The failed terrorist attack on a packed airliner on Christmas has renewed concerns about the lack of stable leadership at the Transportation Security Administration, the U.S. agency on the front lines in preventing exactly that kind of incident. The TSA has been operating without a permanent top official for almost a year, the result of months of delay by the Obama administration and a political power play by a Republican senator opposed to collective bargaining by government workers. The result, according to some transportation and security analysts, is an agency unable to muster the political will to make the alterations necessary to adapt to changing international threats. 'What doesn't get done as well is leadership and confident direction-setting,' said Stewart Baker, a top official at the Department of Homeland Security in the Bush administration. 'There are plenty of competent people at TSA. But when you are not a political appointee, you have to walk on egg shells a little.' Baker and others say they do not think the security failure of Northwest Flight 253 would have been avoided if President Obama's nominee -- former FBI agent and police detective Erroll Southers -- had been on the job Friday. But they say they doubt that Acting Administrator Gale Rossides, a Bush appointee, has the political connections within the Obama White House and the Democratic Congress to reinvent the agency in ways that get ahead of the terrorists. 'She's competent and knows the system well,' said one transportation expert, who spoke on background because he regularly works with TSA officials. 'But she doesn't want to rock the boat. She's basically there to keep the trains on the tracks.' Several analysts said this week that the events of the past week highlight the need for a permanent TSA administrator to move quickly in a number of areas. They say the TSA must find the resources -- financial and otherwise -- to design a 'checkpoint of the future' that anticipates the emerging threats and to phase out metal detector technology that dates to the early 1980s. The agency also needs to design better ways to share and interpret the reams of passenger data collected by U.S. and foreign agencies, they said. The suspect in Friday's incident, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, would not have been allowed to board if warning signs about him had been properly shared, Obama said this week. And some say the new TSA administrator needs to be deeply knowledgeable about security and terrorism and more willing to be aggressive in shaking up a seven-year-old bureaucracy that does not respond nimbly to the current threats. 'It's critical,' said Michael Boyd, an airline consultant based in Colorado. 'We need an (H. Norman) Schwarzkopf type there who's going say, `I'm going to start thinking like a terrorist.' We don't have that.' A spokesman for the TSA declined to comment on the critique. 