DHS Funding Freeze Forces Hard Choices on Future of Airport Security

Late last month, Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport looked less like the world’s busiest hub and more like the scene of a slow-motion collapse. Lines snaked from security checkpoints through terminal corridors and down into baggage claim. Signs warned travelers to arrive three to five hours early. Some 61,000 Transportation Security Administration screeners worked without pay as the partial Department of Homeland Security shutdown, the longest in the agency’s history, ground on.A legislative breakthrough ending the funding lapse that began on February 14 is within reach: The Senate unanimously passed a bipartisan deal last week to fund most of DHS — excluding ICE and parts of Customs and Border Protection — and advanced the measure again Thursday in a pro forma session. The House, however, is controlled by Republicans who initially called the Senate plan a “joke” and isn’t scheduled to reconvene until April 13, meaning the crisis at America’s airports drags on. Amid the mayhem, TSA’s deputy administrator, Ha Nguyen McNeill, told a House committee that airports were experiencing “the highest wait times in TSA history,” with some exceeding four and a half hours. More than 480 officers have quit since the shutdown began, and call-out rates at some airports have topped 40 percent on certain days.Mr. Trump, who earlier threatened “very drastic measures,” ultimately bypassed Congress altogether, signing an executive order to pay TSA agents — though questions about its legality and duration remain unresolved, and thousands of Coast Guard and other DHS personnel are still going without paychecks. The chaos has reignited one of Washington’s most uncomfortable questions: Should the TSA exist at all?A record that speaks for itselfThe agency was born in the post-September 11 crisis, signed into law in November 2001 as Congress scrambled to federalize airport security following the deadliest terrorist attack in American history. The logic was simple: Private contractors had failed, and the government needed to take control. Twenty-four years later, the record of that decision is available for anyone willing to read it honestly.In 2006, congressional hearing materials noted failure rates of roughly 90 percent in covert weapons tests — undercover operations in which government investigators posing as passengers attempt to smuggle mock weapons and explosives past security checkpoints. By 2015, a Department of Homeland Security Inspector General report found that undercover investigators successfully smuggled mock weapons or explosives through checkpoints 67 out of 70 times, a failure rate of 95 percent. After 2017, DHS classified all detailed test results. But a report leaked that same year found that TSA screening operations had a failure rate “in the ballpark” of 80 percent, which was characterized as an improvement. The agency’s FY2025 budget request stood at $11.8 billion. What taxpayers are getting for that figure is classified.A professor who teaches aviation and aerospace science at Metropolitan State University of Denver, Jeffrey Price, urges caution. “We shouldn’t be making decisions on information that is a decade old, particularly since there have been numerous improvements to the system since then,” says Mr. Price, who runs Leading Edge Strategies, a top airport management training firm.“The widespread deployment of CT machines into the checkpoints, replacing the traditional X-ray machines, plus the training of all TSOs in suspicious awareness, are just two of the improvements,” Mr. Price tells The New York Sun. “We live in a different security screening world than we did 10 years ago.”The legislation waiting in the wingsIn March 2025, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem moved to terminate the collective bargaining rights of nearly 47,000 TSA agents — a move a federal court blocked, finding it appeared retaliatory against the American Federation of Government Employees. Ms. Noem issued a new determination in September 2025, but when TSA moved to implement it in January 2026, a second federal judge ruled the effort violated the standing injunction. The Ninth Circuit subsequently vacated the injunction in February 2026, leaving the case to proceed on the merits at the district level.Less than three weeks after Ms. Noem’s initial move, Senate Republicans introduced the Abolish TSA Act of 2025 which would privatize all agency functions and establish a new Office of Aviation Security Oversight within the FAA to set standards and monitor compliance.The bill’s sponsors, Mike Lee of Utah and Tommy Tuberville of Alabama, have been pointed in their criticism of the agency. “The TSA has not only intruded into the privacy and personal space of most Americans, but it has also repeatedly failed tests to find weapons and explosives,” Mr. Lee said when introducing the bill. “Our bill privatizes security functions at American airports under the eye of an Office of Aviation Security Oversight, bringing this bureaucratic behemoth to a welcome end.” Mr. Tuberville was equally direct. “The TSA is an inefficient, bureaucratic mess that infringes on Americans’ freedoms,” he stated. “It’s a bloated agency, riddled with waste, fraud, and abuse of taxpayer dollars, that has led to unnecessary delays, invasive pat-downs and bag checks, and frustration for travelers.” With the shutdown crisis in full view, Mr. Tuberville sharpened the argument further. “There are several airports like Kansas City and San Francisco that don’t have long lines. I wonder why? Because the federal government doesn’t run them. They are privatized. And that’s what we should do to every airport,” he told Alabama’s WBRC News. “Let the airports supply the security. The federal government can’t do anything right.”Democrats, the TSA union, and aviation worker organizations counter that airport screening is a critical national security function that must stay in public hands, and that dismantling a federal agency responsible for handling hundreds of millions of passenger screenings annually risks fragmenting standards and severing the intelligence-sharing architecture built more than 24 years ago. Defenders of the agency also point to a somewhat different on-the-ground record: in 2024 alone, TSA intercepted 6,678 firearms at security checkpoints, 93 percent of them loaded, while screening more than 900 million passengers. The agency also conducted some 6,700 Visible Intermodal Prevention and Response operations — joint law enforcement sweeps targeting train stations, bus terminals, ports, and other transit hubs beyond the airport checkpoints — and trained thousands of crew members in self-defense protocols.Whatever its failure rate on covert testing, proponents argue the sheer volume of daily deterrence and interdiction is not something a patchwork of private contractors could easily replicate overnight.That argument, however, has grown harder to make amid a separate and more recent disclosure. A classified Inspector General audit conducted in late 2025 raised fresh concerns about vulnerabilities in TSA screening procedures, including questions about whether a 2025 policy change allowing passengers to keep their shoes on during screening had outpaced the technology’s ability to detect concealed threats. The agency failed to submit a required response to the findings. As of earlier this month, the Inspector General’s office reported it had been “unable to substantively engage TSA” on the matter for months due to department-imposed classification restrictions — a bureaucratic wall that left identified security vulnerabilities without a formal corrective response for over five months.Mr. Price, however, is unambiguous. “I completely disagree with abolishing the TSA and going back to a pre-9/11 model,” he tells the Sun. “The airlines already proved they cannot do a better job of screening, and the FAA already showed, in the 9/11 Report, that they were captured by the aviation industry, which kept screening performance requirements low.”What the private model already showsThe Screening Partnership Program, introduced in 2004, already allows private companies to handle security at 20 airports under TSA oversight. Several of those, including San Francisco International and Kansas City International, have private contractors manning their checkpoints, operating business as usual and entirely insulated from the political disruptions now paralyzing federalized airports. The contrast has been stark: while Houston and Atlanta have seen more than a third of their TSA workforce call out on certain days, San Francisco International posted publicly this month that it was “not experiencing this issue.”According to data compiled by the Airports Council International and cited by the Reason Foundation, 75 percent of airline passengers in Europe are served by privatized airports, as are 66 percent in Latin America and 47 percent in Asia-Pacific. By comparison, the figure for North America stands at roughly 1 percent. Participating American airports such as San Francisco International have frequently outperformed their federalized counterparts on wait times, and private screeners at those airports have continued drawing paychecks throughout every government shutdown.Marc Scribner, senior transportation policy analyst at the Reason Foundation, points to a structural flaw baked into the agency’s design. “Having TSA simultaneously regulate the service it provides is an inherent conflict of interest, which is why ICAO standards that the United States is supposed to adhere to recommend the separation of screening from its regulation,” Mr. Scribner tells the Sun, referring to the International Civil Aviation Organization.Yet, he continues, the Abolish TSA Act does not fully resolve that problem. “Airports can’t choose the screening providers and terminate contracts with those that fail to meet their requirements and choose another provider,” he explains. Under the Aviation and Transportation Security Act of 2001, Congress vested screening authority exclusively in the federal government, stripping airports of any power to contract, discipline, or replace their own screeners — a structural arrangement that has remained largely intact for more than two decades.An improved model, Mr. Scribner claims, would let airports contract directly with vetted providers, with the existing 9/11 Security Fee on airline tickets converted into a locally administered user fee that would flow directly to airports to fund screening operations.Mr. Price supports the existing partnership program but warns against haste. “Those airports have consistently met TSA standards,” he notes. “The transition timeline is not realistic. It took TSA a year to replace the contract screeners after 9/11.”The push to privatize did not emerge in a vacuum. The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, the 900-page conservative governing blueprint, explicitly called for TSA privatization in Chapter 5, written by a former acting deputy secretary of homeland security, Ken Cuccinelli, who served in the first Trump administration.The document states that “until it is privatized, TSA should be treated as a national security provider, and its workforce should be deunionized immediately.” The deunionization effort came first: announced in December, nominally implemented January 11, then blocked four days later by a federal judge, and subsequently revived when an appeals court vacated that injunction in February. Whether privatization follows may now depend on how long the lines stay.The political fault linesLast month, Mr. Trump deployed ICE officers to at least 11 major airports to supplement the TSA, a move Democrats have called dangerous and legally dubious. With the TSA administrator position vacant, it has fallen to Ms. McNeill, the agency’s acting administrator, and her deputy, Adam Stahl, to manage the crisis. Mr. Stahl has warned that if the shutdown does not end soon, some smaller airports might have to “quite literally shut down.”Ms. McNeill, meanwhile, told lawmakers the agency has seen a more than 500-percent increase in assaults on TSA officers since the shutdown began, and that by Friday the agency will have reached nearly $1 billion in missed paychecks — leading to officers reportedly sleeping in their cars, selling blood and plasma, and taking on second jobs while expected to perform at the highest level.“They love this job. They’re quitting because they have no choice,” said the president of AFGE TSA Council 100, Hydrick Thomas, who works as an agent at JFK Airport. “They don’t have the finances to come to work.”The average TSA officer earns between $46,000 and $55,000 a year, starting at roughly $40,000, and by TSA’s own testimony, most live paycheck to paycheck. Officers have now worked 87 days without timely pay in the current fiscal year alone, across three separate shutdowns in six months. Even with Mr. Trump’s executive order, back pay has historically taken between 14 and 30 days to arrive — long after the late fees, eviction notices, and defaulted loans have already landed.The funding standoff is reshaping how lawmakers, airports, and travelers think about who should bear responsibility for the front line of aviation security. Defenders of the status quo point to 25 years without a successful domestic aviation terror attack. Critics point to decade-old failure rates that topped 95 percent on covert weapons tests, the results of which are now classified, and a budget approaching $12 billion. They also point to a self-regulating structure that contravenes the ICAO’s Annex 17 standards, which call on member states to separate the provision of screening services from the regulation of those services.Both arguments have credence. Both have been made before. What is different now is that the crisis unfolding in real time at America’s airports is doing something that years of congressional hearings could not — forcing a reckoning with whether the agency’s institutional design is capable of surviving its own contradictions. As Mr. Scribner said, “the TSA’s institutional design is poorly suited to address those real challenges.”“The lessons from 9/11 weren’t about the inherent flaws of private screening, but ensuring adequate oversight and preparedness,” he said.

DHS Funding Freeze Forces Hard Choices on Future of Airport Security

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