I don’t think it’s terribly surprising that this is something that President Trump is planning, but it’ll still be interesting to see how it ends up being executed.
In this post:
Trump’s 2027 budget plans include privatizing the TSA
The White House has today released its 2027 budget proposal. The 90+ page document contains lots of details, but from a travel perspective, here’s one that stands out the most.
In 2027, the Trump administration is looking to cut $52 million in costs by starting the process of privatizing the TSA. The idea is that TSA privatization efforts would begin by requiring small airports to enroll in the Screening Partnership Program (SPP), under which TSA pays for private screeners at designated airports.
Per the proposed budget, “the airports that already use this program have demonstrated savings compared to Federal screening operations,” and “the move would yield cost savings compared to Federal screening and begin reform of a troubled Federal agency.”
Of course the TSA has been in the headlines a lot in recent weeks, given the extent to which TSA officers have been used as political pawns, during the current partial government shutdown. Fortunately TSA officers are now starting to get paid again, because Trump suddenly decided it was legal to pay them.
This isn’t the first time that we’ve seen plans to start privatizing the TSA. Roughly a year ago, we saw two Republican Senators introduce the Abolish the TSA Act, which was even more extreme. It was supposed to “dissolve the bloated and ineffective” organization, while “allowing America’s airports to compete to provide the safest, most efficient, and least intrusive security measures, under a new Office of Aviation Security Oversight.”
It sounds like Trump is actually planning on taking more of a gradual approach with all of this, starting with small airports, and then we’ll see what happens in the long run. It’s not clear if this plan would include eventually privatizing all airport security, or if this would be primarily intended for smaller airports.
Would privatizing airport security be good or bad?
I imagine that people will have conflicting takes on the concept of privatizing the TSA. For that matter, perspectives may differ greatly based on the scale at which this is being considered, and whether we’re talking about getting rid of TSA altogether, or just replacing the organization at small airports.
The Screening Partnership Program is currently used at a variety of airports, including major airports like Kansas City (MCI) and San Francisco (SFO), plus lots of smaller airports. By all accounts, it seems to be work just as well as what you’ll find at airports staffed directly by the TSA.
I don’t necessarily have strong opinions here one way or another. If you ask me, there’s nothing inherently wrong with privatizing airport security, and it would be nice if airport security was no longer a bargaining chip used during government shutdowns.
However, there are also some things I’m skeptical about. For example, if the goal with privatizing things is that the government wants companies to compete for these contracts (at least in the long run), I can’t help but wonder how fairly those will by awarded, and also if that could lead to a compromise in terms of safety. We all know how capitalism works — it’s all about short term gains, so do you really think a private company will be able to do this well on a huge scale?
The thing is, it’s not like the TSA has an amazing track record with stopping prohibited items. However, if the goal with this is simply to reduce costs as much as possible, I can’t help but think that might come with some negative consequences.
I also don’t love the framing of this and villainization of the TSA, about how it’s a “troubled Federal agency” in need of reform. The TSA is far from perfect, but as far as government organizations go, I hardly think it ranks up there in terms of being problematic.
Bottom line
President Trump officially wants to privatize the TSA, with the 2027 budget proposal showing tens of millions of dollars of savings from having more small airports enroll in the Screening Partnership Program (SPP), whereby private contractors will perform security.
I’m not totally opposed to this as a concept, though as usual, it comes down to the details, and how they’re executed.
What do you make of the proposal to privatize airport security?
It is genuinely adorable watching a comment section composed of frequent flyers pretend to understand federal procurement law. The sheer volume of hysteria regarding "kickbacks" and "billionaires" indicates that almost no one here has ever read a Federal Acquisition Regulation clause, but as usual everyone will accuse me of being Tim's AI assistant, and fall on deaf ears..
Let’s inject some actual operational reality into this emotional support group.
Expanding the Screening Partnership Program...
It is genuinely adorable watching a comment section composed of frequent flyers pretend to understand federal procurement law. The sheer volume of hysteria regarding "kickbacks" and "billionaires" indicates that almost no one here has ever read a Federal Acquisition Regulation clause, but as usual everyone will accuse me of being Tim's AI assistant, and fall on deaf ears..
Let’s inject some actual operational reality into this emotional support group.
Expanding the Screening Partnership Program (SPP) does not mean "getting rid of the TSA." The TSA remains the sole regulatory body. They still write the Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs), they still procure the hardware (like the Analogic CT scanners and L3 body scanners), and they still conduct the security clearances for the staff. The only thing changing is the labor execution.
Many of you are clutching your pearls over the "lowest bidder" fallacy, completely ignoring that federal security contracts use "Best Value Tradeoff" source selection, not LPTA (Lowest Price Technically Acceptable). The private contractor is held to strict, quantifiable performance metrics regarding wait times and detection rates. If a contractor underperforms, they face financial penalties or lose the contract entirely. Conversely, when a federal AFGE union worker fails a Red Team audit, they are virtually unfireable, and the agency uses the failure to demand a larger budget from Congress to "fix" their own incompetence.
Furthermore, the fact that half of you regularly fly through Heathrow, Frankfurt, and Amsterdam airports entirely screened by private security contractors operating under strict government mandates and then log on here to scream that doing the exact same thing in the US is a "racket" is peak cognitive dissonance.
You are defending a bloated, un-fireable federal labor monopoly that routinely fails its own security audits simply because you do not like the politician proposing the change. Step out of the political echo chamber and look at the operational data.
Please, please I beg of you, logically disagree with me, and shill over the TSA?
What I fail to understand here is how this helps prevent "chaos" when budget stuff comes up. Let's pretend the current staffing of TSA agents is utterly fungible with private companies in a competitive bidding environment. Private companies, notably, will stop work if they don't get paid. Whether airport security is done through federal employees directly or through a private company, if you don't pay people they tend to not show up at work.
Airports...
What I fail to understand here is how this helps prevent "chaos" when budget stuff comes up. Let's pretend the current staffing of TSA agents is utterly fungible with private companies in a competitive bidding environment. Private companies, notably, will stop work if they don't get paid. Whether airport security is done through federal employees directly or through a private company, if you don't pay people they tend to not show up at work.
Airports used to operate using private security paid for by the airlines pre-9/11, and it took things like a hundred+ hijackings and other incidents to get them to install metal detectors in 1972. Presumably a lot of that is that we didn't have these things in train stations, and airports are just train stations for airplanes, so why wouldn't we copy train station modes of operation?
Fundamentally, this is a low-paying, high-turnover job which then requires specialized knowledge of how to do things like "read the outputs of a luggage scanner and identify a knife", which is not as easy as you might think, so it's always going to suck.
The concern with the public thing is "TSA agents are unfireable", which is not true you just can't fire them without cause, and the concern with the private thing is "if they're already low-paying jobs, where's the profit margin appearing for the companies bidding?", and I do not have an answer for that.
lol it's the plot to rob america blind, over and over, everywhere - every day a new way to extract taxpayer dollars and shovel them into billionaire pockets
i like the french solution to this
Privatizing public services is almost always a bad idea. Worse service. More expensive. Less good jobs. More private data and Money going to the billionaire technocrats. I would oppose this no matter what party or administration proposed it.
The DoD has many security contracts that were put out for bid to companies , reviewed carefully and awarded appropriately. Do i believe DHS will follow any of the above? Not a chance.
TSA screeners are probably not trusted with top secret information. If so, they would be no different from private security. Private security could probably hire cheaper labor for crowd control and gathering luggage bins.
Remembering how unprofessional previously airline security screening was prior to 9/11 this is concerning but totally depends upon how it is privatized. No more LaToya’s with the hair weaves and nails, Jeremiah’s helping get the contraband through for the local smuggler.
The Attorney General got fired today. The hidden Epstein files must be gold. Lost two planes in Iran. Some aircrews rescued thank goodness. Strait still closed. Qatari LNG will take up to three years to repair. Houthis attacking shipping lanes. The Defense Secretary is a mad man. Oh wait, let’s hire our corrupt buddies to run TSA.
I've seen the difference first hand going through some of the smaller airports which utilize private screeners. A privatized, non-union TSA would be a MAJOR improvement. It's like the difference between American Airlines flight attendants (militant, angry union types) and Delta flight attendants (non-union, with empathy and tremendous customer service). Long overdue. Although 1990 may miss the TSA groping (based on his prior creepy posts).
Basically everything this clown touches turns to sh!t now - so probably No it won’t go well
Is America great again yet, trumptards?
Keep believing in the book of Epstein and praying in the name of AIPAC.
Nothing novel here. Airport screening was done by private contractors at US airports before 9/11.
100% for that. The biggest threat to air safety are the drunk dregs of society that think an airplane and an airport are the same as the streets they loiter in and commit their crimes. That's what airport security should be focused on.
To be fair this should not be a surprise as was well trailed in project 2025. I suspect Eric or Don junior will have a company that wins a contract that is more costly than the current structure. Grifters gonna grift.
this one sounds familiar...hinder a government provided service in some way, complain that it doesn't work or do its job well, suggest/privitize it to one of your buds, have them charge the government some single, double, or triple digit figure of what the government was paying for said service, if there are issues, complain that government isn't paying enough to have the private service operate properly
organized racket
Gonna completely ignore that other countries such as England have already privatized airport security? Guess it doesn’t fit the oRaNgE mAn BaD narrative..
No you twat, it’s that he isn’t actually interested in “fixing” things, just reading himself and his grifter posse
Make that “enriching”. Esp since he doesn’t read so well these says.
UA-NYC calling somebody a twat is my favorite part of comments on this blog.
Get ready for the contracts to be awarded to companies with Trumps on the board. Or as advisors. Or as any of the above for parent organizations. Maybe even companies incorporated mere days before winning the contracts.
America is now being robbed blind from the Oval Office and it looks like it's going to reach Gaddafi levels of plundering.
Cuz the Biden’s, Clinton’s, Bush’s, etc definitely didn’t do anything bad
No, not even close.
LOL 9c. Only in the MAGAverse is the presence of some corruption in prior administrations an excuse to fully and completely pursue corruption in the present one.
Security screening was conducted by private companies before 9/11. The whole reason TSA was created in 2001 was to increase transportation safety and reduce laxity of screening. What comes around goes around, I guess…
All of the 9/11 terrorists got thru airport security (run by private companies instead of a government agency) with the box cutters used to hijack all four aircraft.
And everyone forgets is was legal to carry a box cutter through security back then.
Creating the TSA to handle security in response to 9/11 was a knee-jerk reaction to make people feel safer - but had the TSA been in charge before the attacks (under the...
All of the 9/11 terrorists got thru airport security (run by private companies instead of a government agency) with the box cutters used to hijack all four aircraft.
And everyone forgets is was legal to carry a box cutter through security back then.
Creating the TSA to handle security in response to 9/11 was a knee-jerk reaction to make people feel safer - but had the TSA been in charge before the attacks (under the same rules in place at the time), the results would have been the same.
In the grand scheme of things, this doesn't even matter. People will continue to get screened and board their planes. I'm at Kansas City airport every month and you don't even notice a difference.
Same, I’m at MCI 6-8 times a month and I find the security experience at MCI to be indistinguishable from anywhere else. I guess other than the grey shirts and the officers tend to be a little less brusque. If the screening is “just as effective” I don’t really care who does it.
There are fair arguments for and against this. But, will the actual contracting ***process*** be fair? Kristi Noem's chief of staff had been purportedly seeking kickbacks from DHS contractors. Apparently, the new DHS has frozen major contracts while investigating. But, this is a fair concern.
There will undoubtedly be a nice little kickback for the Trump Organisation along the way, with trailing commissions for decades to come.
Yes, I think the precedent is that "the Big Guy" gets 10%.
The contract would likely be awarded to a company who has paid to play with this administration, using the Noem/Lewandowski playbook that landed the $220M DHS advertising campaign.
"if the goal with privatizing things is that the government wants companies to compete for these contracts, I can’t help but wonder how fairly those will by awarded, and also if that could lead to a compromise in terms of safety. "
That is not how the Screening Partnership Program works. I do not think this is ideal at all, but what happens in places like San Francisco and Kansas City is that the TSA...
"if the goal with privatizing things is that the government wants companies to compete for these contracts, I can’t help but wonder how fairly those will by awarded, and also if that could lead to a compromise in terms of safety. "
That is not how the Screening Partnership Program works. I do not think this is ideal at all, but what happens in places like San Francisco and Kansas City is that the TSA selects a company that they determine is a good fit, and assigns it to the airport. It is not a competitive RFP process. The airport does not even have a say in what company is chosen.
I think the key issue here is that if you're introducing a profit margin while also trying to constrain costs, the only thing you can cut is wages or staffing. Neither of these lead to high quality employees who stick around for any length of time. The fix to the political issue is to pass a law that clearly says TSA agents get paid in the event of a shutdown, which shouldn't be an issue because they're largely funded by ticket taxes anyhow.
You’re technically correct in general but many private corporations can do for less the same job as the government solely on the basis of overhead. Lower cost doesn’t always mean less money in the pockets of employees, sometimes it can mean less bloat.
Definitely agree that since the security fee is part of the ticket there shouldn’t have ever been an interruption in their pay.
Based on my experience at LaGuardia this morning, it seems like TSA has already been mostly replaced... by ICE
Great idea. Make sure the funding can’t be cut for this during a shutdown, and also make sure the security agents can’t collectively bargain or strike.
Yes, and make sure that the contracts are no bid and can be given to insiders who have recently started new companies. This could be similar to other DHS contracts.