The TSA is broken — is privatization next?

KC Guidry usually gets to the airport two hours before a flight to give herself enough time to get through security. But she knew her flight on the morning of Monday, March 23, out of Houston’s George Bush Intercontinental Airport was going to be anything but routine.

“I heard the lines were long through TikTok and through the news,” she said. “The day before, I saw the wait time for the terminal I needed to leave from was 200 minutes. I saw they were not doing PreCheck or CLEAR, so I adjusted my schedule.”

She arrived at the airport at 12:30AM for a 7:20AM flight and joined a security line that was already looping around Houston’s Terminal E. She didn’t get through until 4:30AM. Others likely fared worse. By 9:30AM, the airport was already warning travelers that wait times could approach four hours. By the end of the day, they were averaging closer to five — and some security lines stretched all the way out of the terminal and into the underground parking garage.

Airport chaos has become the hallmark of the Trump era. Travelers already have to deal with skyrocketing oil prices, a crumbling safety system, and the war in Iran. And for the third time in six months, funding for the TSA has lapsed due to a budget impasse. Nearly 50,000 Transportation Security Officers (TSOs) who man the nation’s airport security checkpoints haven’t received a paycheck since late February.

As “essential workers,” TSOs are required by law to show up for work even if they’re not getting paid. But not all of them do. Although it’s illegal for TSA employees to organize an official strike, thousands are independently calling out sick. Two weeks ago, nearly 6 percent of them didn’t report to work — three times higher than normal. This week it’s closer to 10 percent nationwide. And call-out rates exceeded 33 percent at several of the country’s largest airports, including JFK in New York, Hartsfield-Jackson in Atlanta, and Houston’s George Bush Intercontinental.

Despite the chaos, the Trump administration appears in no hurry to end the budget stalemate, even though a recent CBS News/YouGov poll showed broad disapproval of the shutdown in general, and the way Republicans were handling it. For weeks, President Trump himself has tied any deal to restore TSA funding to the passage of the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act, which Democrats are prepared to filibuster. He even rejected a compromise negotiated by members of his own party that would have reopened the department on Monday.

(ICE did not respond to our request for more details about their deployment).

Like much of Trump’s second-term agenda, his position on the shutdown makes little sense on its face. But the strategy becomes clear when examined through the lens of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, which calls for the complete dismantling of the TSA.

“The Transportation Security Administration [should] be privatized,” the document says. “Until it is privatized, TSA should be treated as a national security provider, and its workforce should be deunionized immediately.”

Former DHS Secretary Kristi Noem did accomplish the last of these goals, stripping TSA workers of many of their collective bargaining rights last December. But she spent the rest of her tenure glorying in her department’s power. She personally attended ICE raids in New York, Minneapolis, and Los Angeles in full hair and makeup. She used Coast Guard funds to purchase two private jets and authorized the TSA’s purchase of $1 billion in new security equipment. She even spent $220 million on an ad campaign starring herself that was apparently meant to scold undocumented migrants back across the border. This was not the behavior of someone ready to give DHS’s responsibilities — and its considerable budget — to the private sector.

Her successor Markwayne Mullin, who was confirmed on March 24, doesn’t seem to share Noem’s proclivity for the spotlight.

He didn’t otherwise mention how he might run the TSA except to generally advocate for better funding for the whole department. But we do know he is a consistent supporter of the Heritage Foundation. During his final term in Congress, he voted in line with the think tank’s positions 90 percent of the time.

Supporters of TSA privatization clearly sense an opportunity with Mullin in charge. Since his nomination was announced, Fox News, Reason magazine, and the right-leaning Competitive Enterprise Institute have published articles laying out the case for TSA privatization. Over the weekend, Senator Tommy Tuberville (R-AL) promised to revive his “Abolish TSA Act,” which died in committee last year.

Mullin may never have a better opportunity to do so than he does now, with Trump seemingly willing to endure voter anger and public bafflement to advance his agenda. TSA workers are quitting at a rate of nearly 200 per week. And a public that has endured airport meltdowns during two of the busiest travel periods of all time — Thanksgiving 2025 and Spring Break 2026 — might be willing to accept radical change if it means getting through security in a reasonable amount of time.

Privatization might look something like the arrangement at Kansas City International or Orlando Sanford. At these airports, employees of a third-party security company called VMD Corp staff the checkpoints but still follow TSA procedures. They have been unaffected by the government shutdown: “The professional teams at our SPP airports have less than 3 minute lines,” the company taunted on X over the weekend.

Or it could look like the mess at Canada’s Calgary International. In 2024, a company named Paladin International took over screening duties. Since then, security screeners have complained about consistent understaffing, poor working conditions, and even being denied bathroom breaks and access to water. Wait times at Calgary routinely exceed 30 minutes, far higher than the national average for Canada.

Privatization is no magic bullet. But the status quo is untenable as well. For as long as the TSA remains useful as political leverage, travelers should prepare for periodic disruptions with unbearably long wait times. And if President Trump continues to complain that “our airports are like from a third world country,” as he did during a 2016 debate, he needs to look no farther than his own administration for someone to blame.