The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) was formed in the aftermath of the 9/11 terror attacks. It was a panicked response by the government to a terrible event.
In the two decades since its formation, the TSA has failed every security test devised by the agency's inspector general and the Government Accountability Office (GAO) by a worrying margin. According to the most recent statistics, TSA's failure to detect weapons and other dangerous items is between 85-90%.
At $10 billion a year, the TSA is an expensive, irritating, inefficient failure. And like most public employees, TSA screeners have a union to protect incompetents, bargain for wage and benefit increases, and fashion work rules that not only make flying more of a headache, but less safe as well.
On Friday, the Department of Homeland Security announced they were terminating the collective bargaining agreement with 45,000 TSA screeners. It's the latest shot across the bow against public sector unions by the Trump administration.
DHS says that eliminating the TSA contract “removes bureaucratic hurdles that will strengthen workforce agility, enhance productivity and resiliency, while also jumpstarting innovation.”
DHS claims that TSA union members are abusing sick leave, forcing other employees to pick up the work. The department says that TSA employees will now follow a new system based on “performance, not longevity or union membership.”
"Transportation Security Officers will no longer lose their hard-earned dollars to a union that does not represent them," said DHS in a statement. "This action will ensure Americans will have a more effective and modernized workforces across the nation's transportation networks."
The union representing TSA employees, the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE), said the union "will not rest until the basic dignity and rights of the workers at TSA are acknowledged by the government once again."
I never understood the "dignity" argument. It was relevant in the early days of the organized labor movement, when companies saw workers as little better than slaves and treated them as expendable.
However, modern American workers, union and non-union, have robust protections governing every aspect of their work. Safety rules, overtime rules, and rules governing employer-employee relations have largely made unions obsolete, as evidenced by just 10% of American workers belonging to a union.
The latest TSA contract signed in May 2024 was a bonanza for the union.
More from Reason.Com:
For the first half of its history, TSA workers were not unionized. It wasn't until 2011 that the Obama administration granted agency employees the right to unionize. The first TSA labor contract went into effect in late 2012.
The unionization of airport screeners realized the fear of many early TSA critics that the agency's security services would become "just another government jobs program," says Marc Scribner, a transportation researcher with Reason Foundation, the nonprofit that publishes Reason.
Pay increases and union protections have made airport security needlessly expensive, and the process for eliminating bad employees is unnecessarily cumbersome, he tells Reason. Having the same agency both regulate airport security and provide airport security services is an inherent conflict of interest.
With airport scanning equipment becoming better and smarter, it's easy to see a day when human screeners will be a smaller part of the airport security regime.
Reason's Robby Soave calls it "security theater" because the screenings are for show, and not really meant to intercept contraband.
"TSA agents riffle through luggage in search of contraband items and subject travelers to aggressive pat-downs of their genitals," he says. "Navigating these intrusive procedures often requires showing up to the airport much earlier than would otherwise be necessary, creating inefficiencies for the airlines and their customers."
Israeli airport security procedures, perhaps the best in the world, would never be allowed in the U.S., because security personnel routinely profile passengers based on "illegal" criteria including ethnicity and race.
You don't see any Jewish grandmothers taken away to be strip searched by security personnel.
We can't return to the pre-9/11 security system. However, radically reforming TSA's screening procedures will keep us safe while making flying less of a challenge.
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