We've all seen the clips that have gone viral of Transportation Security Administration lines at airports stretching into baggage claims and parking decks, with some airline passengers having to wait hours just to get through security. The result is missed flights, 

This is all completely avoidable. The TSA’s funding has once again been caught in the crossfire of partisan differences on funding Immigration and Customs Enforcement, with a partial government shutdown ongoing. We shouldn’t even be in this mess in the first place, because airport screening should not be performed by the government. 

There is no good reason why the TSA hasn’t been privatized. The agency is an inefficient, bureaucratic mess and has its funding subject to the whims of political fights extraneous to its mission. Privatization would both make the agency function better and insulate it from political fights. 

American travel caught in the crossfire of partisan politics

In a sense, American travel has been taken hostage. Democrats and Republicans are fighting over funding for the Department of Homeland Security, and Democrats are banking on travel disruptions raising the pressure on Republicans to make a deal. 

This is far from the first time this has happened. Nearly every time we get a government shutdown, strains on travel operations are one of the first pressure points that bring the parties closer to negotiations. I’m not here to litigate whether Democrats or Republicans are at fault for this, both because it doesn’t matter to my overall point and because they have each been on both sides of these fights historically. 

While the Senate has passed a compromise on Department of Homeland Security funding, the House appears unlikely to pass the legislation in its current form.

Other solutions have included sending ICE agents to fill the void left by TSA staffing shortages or Trump signing an executive order to pay TSA staff (though his authority to do so is unclear). Neither gets to the actual problem itself, just stopgaps to control the political bleeding.

However, what is clear is that in this case, TSA funding is not the hang-up; the politics around immigration enforcement is. The travel disruptions are symptoms of that fight, and are used as leverage to reach other policy aims. 

The only way to insulate American travel from these issues is to take the ability to play politics over its funding out of these fights entirely. The way to do that is to outsource airport security and screening to private contractors. This way, the funding is appropriated ahead of time, and employee wages are not subject to the government money faucet being turned off. 

This isn’t theory alone. The wait times at the limited number of U.S. airports approved to use private screening contractors have remained extremely short, even over the past week, as waits at other airports nationwide spiked. These handful of airports that use contractors include San Francisco and Kansas City. They're by no means massive transit hubs, but the same idea transfers to our nation's largest airports.

TSA suffers from government inefficiency 

Anyone who has taken a flight can tell you that airport security doesn’t perform as well as it could. Not only would privatization insulate the agency from political lapses in funding, but it also could lead to lower taxpayer costs and better operations for travelers. 

Audits have found that the TSA performs no better than private contractors tasked with the same operations. But the agency comes at an immense cost and suffers from the same sort of bureaucratic problems that every government agency does. 

Nor is this bureaucratic model the common way of doing things worldwide. The United Kingdom, Canada, Germany, France, Spain and many other countries use private contractors to handle their screening. In fact, more than 80% of European airports use private screening. 

A privatized version of TSA would have profit incentives to build better, more efficient processes. Travel screening and security are about two-thirds of the TSA’s budget, and these are the tasks most capable of being performed by private companies. 

The government's role in transportation security should remain focused on the things only the government can do, such as intelligence. For the rest, a competitive bidding process should be opened up for private firms to take on the screening and security aspects. These changes would require Congress to act, making such an overhaul unlikely. 

However, if America ever wants to stop these sorts of political travel delays from being routine, then we should remove the ability of political whims to influence the funding for airport security. 

Dace Potas is an opinion columnist for USA TODAY and a graduate of DePaul University with a degree in political science.

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