Thousands of travelers across the country missed flights this past week as more and more Transportation Security Administration employees failed to show up to work because they haven’t been paid for almost three weeks. Ideally, Democrats would come to their senses, drop their attacks on federal immigration law enforcement, and fund the Department of Homeland Security entirely. But even after this most recent government shutdown is resolved, more airports should consider abandoning TSA screening and hiring private security instead. Congress should help them do it.
When Congress created the TSA in the wake of 9/11, it failed to consider the costs and benefits of turning airport security into a federal monopoly. Before DHS existed, just over 16,000 private security employees screened passengers nationwide. The TSA replaced them with more than 40,000 federal workers, a number that has since swelled to 55,000 at an annual cost of $12 billion.
That expense might be defensible if federal screeners were better at their jobs than private ones. But they are not. The limited data available show that private screeners perform as well as or better than TSA employees.
In 2005, the Government Accountability Office found that private domestic screeners significantly outperformed TSA personnel. The same year, the DHS inspector general concluded that TSA screeners were no better at stopping prohibited items than airport screeners had been before 9/11.
Failures have continued. In 2015, an internal TSA inquiry found that undercover agents managed to smuggle banned weapons and explosives past TSA officers at Minneapolis-St. Paul 95% of the time. A later nationwide test found an 80% failure rate.
If the prospect of private security at airports scares you, consider that more than 20 airports, including San Francisco International and Kansas City International, already have private security, and that these have proven to be every bit as safe, if not more so, than TSA screeners. Private security at these airports is also unaffected by government shutdowns.
Democrats are, as always, against private airport security, but not because they want to keep people safe. If that were the case, they wouldn’t be playing games with TSA paychecks right now. Democrats love government-run airports for the same reason they love government-run schools and hospitals: It brings them money. Specifically, campaign money paid by government union employees. Immediately after the TSA was first created, the American Federation of Government Employees unionized TSA screeners.
TSA screeners are governed by the Aviation and Transportation Security Act of 2001, not the Civil Service Reform Act of 1978, so they do not have the full bargaining powers enjoyed by many other unionized federal workers. They cannot negotiate over security policy, screening technology, or deployment decisions. They can, however, bargain over pay, and a portion of that money goes to the AFGE, which in turn helps fuel the Democratic Party’s political machine.
There is no good reason taxpayers should be forced to fund an inefficient and bloated airport security bureaucracy that wastes billions of dollars and millions of travelers’ hours while funneling passengers through advanced imaging machines that have not been proven to improve security. Worse, a share of those taxpayer dollars ends up in union coffers and then in Democratic campaigns.
CALIFORNIA IS A HIGH-TAX STATE, GOV. NEWSOM
The Senate has taken up legislation that would make it easier for airports to move to safer, more reliable private screening. The Abolish the TSA Act would establish an Office of Aviation Security Oversight within the Federal Aviation Administration to regulate private airport-security contractors. That would eliminate the conflict of interest in which the TSA acts as both the monopoly provider of airport screening and its own regulator.
It would also end long lines at security checkpoints caused by government shutdowns.
