With all the confusion about what and how much you can take on a flight, rude officers and publicly humiliating Roto-Rooter-style cavity searches, the Transport Security Administration is officially tied with every U.S. citizen’s bogey man, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), for the title of the least popular federal agency in the country, a poll shows.
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The TSA had this coming for a while, although you can’t really blame them for doing their job. Security inconveniences were given as the top reason for TSA’s unpopularity by frequent flyers.
Although passengers may be right about humiliating and too-intimate physical patdowns, you have to feel for staff. Not only do they have a highly unpopular image and low pay, but they are also not in a position where they can brag about their successes. With all the hush-hush secrecy that surrounds aviation security, TSA is, as one policy expert puts it, “damned if they do and damned if they don’t.”
So, who do Americans dislike even more then the TSA and IRS? Still reeling from the Katrina disaster, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) takes top honors.