TSA has its eyes on the future!
Administrator David Pekoske this week released the second phase of his Administrator’s Intent (AI). AI 2.0 is designed to build on the successes achieved to date and takes into account lessons learned from the COVID-19 pandemic, identifying goals and objectives for TSA through fiscal year 2022.
Pekoske encourages the public to read this important document, which stems from months of robust feedback from representatives throughout TSA and across the nation’s transportation systems.
“Even if you don’t read it cover to cover, just browse through it at the very least,” said Pekoske. “It provides you with information on where we’re headed as an organization. It’s what everybody who’s inside TSA and our external partnerships have said are the things most important for the agency.”
Christina Nelson, executive director of TSA’s Strategy, Policy Coordination, and Innovation team, played a key role in developing AI 2.0 and said the biggest difference between the first version and AI 2.0 is how the focus areas are articulated.
“We defined focus areas in this update to better communicate with employees and our stakeholders on how TSA plans to execute the strategy over the next two years,” Nelson said. “In renewing the Intent, we are not only building off the work done on the first Intent’s objectives but continuing to communicate our plans so we can advance transportation security in a coordinated manner.”
Nelson said it took several rounds of internal and external stakeholder outreach to finalize AI 2.0. “We leveraged our stakeholders to help define what the world around us would look like in 2026, the term defined in the current TSA Strategy. Then, we engaged internally to define what the agency needed to do in the next two years to be successful in that environment. That combined input drove the creation of the focus areas before we solicited objectives from the agency. Even after limiting objectives to the focus areas, we received nearly double the amount of objectives that we ultimately prioritized to make it into the document.”
AI 2.0 was drafted in March, but Nelson said the team pushed the pause button to evaluate how the COVID-19 pandemic may affect what they wanted TSA to accomplish over the next two years.
“What we learned in this period of evaluation was that the objectives laid out set the agency to become more resilient and allow us to adapt to changing circumstances,” Nelson said. “I believe that was a testament to how closely we worked with stakeholders to understand the world around us and set us up for success.”
Pekoske congratulates the entire TSA team and all of the agency’s partners.
“I am proud of the hard work and achievements TSA has made over the previous two years as a result of the first Administrator’s Intent released in 2018 and am confident in our dedicated professionals as we reprioritize our efforts on emerging threats,” Pekoske noted. “If you want to get a sense from a leadership perspective the things most important for all of us to use as leadership principles, please take a look at AI 2.0.”