The Real Reason Republicans Want to Privatize the TSA

It’s not to improve airport security or save taxpayer money—because there’s scant evidence to support those claims anyway.

President Donald Trump and the conservative think tanks that inspire his policies want to privatize the Transportation Security Administration screeners who check your bags and bodies before you fly. It’s been a goal of theirs since Trump’s first term—the Heritage Foundation has been banging on about it since at least 2017—but they’ve re-upped the call amid Congress’s stalemate over Department of Homeland Security funding, which is now in its ninth week. “Shutdown woes show why it’s time to privatize the TSA,” the libertarian Competitive Enterprise Institute declared in March. And Trump’s budget request to Congress earlier this month called for privatizing the TSA, as it did last year.

So the answer to long airport lines isn’t, apparently, for Republicans to reach a deal with Democrats that funds DHS while also implementing ICE reforms. It’s simply to hand over airport security to the private market.

These proponents make claims that echo other arguments in favor of the private market—that it improves quality and efficiency—and note that the U.S. airports that employ private security screeners have run smoothly amid the shutdown. But there isn’t a lot of evidence that privatizing the TSA would indeed make airport security smoother and cheaper. It would, however, reduce the federal government’s workforce and possibly save on employee salaries and benefit costs, since TSA workers are unionized and private screeners usually are not. And that, perhaps, is why Trump and his ilk are so keen on it.

We don’t really know what fully privatizing the TSA would accomplish because there hasn’t been a ton of good data collected and analyzed about the private airport security that exists now. The TSA was created in the immediate wake of 9/11, replacing passenger screening that had been handled by........

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