The Trump administration is seeking to shave a mere $52 million from the Transportation Security Administration’s (TSA) massive annual budget of nearly $12 billion by expanding the privatization of airport security across the United States, a new 2027 budget proposal has revealed.
The budget proposal seeks to expand the TSA’s ‘Screening Partnership Program’ (SPP), in which private companies are contracted by the federal government to run airport security checkpoints and other TSA functions.
Until now, SPP has been entirely voluntary. There are currently 20 airports across the United States that don’t use TSA officers at their security checkpoints, instead employing private security contractors through the SPP program.
Most notably, Orlando and San Francisco International Airports are part of the SPP program, although travelers are sometimes none the wiser because the uniforms worn by private security staff look incredibly similar to the blue threads worn by government-employed TSA officers.
Although the SPP is funded through the TSA, private security contractors are not directly paid through the TSA’s normal payroll. That meant that during the latest partial government shutdown, Orlando and San Francisco Airports did not suffer the same staffing woes as many other major airports.
According to the Trump administration, the SPP has already “demonstrated savings compared to Federal screening operations,” so expanding its use to other airports “would yield cost savings compared to Federal screening and begin reform of a troubled Federal agency.”
The 2027 budget proposal seeks to initially expand SPP to smaller airports, which would explain the rather modest budget savings currently envisaged.
Created in the aftermath of the 9/11 atrocities, the TSA was designed to bring standardized airport security screening, although the effectiveness of the agency has always been a big question mark.
What’s important to understand about the SPP program is that while airports apply to be part of this initiative, they don’t automatically get to run the security operation.
SPP is managed by the federal government, and the final decision over which private contractor runs an airport’s screening program is made by the TSA.
Some Republican lawmakers have long called for the dismantling of the TSA, arguing that it has led to invasive searching of innocent people without meaningfully improving security.
The expansion of SPP is unlikely to address the core complaints of many of these lawmakers, as the security rules and regulations would remain the same, and the security program would remain under the close supervision of the TSA.
It could also be argued that the current SPP setup doesn’t go nearly far enough in privatizing airport security screening. After all, the program is still funded through the federal government, and cost savings are mainly through staff payroll efficiencies.
There is no doubt an argument that airport security screening should be privatized to the extent that airports and airlines bear the largest funding burden, with oversight provided by the federal government, much like many other countries.
