Honestly I'm not sure if I should be surprised at how high the cost is, or how low it is. I can't tell if $11 per passenger is ridiculous or not.

How do we put this cost in context?

$11.09 sounds pretty reasonable to me, but like parent, I don't know what to compare it to.

It doesn't even seem like "cost per screening" is a useful metric. What does it mean? What's the problem with it? The issue with the TSA is that it's spending billions at all to no apparent effect. No one cares about its efficiency at doing nothing.

It is 2-10% of a ticket price, for no benefit.

I guessed twice as high, and the number of US air travellers you cited doesn't even account for foreign airlines flying in and out of US airports.

$8.1 billion is a lot of course, and I find the TSA to be a useless bunch, but compared to the defense budget, this is a steal. It's also providing work to 47,000 Transportation Security Officers, most of whom would otherwise be unemployed if the article is to be believed.

On defense budget, their build aircraft carriers, ballistic nuclear missiles and supersonic jets. On TSA budget, they have a bunch of dimwits groping your balls (or whatever you have depending on your sex) and taking naked pictures of you. Oh, and buying scanners that then they have to turn off because they lied about safety tests. Not exactly comparable things.

8.1B USD / 47k employees -> a salary of about 172k. That's pretty good unemployment benefits.

"TSA personnel primarily responsible for screening passengers make between $25,518 and $44,007" [1]

$8.1 billion is the entire TSA budget, it's not just wages for Transportation Security Officers. Looking at the budget [2], total wages for screening personnel are closer to $2 billion.

[1] http://mediamatters.org/research/2010/11/29/fox-panelists-ou...

[2] TSA appropiatons bill, page 32: http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/CRPT-110srpt396/pdf/CRPT-110srp...