,000 employees under President Donald Trump. The new classes would allow TSA to justify the new training space and use unspent appropriations before they expire, the former manager said.
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