Abolish the TSA and Privatize Airport Security Now
Airport security is far too important to leave vulnerable to political spats.
The argument: Airport security would be more efficient and insulated from politics if it was administered by the private sector rather than a bloated, unresponsive, and unaccountable administrative agency.
WHY IT MATTERS
Congress has again failed to fund salaries for the TSA agents who are responsible for security screening, thanks to the second government shutdown in just a few months. Meanwhile, wait times at some American airports have approached three hours. The federal takeover of airport security after 9/11 has been controversial from the beginning. Although airports are technically allowed to opt into private security through a federal program, the process for joining the program is not designed for either clarity or efficiency.
The 9/11 attacks made clear that security surrounding air travel needed a major overhaul. Nearly 3,000 Americans died because of the systemic failures of the previous system, after all. But the system that replaced it carries two serious liabilities. We are experiencing the first now: when airport security becomes politicized, it also becomes vulnerable to partisan conflict and political brinkmanship. The second—its troubling ineffectiveness—has not had visible consequences. Or, at least, not yet.
TSA agents are classified as essential government employees, which means they must report to work even during periods of shutdown when they are not being paid. The partial shutdown affecting them stems from political conflicts in Washington over reforms to Customs and Border Protection and Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The consequences are predictable: higher absenteeism, staff shortages, and less efficient operations at airports. Although TSA screening and air travel security have nothing to do with immigration policy, agents are required to work without pay while travelers face significant delays and frustration. These disruptions become convenient political leverage, used by each side to score points against the other.
“Although airports are technically allowed to opt into private security through a federal program, the process for joining the program is not designed for clarity nor efficiency.”
All of this might be tolerable if government screening were effective. Yet the TSA and the Department of Homeland Security have long resisted transparency. A report leaked in 2017 found TSA screening operations had a failure rate “in the ballpark” of 80 percent, an improvement over a similar 2015 report showing agents failed to detect weapons and explosives 95 percent of the time. The American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE), which represents TSA agents, warns that privatizing airport security would undermine security and accountability. But it is difficult to see how performance could worsen given those failure rates. Meanwhile, the one major American airport using private screening and dozens of major European airports that do generally operate more efficiently and are at least as safe as TSA-staffed airports.
Privatization would not magically eliminate every problem associated with air travel security. But it would do at least two things. First, private firms are more likely to be responsive to the market mechanisms that would improve service and address employee misbehavior. Second, the use of private security companies, even if funded via government grants, would insulate airport security from politicization. The reduction of basic public functions into political weapons rarely harms politicians, but it almost always harms the citizens those systems are meant to serve.
THE BOTTOM LINE
Efficient air travel is a critical part of the global economy and a part of the daily lives of hundreds of thousands of Americans. While there is a place for government oversight of air travel, citizens are best served by a system that produces the most effective results and faces consequences when it fails. After a quarter of a century trying to prove that it is that solution, the TSA has failed.
Trey Dimsdale, Senior Editor of Law & Liberty at Restoring the West, is president of the AHA Foundation. Follow him on X @TreyDimsdale.
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Great idea. Now for airport traffic control and the post office.
At the time TSA, or something like it was under consideration it was pointed out that the Israelis used private security services at their airports. Few, if any country on earth lives with the daily security threats that Israel experiences. Instead of emulating Israel’s system, we created a whole new federal agency along with the unionized federal workforce that comes with such agencies. A great opportunity was missed.