Why is it that the head of the Transportation Security Administration comes out with his ideas for reform three years after leaving office? Is it the book he’s got coming out next week? That’s part of it. But he supplies the real answer: “TSA’s bureaucratic momentum and political pressures.”

It’s possible to imagine an agency that isn’t directed by bureaucratic momentum and political pressures, but it isn’t possible to produce one. The litany of nonsensical procedures, indignities, and privacy invasions at the airport will not go away until the TSA does.