We have seen this before:
Corporations and their supposedly-small government supporters look at a public agency and see an opportunity for profit. But they know that a lot of public things are popular with the public and they can’t just privatize it without some resistance. So they first starve it of the funds it needs to run well. Then they provoke a moment of crisis that “proves” the agency isn’t as efficient as it needs to be. People turn against the program or agency and blame it on “government inefficiency.”
Soon after Trump halted salaries for officers of the Transportation Security Administration staff, a few small rumblings for privatization began surfacing–an occasional story in the media, columns from among the usual suspects. In no time, the rumbles became tremors–multpiple articles speculating whether it was time to privatize the agency, followed by editorials emphatically stating that it was, as if an organically-grown grassroots movement had spontaneously formed in a moment of need (“the debate has taken on renewed urgency in recent weeks” writes The Hill). And then, this week, came Trump’s 2027 budget, which slashes the agency’s operating budget while setting up a new funding stream that encourages the expansion of the privatization of the TSA that began with a pilot program involving fewer than two dozen smaller airports.
It doesn’t take a fortune teller or an expert in pattern recognition to predict this, for it was foretold not by the sages but rather the pages of the Heritage Foundation’s blueprint for the Trump administration, Project 2025, and even before that.
At one point in our American history, nearly everyone in the United States believed that the safety of air travel was a matter of the public interest. As we’ve said countless times, businesses are in business to make money. The TSA was in operation to make air travel safer. Those motivations are not alike, and they don’t lead to the same outcomes.
The Trump 2027 budget calls for slashing more than eight thousand positions at the agency. Some of the more than $529.3 million in transportation safety officer personnel costs and benefits would simply shift to the Screening Partnership Program (SPP), which allows private contractors to conduct screening, and which saw an increase in its funding by $477.3 million.
What changes will be made by the profit-seeking private corporation? Staff cuts, hours cuts, wages cut? What corners will be cut? What oversight will slip? What public authority over it will diminish over time as the privateer becomes embedded in the apparatus?
This wouldn’t be the first time vital security was put into the hands of a private corporation. A little over a decade ago, USIS, a company that performed background checks for the government, got into the sloppy habit of simply marking individuals’ backgrounds as checked, and passing them along without full vetting. USIS even had a term for the practice: flushing. When a former executive blew the whistle on the operation, the company was forced to forgo $30 million in contract fees.
Privatizing the TSA is simply another money grab, the continued corporate plunder of American treasure and society that puts more control over our daily lives in the hands of a few, answerable to a few. While the airport security lines slowed to a crawl, the further privatization of everything took off, faster than a 747.