So the answer to long airport lines isn’t, apparently, for Republicans to reach a deal with Democrats that funds DHS while also implementing ICE reforms. It’s simply to hand over airport security to the private market.
We don’t really know what fully privatizing the TSA would accomplish because there hasn’t been a ton of good data collected and analyzed about the private airport security that exists now. The TSA was created in the immediate wake of 9/11, replacing passenger screening that had been handled by airlines, which often contracted with private companies. But in 2004, Congress passed a law creating a TSA pilot program that allowed airports to apply to hire private companies to perform security screenings overseen by the agency. The Screening Partnership Program became permanent after the pilot ended, and 20 airports use it today. Most of them are small, but participants include San Francisco’s and Kansas City’s international airports. In a sense, using private companies to screen passengers goes back to pre-TSA days, but today they have to follow the same stricter rules and procedures that TSA screeners do, and they have to qualify to be a TSA vendor. There are 27 companies eligible to provide airport screening, and many also provide security for other government agencies and buildings.
Early reporting from the program failed to account for the costs of things like employee benefits, and didn’t fully compare private company performance metrics to the federal government’s performance metrics. The GAO recommended in 2012 that the TSA regularly report that data to Congress, but there hasn’t been a comprehensive evaluation since then. So it’s hard to say whether the program is more cost-effective.
Sherman said one thing privatization wouldn’t change is the stressful and demanding nature of the job. She pointed to a 2023 GAO study on morale of TSA screening officers and found that they had low job satisfaction, despite a small improvement in morale from a recent raise. It’s hard for them to call out sick, take breaks, or find opportunities for advancement because of the demands of the job, leading to a lack of work-life balance and complaints about management practices. “This is a difficult job,” she said. Private-sector contractors face the same demands in the same environment. “Being at the airport, how the shifts run, the kind of customer interactions because everybody wants to just get on their flight, because all of the technologies and procedures for screening are exactly the same, even though the individual is being paid by someone else, those pressures remain,” she said.
Republicans have been calling to privatize chunks of the federal workforce since the Reagan era, and the results have been mixed. Elliott Sclar, an urban planning professor at Columbia University, wrote in a 2001 book that it is too complex and inefficient to transfer some public services to the private domain. And he argues that Americans are so suspicious of the government that anything that could have been privatized likely has been by now. “The reason we have so little privatization despite two decades of an ideological full-court press to change that is because Americans are also pragmatists,” he wrote.
It’s clear that the Trump administration has an ideological interest in dismantling the federal workforce, whether it’s good for the U.S. or not. This is the second time in Trump’s second term that a fight over funding has shut down at least some federal agencies, and voters increasingly disapprove of his leadership and that of the Republican Party. The administration likely doesn’t have enough goodwill from voters to make a big change like privatizing all airport security operations. The last thing Americans want at this point is for more disruptions when they travel.
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