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J.D. Tuccille: U.S. airport security shutdown exposes government inefficiency

While unpaid TSA workers quit and lines grow, private security runs smoothly, proving government is the ultimate single point of failure

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The partial shutdown of the United States Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has now exceeded 50 days as Democrats and Republicans battle over proposed reforms to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) with department funding held hostage. Ironically, ICE agents are unaffected since their agency’s funds were guaranteed by a 2025 tax and spending bill, leaving long lines at airports while unpaid Transportation Security Administration (TSA) agents walk off the job as the most visible sign of the conflict. Also unaffected are airports that opted out of relying on TSA in favour of private security. There’s a lesson to be had in this experience about the foolishness of depending on the state.

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The debate in Washington, D.C. is rooted in legitimate concerns. The Trump administration’s escalated enforcement of immigration rules was controversial even before federal agents killed protesters Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minnesota. The head of DHS has since been replaced and there’s plenty to scrutinize about the way ICE and Border Patrol agents go about their business.

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But the agencies in question were guaranteed four years of funding, including annual bonuses, in last year’s One Big Beautiful Bill. “This $165 billion in funding will help the Department of Homeland Security and our brave law enforcement further deliver on President Trump’s mandate to arrest and deport criminal illegal aliens and MAKE AMERICA SAFE AGAIN!” then-DHS Secretary Kristi Noem boasted at the time.

That leaves Democrats pushing for investigations and reforms of ICE and Border Patrol by holding hostage unrelated agencies, like the Coast Guard and TSA, whose employees are currently working under the promise that they’ll receive their paychecks in the future. Some TSA agents, in particular, have responded by quitting or calling in sick. Amid multi-hour waits at airport security checkpoints, USA Today reported this week that “Transportation Security Administration operations remain impacted by staff shortages after hundreds of agents quit rather than work without pay during the partial government shutdown.” And who can blame them?

But not all airports have been affected. San Francisco International Airport (SFO) announced that “While we’ve seen and heard about the long security checkpoint lines over the last few weeks, SFO is NOT experiencing this issue. SFO is the largest airport participating in the Screening Partnership Program, which contracts checkpoint security screening services to a qualified private company.”

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The private company hired by SFO pays its employees with money it receives as part of a contractual deal with the airport. That leaves the arrangement unaffected by political squabbles thousands of miles away among the creatures who inhabit the halls of Congress.

Only 20 airports currently participate in the Screening Partnership Program, which allows them to pick from a list of approved security vendors. It’s not a fully free market because both the airports and the security companies must receive federal sign-off, and they’re required to adhere to TSA’s procedures and directives, meaning that airports and contractors have little leeway to experiment with security methods that might improve passengers’ experience and enhance safety.

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But, unlike TSA, private security companies that perform unsatisfactorily can be replaced by competitors who must do a better job if they don’t want to suffer the same fate. And, of course, arrangements with private vendors are far less vulnerable to being held hostage by posturing lawmakers in Washington, D.C.

In reality, the more we ask government to do, the more we create a single point of failure for all of those assigned jobs. And the sad fact is that TSA repeatedly demonstrated its inability to perform the one task for which it was created well before the government stopped paying its workers and they started looking for more stable positions in the private sector where employers are legally obligated to pay workers. Undercover government inspectors who test TSA’s airport security efforts find the agency’s agents fail to detect fake bombs and weapons as much as 95 per cent of the time.

After a particularly egregious round of results in 2015, CSO, an enterprise security publication, noted, “Security theater implies fake security and the TSA, one of the biggest fake security agencies in the U.S., failed 67 out of 70 times to find fake bombs smuggled through airport security checkpoints by fake terrorists.” Real terrorists, we can assume, might be more motivated to evade detection.

It’s easy to pick on TSA because it’s so intrusive, ineffective and high-profile, but the agency’s track record is, unfortunately, all too representative of how government goes about its business. As we’ve seen not just with TSA, which was created in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, but also with ICE and Border Patrol, government officials are often motivated to make public shows of “doing something” about public concerns of the moment. They proceed to do so largely insulated from accountability for waste, inefficiency and even horrendous violations of civil liberties.

During the last government funding fight, air traffic controllers employed by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) staged their own job walk-outs in the absence of paychecks. But rather than demonstrate how much we need them, the experience underlined just how archaic America’s air traffic control has become under government stewardship (its systems still record data on floppy disks and paper strips) and how much better — and reliably — the system could run if privatized.

More disturbingly, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF) spent years trying to justify its budget requests by running guns to Mexican drug cartels in a harebrained scheme to set up headline-grabbing busts. It quickly lost track of most of the guns, one of which was used to kill a federal agent. The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel reported in 2013 that “ATF agents befriended mentally disabled people to drum up business and later arrested them in at least four cities in addition to Milwaukee” after entrapping the marks in drug and gun stings — again, to grab headlines.

The partial government shutdown, like those in the past, has inconvenienced many people. But rather than demonstrating how much we need government, these hassles prove that we’ve handed too many responsibilities to the state. In doing so, we’ve created a single point of failure, and one that enables abuse and inefficiency.

The Trump administration is reportedly considering privatizing airport security operations to minimize future disruptions. That’s a great start. But it should only be the beginning of an effort to reduce government’s role and shift important tasks to competitive and responsible private parties.

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