The Transportation Security Administration is running out of time. With the 2026 FIFA World Cup set to bring millions of international visitors to American soil starting in June of next year, the agency responsible for screening every single one of them at the nation’s airports is staring down a staffing crisis that could turn terminals into bottleneck nightmares. The warning signs are already flashing. And the people sounding the alarm aren’t outsiders — they’re the ones running the system.
According to Business Insider, the TSA faces a convergence of threats that could cripple airport operations during what’s expected to be the busiest travel period in American aviation history. The 2026 World Cup — co-hosted by the United States, Mexico, and Canada — will stage matches in 11 American cities from June 11 through July 19. That five-week window lands squarely in the middle of what is already peak summer travel season, a period when TSA checkpoint lines routinely stretch patience and terminal capacity to their limits even in normal years.
This won’t be a normal year.
FIFA projects the tournament will attract more than 5.5 million in-person spectators across all three host nations, with the majority of matches — 78 out of 104 — played on U.S. soil. Host cities include New York/New Jersey, Los Angeles, Dallas, Miami, Atlanta, Houston, Philadelphia, Seattle, San Francisco, Kansas City, and Boston. These aren’t secondary markets. They’re home to some of the most congested airports in the country: JFK, LAX, DFW, MIA, ATL, and others that already strain under normal summer volumes.
The math is unforgiving. TSA screened a record 3.05 million passengers in a single day on June 23, 2024, according to the agency’s own data. Summer 2025 is expected to push those numbers higher still. Layer on top of that the World Cup surge — hundreds of thousands of additional international travelers arriving on unfamiliar schedules, many navigating U.S. airports for the first time — and the system faces a stress test unlike anything it has experienced since its creation after September 11, 2001.
But here’s the problem that makes all those projections especially troubling: TSA doesn’t have enough people.
As Business Insider reported, the agency has been grappling with chronic staffing shortfalls for years. Transportation Security Officers — the frontline screeners who check IDs, run bags through X-ray machines, and manage the physical screening process — are among the lowest-paid federal employees. Starting pay was raised to $20.23 per hour in 2023 after years of advocacy, but attrition remains punishing. TSA’s annual turnover rate has hovered near 20%, and at some airports it runs significantly higher. Recruiting, hiring, training, and retaining screeners is a grinding, perpetual challenge.
The federal hiring freeze and workforce reduction directives emanating from the Department of Government Efficiency — the Elon Musk-led cost-cutting initiative — have added a volatile new dimension. DOGE has pushed aggressive headcount reductions across federal agencies, and while TSA has so far avoided the deepest cuts, the chilling effect on hiring and morale is real. Agency employees have described an atmosphere of uncertainty, unsure whether positions will be backfilled when colleagues leave. That kind of ambiguity doesn’t exactly help retention.
TSA Administrator David Pekoske, whose term ended in 2024, had been pushing for years to bring screener compensation in line with other federal law enforcement positions. Some progress was made. Not enough. His successor inherits an agency that needs to be ramping up aggressively right now — not trimming or holding steady.
The staffing concerns aren’t theoretical. During the 2024 summer travel season, multiple airports reported checkpoint wait times exceeding 60 minutes during peak periods. Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson, the world’s busiest airport, saw lines snake through terminals in scenes reminiscent of the 2016 screening crisis that prompted congressional hearings. That was without a World Cup.
And the operational complexity goes beyond raw passenger numbers. International arrivals require additional processing — Customs and Border Protection screening, visa verification, secondary inspections — that creates downstream pressure on terminal space and ground transportation. When CBP processing slows, it backs up into the secure areas of terminals, which in turn affects domestic operations. The system is interconnected in ways that make isolated fixes insufficient.
Airport authorities in host cities are acutely aware of what’s coming. The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which operates JFK, Newark Liberty, and LaGuardia, has been in discussions with federal agencies about surge staffing and facility modifications. Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport has been upgrading terminal infrastructure, though the timeline for completion of some projects remains tight. Miami International Airport — a primary gateway for Latin American visitors, who will constitute a significant share of World Cup attendees — faces particularly acute pressure given its already stretched international arrival facilities.
Private sector players are watching closely too. Airlines have begun adjusting summer 2026 schedules to account for anticipated demand spikes to host cities, but adding flights doesn’t help if passengers can’t get through security. Hotel bookings in host cities are already climbing for the tournament window, according to hospitality industry data. The economic opportunity is enormous — FIFA and host city organizers have projected billions in visitor spending — but that opportunity evaporates if the arrival experience is so miserable that it dominates headlines and social media feeds.
There’s a diplomatic dimension as well. The United States is co-hosting the World Cup in part as a showcase event, a demonstration of organizational competence ahead of what many see as a dry run for a potential future Olympic bid. Chaotic airport scenes — foreign visitors trapped in hours-long security lines, missed connections, overwhelmed terminals — would be a national embarrassment broadcast globally. The 2014 World Cup in Brazil was marred by infrastructure failures that became the dominant story. American organizers have explicitly promised a different experience.
So what can actually be done in the roughly 14 months remaining?
TSA has several tools at its disposal, none of them easy or cheap. Surge staffing — temporarily reassigning screeners from lower-volume airports to host city airports — is the most immediate option and has been used during previous high-demand periods. But it’s a zero-sum approach that degrades service elsewhere and creates logistical headaches for the reassigned officers, many of whom must travel and find temporary housing at their own partial expense. It’s a band-aid, not a fix.
Accelerating enrollment in TSA PreCheck and other trusted traveler programs could help by diverting more passengers into expedited screening lanes. PreCheck enrollment has grown steadily — the agency reported over 17 million active members in 2024 — but a significant share of summer travelers, and the vast majority of international visitors, won’t have it. The CLEAR program, which offers biometric identity verification, operates in about 50 airports but remains controversial and isn’t universally available at all host city airports.
Technology upgrades represent another avenue. TSA has been deploying credential authentication technology (CAT) units that digitally verify IDs and boarding passes, reducing the need for manual document checks. Computed tomography (CT) scanners, which produce 3D images of carry-on bags and reduce the need for manual bag searches, are rolling out but haven’t reached full deployment. Both technologies can improve throughput per lane, but installing and calibrating new equipment takes time — and money that may not be forthcoming in the current budget environment.
Congress could act. Bipartisan support for adequate TSA funding has historically existed, though it tends to materialize only after a crisis rather than before one. The September 11 Security Fee, a $5.60 per-passenger charge that funds a portion of TSA operations, was last adjusted in 2014. Increasing it — or directing more of its revenue to frontline operations rather than deficit reduction — could provide resources for hiring surges. But legislative timelines and the current political climate make rapid congressional action uncertain at best.
The union representing TSA officers, the American Federation of Government Employees, has been vocal about the need for immediate action. AFGE has called for a hiring surge of at least 6,000 additional screeners, accelerated pay raises to reduce attrition, and a commitment from the administration that TSA will be exempt from further workforce reductions. Whether those calls will be heeded is an open question. The tension between the administration’s stated goal of shrinking the federal workforce and the operational reality of a massive international event on American soil creates a policy contradiction that hasn’t been resolved.
There’s also the question of coordination. The World Cup isn’t just a TSA problem. It involves CBP, the Federal Aviation Administration, local law enforcement, airport authorities, airlines, FIFA’s local organizing committee, and the Department of Homeland Security’s overarching security apparatus. The 2026 FIFA World Cup Host City Committee structure is supposed to facilitate this coordination, but the sheer number of stakeholders and jurisdictions involved makes unified planning enormously complex. Previous mega-events in the U.S. — Super Bowls, the 1994 World Cup, the 1996 Atlanta Olympics — required years of interagency planning. The difference now is that the federal side of that planning is happening amid unprecedented organizational turbulence within DHS and its component agencies.
Some airport executives have privately expressed frustration that the federal government appears to be treating the World Cup as a routine surge event rather than the extraordinary operational challenge it represents. One aviation industry consultant, speaking to reporters earlier this year, compared it to “planning for ten Super Bowls happening simultaneously across the country for five straight weeks.” That’s not hyperbole. It’s arithmetic.
The international comparison is instructive. When Qatar hosted the 2022 World Cup, it funneled all arrivals through a single compact country with one primary airport — Hamad International in Doha — and still faced significant congestion and processing delays despite years of preparation and essentially unlimited financial resources. The United States is attempting to manage arrivals across dozens of airports in 11 metro areas, with a screening workforce that was already stretched thin before anyone started talking about soccer.
None of this means disaster is inevitable. The TSA has demonstrated an ability to surge capacity when political will and resources align. The agency processed record volumes in summer 2024 without a systemic breakdown, though the margin for error was thin. American airports, for all their frustrations, handle more passengers annually than any other national system in the world. The infrastructure exists. The question is whether the people and the funding will be there to operate it at the scale June 2026 demands.
Fourteen months. That’s what’s left. In federal government terms, it’s barely enough time to post job listings, let alone hire, background-check, train, and deploy thousands of new screeners. Every week that passes without a concrete staffing plan makes the math harder. The World Cup is coming whether the TSA is ready or not. Right now, the evidence suggests not.
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