Silk Plants and Air Security

It's getting hard to find even a lousy bag of pretzels on an airline flight these days. But the penny-pinching spirit had yet to arrive in 2002 at the Transportation Security Administration, the federal agency in charge of air security. A draft of an upcoming Inspector General's report from the Department of Homeland Security charges that the agency's sleek Transportation Systems Operation Center, which opened in the Washington suburbs in 2003, was plagued by mismanagement and overspending. The report charges that some of the $500,000 listed under "equipment and tools" was spent on silk plants and decorative artwork. And in addition...