The federal government wants to stop screening your bags at the airport.
Buried in the Trump administration’s latest budget proposal is a plan that would fundamentally reshape how Americans experience air travel security: the gradual privatization of the Transportation Security Administration. The proposal envisions transitioning TSA’s screening workforce — roughly 50,000 officers strong — away from federal employment and toward private contractors, a move the White House frames as a cost-saving efficiency play and critics call a dangerous gutting of homeland security.
The idea isn’t new. But the scale of ambition is.
According to Gizmodo, the administration’s fiscal year 2026 budget blueprint calls for expanding the existing Screening Partnership Program (SPP), which already allows individual airports to opt for private screeners operating under TSA oversight. Currently, roughly two dozen airports use SPP contractors instead of federal employees. The new proposal would dramatically accelerate that trend, potentially making private screening the default rather than the exception.
The budget documents suggest the administration believes private contractors can deliver equivalent security outcomes at lower cost, pointing to studies that have shown SPP airports sometimes matching or exceeding federal screener performance metrics. The Office of Management and Budget has argued that competition among contractors would drive innovation and reduce the per-passenger cost of screening. That argument has a certain tidy logic to it. Whether it survives contact with reality is another question entirely.
TSA was born out of crisis. Before September 11, 2001, airport security was handled by private companies hired by airlines — the very arrangement whose failures contributed to the deadliest terrorist attack on American soil. Congress created TSA as a direct response, federalizing the screening workforce under the Aviation and Transportation Security Act signed by President George W. Bush in November 2001. The logic at the time was straightforward: national security functions shouldn’t be outsourced to the lowest bidder.
Twenty-four years later, the political calculus has shifted.
The administration’s push comes amid a broader effort to shrink the federal workforce, a priority that has defined much of the current term. The Department of Government Efficiency, led by Elon Musk, has targeted agencies across the government for headcount reductions, and TSA — with its massive frontline workforce and perennial complaints about long lines, inconsistent screening, and low morale — presents an inviting target. TSA officers have historically been among the lowest-paid federal workers, and the agency has struggled with retention rates that lag behind comparable positions.
But labor groups are pushing back hard. The American Federation of Government Employees, which represents TSA officers, has called the privatization plan a direct threat to workers who only recently won collective bargaining rights. TSA screeners operated for years without the labor protections afforded to most federal employees — a situation that wasn’t remedied until 2023, when the Biden administration extended standard collective bargaining rights and raised pay scales. AFGE officials argue that privatization would effectively strip those gains away, replacing union-represented federal jobs with lower-wage contractor positions that offer fewer benefits and less job security.
“This isn’t about efficiency. It’s about dismantling the federal workforce,” one AFGE representative told reporters in recent weeks.
The economics are contested. Proponents of privatization point to the SPP’s track record at airports like San Francisco International, which has used private screeners under the Covenant Aviation Security contract for years. SFO has generally received favorable reviews from travelers and has met TSA performance benchmarks. Supporters argue that private operators can hire and fire more nimbly, adjust staffing to match demand more efficiently, and invest in technology without navigating the federal procurement bureaucracy.
Opponents counter that the cost savings are largely illusory. A 2013 report from the Government Accountability Office found that SPP airports didn’t consistently deliver lower costs than federally staffed equivalents, once oversight expenses were factored in. TSA itself must still set standards, conduct audits, and manage the contractors — functions that don’t disappear just because the screeners’ paychecks come from a different source. And there’s a deeper concern: that cost pressure on private contractors will inevitably translate into corners cut on training, equipment maintenance, and staffing levels during peak periods.
Then there’s the security question. It looms over everything.
TSA’s own performance record is far from spotless. Undercover “red team” tests conducted by the Department of Homeland Security’s Inspector General have repeatedly found alarming failure rates, with prohibited items slipping through checkpoints at rates that officials have declined to publicly specify in detail, citing security concerns. A widely reported 2015 round of testing found a failure rate of approximately 95 percent — a figure so damning that it led to leadership changes and a wholesale rethinking of screening procedures. Performance has reportedly improved since then, though exact numbers remain classified.
Private screeners haven’t been immune to similar failures. And the fundamental challenge — detecting increasingly sophisticated threats in a high-volume, time-pressured environment — doesn’t change based on who signs the screeners’ checks. What changes is the accountability structure. Federal employees answer to a chain of command that runs through DHS to the White House. Contractors answer to their corporate management, which answers to shareholders, which answers to quarterly earnings. The incentive structures are different, and in security, incentives matter enormously.
Congressional reaction has broken along predictable lines, mostly. Republicans have broadly supported the concept, framing it as a common-sense application of market principles to a government function that has grown bloated and bureaucratic. Democrats have largely opposed it, arguing that national security screening is an inherently governmental function that shouldn’t be subject to profit motives. But there are dissenters in both camps. Some Republican lawmakers from districts with large federal workforces have expressed quiet reservations, and a handful of centrist Democrats have acknowledged that TSA’s status quo has significant problems worth addressing.
The airline industry itself has been cautiously supportive — or at least not openly hostile. Airlines pay into the system through security fees passed along to passengers, and any arrangement that reduces those fees or improves throughput at checkpoints has obvious commercial appeal. Faster screening means fewer missed flights, fewer angry customers, and more efficient use of gate capacity. But airlines also remember what happened before 9/11. No carrier wants its name attached to a security failure that occurs on a private contractor’s watch.
Airport operators have mixed feelings. Those already in the SPP program generally report satisfaction with the arrangement, though they note that TSA’s oversight role means the federal government never truly leaves the picture. Airports considering a switch face a complicated transition process, potential labor disruptions, and the political sensitivity of appearing to prioritize cost savings over security in a post-9/11 world.
The budget proposal faces steep odds in Congress. Presidential budgets are aspirational documents — opening bids in a negotiation, not final legislation. Even with Republican majorities in both chambers, the votes for wholesale TSA privatization aren’t obviously there. The more likely outcome, according to several Capitol Hill staffers who spoke on background, is an incremental expansion of the SPP program: making it easier for airports to apply, streamlining the approval process, and perhaps providing financial incentives for airports that make the switch.
That quieter approach might actually be more consequential than a dramatic legislative overhaul. If enough airports opt into the SPP over the next several years, the federal screening workforce could shrink through attrition rather than mandate. The result would be the same — a largely privatized screening system — but achieved through a thousand individual decisions rather than a single political confrontation.
There’s historical precedent for this kind of slow-motion transformation. The U.S. Postal Service, Amtrak, and air traffic control have all been subjects of privatization debates that played out over decades rather than in a single budget cycle. In each case, the political difficulty of a clean break led to hybrid arrangements — part public, part private, fully satisfying to almost no one. TSA may be headed for the same fate.
So what happens next? The budget proposal will be debated, amended, and likely diluted through the appropriations process. AFGE will mobilize its members. Industry lobbyists will work the halls. Think tanks on both sides will publish competing analyses. And the next time you take off your shoes at airport security, the person checking your ID might work for the federal government — or might not. The question the country has to answer is whether that distinction matters as much as it once did.
For the 50,000 TSA officers whose livelihoods hang in the balance, it matters quite a lot.
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