In the 2009 corporate comedy film Up in the Air, George Clooney, playing a frequent-flyer-obsessed downsizing consultant, coaches a new colleague on the quickest path through airport security. “Never get behind old people. Their bodies are littered with hidden metal, and they never seem to appreciate how little time they have left. Bingo, Asians. They pack light, travel efficiently, and they have a thing for slip-on shoes. Gotta love ’em,” he says.
If Clooney’s character were traveling in American airports today, even the slickest stereotyping strategy or high-miler status wouldn’t save him from long queues, especially in near-routine government shutdowns.
That’s because airport security has, like too many things in our daily lives, been ceded to funding, management, and control by Washington, D.C., staffed by blue-gloved agents of the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) under the Department of Homeland Security. And as with every government shutdown, disappearing checks for TSA screeners means fewer agents on duty while lines balloon.
President Donald Trump’s latest budget request for DHS includes an eyebrow-raising suggestion that many of us have waited for far too long: putting airport security back in private hands.
Specifically, Trump’s plan would shift TSA from operating airport security to serving as a regulator, resulting in $52 million in net savings while expanding the Screening Partnership Program already in place at nearly two dozen airports. That includes major hubs like San Francisco (SFO) and Kansas City, which were immune to shutdown-induced security slowdowns that caused chaos at other airports.
The arguments about putting TSA on the chopping block are not a new invention of the Trump era or even fever dreams of libertarian think tanks. Even the godfather of the TSA recognized that it became a bureaucratic behemoth within just a decade of its creation. U.S. Rep. John Mica (R-FL), an architect of early TSA legislation, later regretted the agency’s creation, calling it his “little bastard child.”
“The whole thing is a complete fiasco,” Mica said. He advocated dismantling the agency entirely and privatizing airport security. His own committee found the switch could save taxpayers as much as 40%.
But we should go further than that. While we’re at it, give me more private airports like in other parts of the world.
Europeans are simply better (airport) capitalists than us in America. Many of them are even listed on the stock markets. According to the Airport Council International, 41% of European airports have some private sector involvement in airport ownership, representing nearly three-quarters of all passenger volume. In North America, meanwhile, we have a paltry 2 percent of our airports with any private investment.
Transitioning to a model in which airports would not only manage their own security operations but also open their ownership and management to public-private partnerships and more accountable private firms is an idea many travelers should welcome. And taxpayers even more.
With transparent private competition, answerable to airports and travelers rather than agency budgets, the American traveler would once again feel like traveling is a joyful and pleasant experience rather than a bureaucratic nightmare.
Just because Congress voted to federalize airline security in the wake of 9/11 does not mean that we have somehow forgotten how to properly screen for security threats at airports without large government bureaucracies. The model already exists and seems to please the Silicon Valley fliers out of San Francisco just fine without any measurable drop in security effectiveness.
Congress should follow the Trump administration’s lead by extending the program to every willing airport and creating a clear pathway for greater private involvement. Not just screening, but ownership and operation. Let airports raise private capital, compete for travelers, and answer to passengers instead of appropriations committees.
Defunding the TSA and redefining its role as a regulator won’t end airport security. It will just make it work. Let’s give it a shot.
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Yaël Ossowski is deputy director of the Consumer Choice Center.
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