H.R. 9328 has coasted through Congress so far as one of the easiest votes placed before it during one of the most tumultuous periods in modern US history. That may be excellent news for active-duty military personnel and their families who want to move through airport security more quickly. It is the latest piece of absolutely terrible news for disability civil rights.

The Improving Travel for Military Members Act passed the House with overwhelming bipartisan support and now sits before the Senate. Few members of Congress appear eager to argue that military families should spend longer in airport security lines. Airports already provide a familiar stage for public gratitude toward service members, where strangers thank them for their service. A bill promising to make travel easier for those same service members arrives wrapped in all the same moral reassurance. Democrats and Republicans can support it together, praise military families, and avoid almost any political cost.

The House also approved language allowing the Transportation Security Administration to open and close screening lanes and shift available resources to carry out the bill. I have found no public disability-impact assessment examining what those decisions would mean for the Americans whose screenings already require the greatest amount of TSA time, staff, space, and attention. I have found no public record of consultation with Disabled travelers or disability organizations about the effect of creating another expedited class within an already strained screening system. The bill appears to have moved forward without serious public consideration of the people most likely to absorb the operational consequences.

Most people carry a very simple picture of a wheelchair user at airport security. They imagine an elderly passenger sitting in an airport chair while an attendant pushes them through the checkpoint. The other familiar image is one of the internet’s favorite villains: the supposedly fraudulent traveler who claims disability merely to skip the line. These two figures, the frail elderly passenger and the presumed faker, have become the public’s default understanding of disability at airports.

Many Disabled travelers resemble neither. Some cannot stand for screening. Some cannot transfer into another chair. Some use power wheelchairs weighing hundreds of pounds, individually configured around their posture, skin protection, breathing, circulation, and ability to function. Some have pacemakers, ventilators, feeding tubes, oxygen equipment, implanted ports, braces, or other medical devices. Some have muscles that fatigue rapidly, joints that dislocate easily, severe pain when touched or repositioned, or medical conditions that make prolonged delays dangerous. Their screenings may require officers to search them while they remain seated, inspect the wheelchair piece by piece, swab the chair and equipment for explosive residue, move cushions and bags, examine medical supplies, and call additional staff or a supervisor.

The same checkpoint serves autistic children and adults who may panic when touched without warning, Blind travelers trying to follow spoken instructions amid overlapping announcements and crowd noise, Deaf passengers who cannot hear directions shouted from behind them, Little People whose bodies do not fit standard screening assumptions, and passengers who require a private room because the screening itself is intimate, painful, or humiliating. Some travelers need a Passenger Support Specialist to help them navigate the process safely. All of this requires officers, time, screening space, and operational attention. Every one of those resources is finite.

TSA has already acknowledged that limitation to me in writing. The agency has stated that Passenger Support Specialist availability depends upon staffing and operational resources. That admission matters because H.R. 9328 assumes that resources can be redirected toward a new expedited population without publicly accounting for the services already dependent upon those same officers and operational capacity. Congress cannot treat TSA staffing as finite when explaining why disability assistance may be unavailable, then treat it as elastic when offering a politically attractive benefit to military families.

The House has voted to create another group entitled to expedited screening. It had the authority to make that choice. It did not publicly demonstrate how the officers, checkpoint space, private screening rooms, Passenger Support Specialists, and additional time required by Disabled travelers would remain available after resources were shifted to satisfy the new mandate. The people affected already possess rights under federal disability law. Many already experience inconsistent assistance, degrading searches, avoidable pain, damaged mobility equipment,........

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