“The whole program has been hijacked by bureaucrats.”

The TSA was created after the 9/11 attacks in 2001, and now, a decade later, the author of the legislation Rep. John Mica (R. -Fla.) is saying it should be dismantled.

In an interview with HumanEvents.com Mica said, “The whole program has been hijacked by bureaucrats.”

“It mushroomed into an army,” Mica said. “It’s gone from a couple-billion-dollar enterprise to close to $9 billion.”

As for keeping the American public safe, Mica says, “They’ve failed to actually detect any threat in 10 years.”

“Everything they have done has been reactive. They take shoes off because of [shoe-bomber] Richard Reid, passengers are patted down because of the diaper bomber, and you can’t pack liquids because the British uncovered a plot using liquids,” Mica said.

“It’s an agency that is always one step out of step,” Mica said.

It cost $1 billion just to train workers, which now number more than 62,000, and “they actually trained more workers than they have on the job,” Mica said.

“The whole thing is a complete fiasco,” Mica said.

His words no doubt ring true for many. In the last couple years the TSA has come under more criticism and scrutiny than almost any other government agency. It’s been criticized for giving inappropriate pat-downs to young children and cancer patients, and was sued by Jesse Ventura. Recently, some TSA agents in Florida were accused of illegally trafficking Oxycotin to the Northeast.

But as a writer at Tech Dirt noted, “One could (and perhaps should) note that when Mica wrote the legislation, his particular political party was in power, and now it’s not. So the cynical voice might say that his words are somewhat politically motivated. And one can (and probably should) ask how it was that Mica didn’t expect this kind of result.”

It’s also unsurprising that the creator of an agency which has incurred so much wrath is working to distance himself from it.

Mica’s party spent the better part of the summer gunning for budget cuts. And as Human Events pointed out, the TSA has incurred their own extra expenses over the years:

Federal investigators tracked those cost overruns to recruiting sessions held at swank hotels and resorts in St. Croix, the Virgin Islands, Florida and the Wyndham Peaks Resort and Golden Door Spa in Telluride, Colo.

Charges in the hundreds of thousands of dollars were made for cash withdrawals, valet parking and beverages, plus a $5.4 million salary for one executive for nine months of work.

Mica also said the agency should be privatized. “They need to get out of the screening business and back into security. Most of the screening they do should be abandoned,” he told Human Events. “I just don’t have a lot of faith at this point.”

We’re betting that whoever snuck a stun gun onto a Jet Blue flight recently doesn’t have a lot of faith either.