The Federal Air Marshal's took over administration of the program for TSA some time ago. Since then the FAMs have complained they could not keep up with the program due to lack of funds. For over a year now there have been rumors the program would be capped because the budget the FAMs inherited was not growing enough to accommodate the increased numbers equals required every 6 moths. That was their story. I think it is a ploy to get more money for their new responsibility. Money has been diverted from the FFDO program for some time now for increased administrative expenses I can not understand. How much can it cost to administer a program the does not pay the participants one penny? FFDOs pay for their own room and board for training and bear the financial burden of missing work to train. They even pay for their own ammo to practice with. The budget for initial training should not have gone up over the years as long as the numbers of new recruits per year did not go up. It would cost more to requal guys since there are more to requal now then the years before. Big deal. They come in for a few hours and shoot holes in paper with contract range masters running the course of fire and recording scores. Incrementally, it can not cost that much more even if the program doubled. It costs the same to pay the contract guys to run the course with 6 guys on the range as 25 guys on the range. And the excuse that the money is needed for supervisory issues is BS You can't find anything on google because FFDOs do not get into trouble. There is hardly anything to supervise. Airline pilots are an incredibly reliable, procedural, and discipline group. FFDOs are not the ones busted for running drugs past security, trafficking in stolen items, and beating wives. All things federal cops have been accused of doing in the last year or so. In the entire history of the FFDO program there has been one N.D. During that time no federal law enforcement agency had a better mishap rate. Does the Obama administration want to kill the program? Their constituentcy hates guns, they don't believe that airliners are at risk any more, they don't even think we are still at war with those shit heads. The DHS Sec can't bring herself to say the word terrorist, and the Justice Department and DOD can no longer use the term enemy combatant. They have an insatiable appetite for money to do things like map the genome of dust bunnies and build parks in small towns. They don't have to want to kill the FFDO program, they will bleed it to death in their search for more and more money to throw at their constituents. Before the end of the Obama administration the FFDO program may look like the Federal Air Marshal Service did just before 9/11. They had been reduced to a force a a couple dozen active agents from hundreds in the 70s and 80s. I fear we will see the same results.
