Government memo to freight forwarders bemoaning the extra costs they'll have to eat to meet new mandates for screening air cargo: Get over it.

"It's not my job to keep all freight forwarders in business," said John P. Sammon, assistant administrator of the Transportation Security Administration for the agency's Transportation Sector Network Management. "My job is to make sure a passenger plane doesn't get blown up. Our role is transportation security. If the stuff goes on FedEx or UPS, so be it."

A civics lesson is the last thing air cargo forwarders are hoping for as they look at new security costs. They say it could cost up to $150,000 per facility to invest in new screening equipment to make sure their consolidated cargo meets the requirement to screen 50 percent of all cargo going on passenger planes by next year and 100 percent by 2011.

"That is a big sum for most small- to medium-sized forwarders competing on characteristically razor-thin industry margins," Brandon Fried, executive director of the Airforwarders Association, wrote in a column on the security rules published in Air Cargo World magazine, a sister publication of Traffic World.

"The government has a responsibility to provide safe, secure transportation systems for the American traveling public," Fried wrote. "However, government leaders seem to have lost sight of the costs and the government's role in securing the homeland."

But Sammon says the cost is the ante for forwarders to participate in shipping in the post-September 11 world. "The price of poker just went up," he said.

Sammon notes TSA is under federal mandates to meet the new screening measures but forwarders have a choice of whether to invest.

"They don't have to do it," he said. "The question for them is, do you want to control your freight? And what is it worth?"

It's not that simple, forwarders say.

"That this is a volunteer program should not detract from the serious economic repercussions posed to those who are forced to 'opt out,' Fried wrote. "Those companies are likely … to face bottlenecks at the airport, causing significant delays as airlines screen their shipments."

Sammon says by including forwarders and doing the screening at their point in the supply chain, TSA is enhancing the forwarding role and heading off the bottlenecks.

"If we just said to the airlines, 'you screen the cargo,' then all of these guys would be hurt," he said. "Trying to do it at the airport, it would be a nightmare."

The TSA lacks the funding and resources to screen cargo as it does passengers and baggage, which are much less complicated, Sammon said. With the congressional mandates, the agency sought the most efficient screening process to keep the supply chain moving, Sammon said.

He acknowledged there have been some hiccups, such as delays with the interim known shipper program that some forwarders say have held up cargo for up to a week. But the delays are not as pronounced as some forwarders claim, said Sammon. "Generally, we have turnaround in less than a day," he said.

Instead of complaining about the cost of the screening measures - or worrying whether a new White House administration will want something different - Sammon said forwarders should take a more active approach. "Other people are out there doing something," he said.

British Airways hopes as many forwarders as possible embrace the certified programs, "Individual forwarders are looking at this in different ways," said David Shepherd, BA''s cargo vice president of the Americas. "The ability to pre-screen and expedite is going to be a selling point."

"We're looking at the TSA requirements as a competitive advantage," said Pilot Freight Services CEO Richard Phillips.

"We're putting extra effort to assure total compliance. If you improve security, you improve other operations. It requires you to be much more methodical in ways you move freight. We keep our known shipper database up to date and secure. We can get into a passenger plane or a freighter."

Pilot says its security certification from the Transported Asset Protection Association is a help. "Some shippers are demanding it," Phillips said.

Several technology companies started TAPA in the 1990s to set standards for secure handling of high-tech goods in the supply chain and the group has broadened its reach to other shippers of high-value goods.

"What we want is very similar to TAPA, to what standards you have to have in place," Sammon said. "Not everyone can play in that market."