Are we safer now?

Recent reports about the loss or theft of Transportation Security Administration badges, patches or uniforms from airports around the country, including Portland and SeaTac, highlight the continuing vulnerability of our commercial aviation system to attack or sabotage.

This should trouble anybody who remembers Sept. 11 and assumes the government has acted since then to close the gaps terrorists sauntered through on their way to causing carnage in New York and Washington.

In response to the events of that terrible day five years ago, the White House created -- and Congress approved -- creation of a sprawling bureaucracy called the Department of Homeland Security. It was a cobbled-together superstructure of 22 sub-agencies, from the Federal Emergency Management Agency to the U.S. Coast Guard, and it was plagued with infighting, recruiting problems and policy uncertainty.

As every air traveler knows, the new department, through the Transportation Security Administration, placed its greatest emphasis on improving airport security. Whether this was the wisest allocation of resources is debatable, but the result has been the hiring of an army of screeners, enforcement of strict new procedures for travelers and their luggage, establishment of a vast new database and other, less-visible changes.

But recent reports in the media and by the General Accounting Office suggest a disturbing lack of progress -- and outright bungling -- that should alarm the people the TSA is supposed to protect.

Most recently, a San Antonio television station used the Freedom of Information Act to get the TSA to acknowledge that its employees had lost track of 1,400 identification items, from badges to shirts, since 2003. Some of them, perhaps, are listed on eBay today.

In a withering report earlier this year, the Government Accountability Office told Congress that the TSA raced to install technologies for its Secure Flight program before it knew how or if they will work to identify suspicious passengers.

In response to that report, TSA director Edmund Hawley said in February he would "re-baseline" the program to make sure it used industry-best practices for implementation and management. This after four years and $130 million has been spent to launch the program.

The agency's screeners have a higher-than-government-average rate of turnover. This stretches the TSA's ability to adequately monitor passenger and cargo traffic at the nation's airports, while making it a constant challenge for the agency to vet, train and retain its workforce.

America's citizens and politicians seem quite willing to debate domestic security measures in the context of broad policy questions, such as illegal immigration and maritime port management. But real security questions are addressed every hour of the day in our airports, where there is disturbingly little sense of urgency.

The Oregonian