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The TSA made itself unfundable

Last Thursday, Congress ended the longest Department of Homeland Security shutdown in American history. For 75 days, tens of thousands of TSA officers worked unpaid. More than 1,100 of them quit. Airport security lines stretched for hours.

The immediate fight is over. The next one is already on the calendar: this appropriation expires Sept. 30. And the battle will keep going, every funding cycle, until we change what we’re funding.

The standoff that produced this shutdown was a fight over Immigration and Customs Enforcement, not airport security. But since ICE and DHS sit inside TSA, airport security became collateral damage in a dispute that had nothing to do with it. That structural problem won’t fix itself.

Congressional dysfunction is a problem, but it’s not the only one made plain by this standoff. Another is what Congress is being asked to fund: a screening regime whose post-9/11 layers cost billions but have never demonstrated their worth.

The TSA costs taxpayers $11 billion a year, more than the entire Coast Guard budget. Most of that cost comes from security measures added after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. A question worth asking, in a moment of recurring crisis, is whether those measures are achieving anything useful.

After the shoe bomber in 2001, we started removing shoes. After the liquid explosives plot in 2006, we banned large bottles. After the........

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