On October 6, the Administrator told an audience of airport executives that TSA will score customer service at every airport and at the level of the individual officer. All quotations in this article are attributable to the Administrator.
Federal News Network, reporting the remarks the same day, recorded the statement and noted that he did not explain how performance would be tracked.
That is the problem.
What Was Described
"We're going to rack and stack all 430 airports by their customer service." He said airports would be tiered by category. An annual award to the top performing team. The bottom five performing teams named publicly. Then the same measurement applied, in his words, at the micro level, TSO by TSO.
"Sorry, but I'm a private sector guy, and we're not going to tolerate poor customer service."
The methodology already exists. He said a Tiger team has developed it. He did not say when the scoring begins, and he did not describe what it measures.
Who Built It
TSA stood up twelve Tiger teams after the Administrator was confirmed in early August. They ran three to four week sprints at headquarters. Improving customer service was one of the problems they were created to solve. They briefed the Administrator on October 2.
He named the people who came into those rooms. Airport chief executives visited. The Airports Council International, the airlines, and technology companies provided input, and he thanked them for it from the stage.
A keynote is not a personnel record, and we are not asserting from thirty minutes of remarks that no officer was ever consulted. We are noting that when the Administrator listed the people who shaped a standard that can end an officer's employment, officers were not on the list. A published methodology would settle the question. We haven't seen one.
What the Inputs Are
He described the methodology as tracking performance through various sources. Sources, plural. He identified one of them.
Airport passenger surveys measure the airport. They are collected by the airport operator, they are not designed to isolate the conduct of one officer, and an officer has no access to them and no way to dispute what they contain. That is the one input we know about. The rest have not been described.
Why the Methodology Matters More Than the Standard
Courtesy is already part of an officer's job. Nobody reading this needs to be told that public interaction is a part of the job, or that the officer who treats travelers badly makes the work harder for everyone on the checkpoint.
The question is not whether courtesy should count. It is what the record looks like when someone says yours is insufficient.
A performance standard that can end employment has to be measurable, attributable to the individual, and contestable. An officer defending against a charge needs to know what was counted, over what period, from what source, and how the threshold was set. None of that has been published.
What Your Appeal Rights Actually Are
This is where the published record helps, and where it stops.
TSA Management Directive 1100.77-3 took effect February 6, 2026 and established the Officer Appellate Board. The Board takes four categories of action and nothing outside them. A removal is within its jurisdiction. The Board decides whether management proved the charges, whether a nexus to the efficiency of the service exists, and whether the penalty was reasonable, weighing twelve penalty factors.
So an officer removed for conduct has a forum. TSA's own frequently asked questions describe the Board as the sole avenue of appeal for supervisory Transportation Security Officers. The agency has not published comparable language covering everyone else, and we have asked it to.
Whether management proved the charges is the question a missing methodology makes unanswerable. A charge has to be specified before it can be rebutted, and neither the officer nor the Board can test a record that was never written down.
The filing deadlines are unforgiving and most of them cannot be undone. The clock runs from the effective date of the decision, not the date on the letter.
We have published a five part series on the Board. It begins at What an Adverse Action Is and Who Can Appeal One, and the standard of proof and the twelve penalty factors are covered in The Three Questions the Board Answers.
What to Do Now
Read your performance work plan and your most recent appraisal. If courtesy or customer service appears as a measured element, note the exact language and how it is scored today, because that is the baseline against which any change will be introduced.
If you receive counseling, a memorandum, or any documented comment about customer interaction, keep a copy with the date. A track record is built from documents, and the officer who has their own copies is in a materially better position than the officer who does not.
What We Have Asked
Against Giants has asked TSA what the methodology is, what the full set of inputs is, whether airport-provided survey data will be used in individual officer assessments, and when the scoring begins. We will publish the answers.
If a customer service scorecard is implemented at your airport, we would like to see it.
Until the methodology exists in writing, the standard described on October 6 is a consequence without a measurement.
If you want to understand how any of this applies to your own situation, that is a conversation worth having. It costs you nothing. againstgiantsllc.com/get-help.html or info@againstgiantsllc.com