Sonia Pitt was hired despite heavy baggage.

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MINNEAPOLIS — Less than two weeks after ousting disgraced Minnesota transportation official Sonia Pitt from the job she found at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, the massive federal agency has taken a new step to beef up its vetting of potential hires.

From now on, more job candidates will have their backgrounds searched on Google.

The policy change, put forth by Kip Hawley, the top administrator of Homeland Security's Transportation Security Administration, is one among several signs that the TSA's admitted blunder in hiring Pitt on the heels of her scandalous firing from the Minnesota Department of Transportation has become a serious issue in Washington.

The incident is raising fresh questions about the effectiveness of Homeland Security, which has been dogged by recurring questions of competency since it was created in the spring of 2003 to protect the country from a repeat of sophisticated terrorist attacks.

Members of Congress and a watchdog group say they are alarmed by the hiring of Pitt, who had been fired in November from her executive-level emergency response job at MnDOT.

The 44-year-old Red Wing, Minn., resident failed to return for 10 days from an unauthorized state-paid trip to Washington during the aftermath of the Interstate 35W bridge collapse.

MnDOT said she misspent $26,400 in state funds and made 94 hours of personal calls from her state-paid cell phone to a Federal Highway Administration official with whom she had a relationship.

Homeland Security officials are now investigating why Pitt continued to hold a federal security clearance after her MnDOT dismissal, whether her TSA application was complete and truthful, and whether cronyism or corruption was involved in her hiring.

"The fact that they could hire a woman with such a deplorable record is in keeping with DHS' pattern of incompetence overall," said Melanie Sloan, executive director Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a nonprofit government watchdog group.

Late last year, Sloan's organization issued a report documenting failures and wasteful spending at Homeland Security. It described the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the TSA as the most troubled components of the agency.

Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., is demanding an explanation of Pitt's hiring from Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff. In response, she received a phone call last week from the TSA's Hawley, who said the agency would get to the bottom of it.

Details from the internal investigation could begin to emerge this week.

"The hiring was a mistake of one kind or another," said Ellen Howe, a TSA spokeswoman.

On May 25, Pitt started a $90,000-a-year job at the TSA in Alexandra, Va., as a transportation security specialist, responsible for communications related to financial grants. Her federal hiring came only 10 days after an arbitrator in St. Paul issued a widely publicized decision upholding MnDOT's dismissal of Pitt.

Any Google search of Pitt's name would have returned many detailed stories about Pitt's downfall at MnDOT.