In the private sector, if something fails over and over again, it's discarded or phased out. In government, it gets a promotion and more funding.
The TSA is, to this day, one of the biggest signs of government excess and misuse of funds. It's beyond expensive and yet, despite the cost, has an unforgivable failure rate that should have Americans everywhere questioning why we need it.
Recently, my friend and colleague Ward Clark wrote a piece detailing how a 57-year-old woman managed to get by TSA and flight crews in order to get on a plane by hiding in an airplane bathroom. The inspector general for the U.S. Department of Transportation, Mary Schiavo, said that the "system is lucky that she wasn’t apparently intending to do harm to the plane or the passengers.”
(READ: Can Anyone Explain to Me Why We Still Need the TSA?)
I'd agree, but this failure isn't exactly a fresh bug that the TSA discovered and will now fix. Failure is a feature of the TSA.
Back in 2015, the TSA was subjected to an audit by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) to test its capability to catch people entering an airport with dangerous items. The result was a failure rate of 95 percent. They tried again in 2017 to find that this failure rate was brought down to 80 percent. Since then, the results of the TSA's failure rate isn't widely talked about. The GOA isn't giving percentages anymore either, it seems.
However, if we're going to take Ward's story about the woman into account, we can safely assume the TSA isn't exactly performing up to the standards it should, given its budget of $11.8 billion, or at least that's what it asked to get for 2025. In 2024, it wanted $10.4 billion, meaning it wanted a raise for making you empty your water bottle and taking off your shoes.
So if it's not stopping terrorists, what is it doing? Annoying you, complicating your airport trip, and possibly make you late for a flight? Yes to all of that, but the TSA's aims seem to be a bit more nefarious than that.
As Savannah Hernandez pointed out in a recent video of experience with TSA at an airport, your ID is no longer enough to get you on a flight. Now, they want to take your picture and scan your body. You can opt out, but if you do, you might be subjected to additional steps to get through.
Hernandez points out that while she had to go through all this bother just to not have her photo taken, she watched as two illegal immigrants going through TSA right in front of her. She even managed to snag a picture of them.
This morning a TSA agent tried to bully me into getting my photo taken after I tried to opt-out of the facial recognition software that TSA is trying to implement.
— Savanah Hernandez (@sav_says_) December 12, 2024
Apparently it’s the norm now to get your photo taken on top of giving TSA your ID every time you want to get on a… pic.twitter.com/UtGyIVuRTV
It's a bizarre thing to do to the American people, especially considering that the government doesn't seem to be bothered by illegal aliens with no ID can do anything here, including vote in our elections.
So it seems to me that the TSA is more of a data collection agency than anything that concerns itself with keeping the friendly skies free of terrorists and criminals. There should be no reason they need to take our photo when we're literally handing them one with our information on it to begin with. Moreover, there should be no reason to be pressured into it unless they're wanting that photo for something else.
The TSA is ultimately security theater, but behind the lights and sets, it's increasingly looking like the real reason for its existence has nothing to do with security at all. Logically, if a terrorist did want to hijack a plane, all they would have to do is look at the TSA's protocols and find ways to bypass them, which as we can see from Ward's story, isn't that hard to do.
From the get-go, the TSA was a privacy-killing, intrusive nightmare, and an expensive one to boot. Combined with its high failure rate, it's gotta go. Abolishing the TSA is a no-brainer.
Instead, security should be privatized. Airlines should be responsible for security measures, and while this might make flights a little more expensive, privatized security is going to be a lot more beneficial and complete than the act the government is putting on after the ticket counter. Moreover, airlines could compete over who has the safest flights, giving incentive to find creative ways to put security measures in place that are both comforting and effective.
If the government does get involved, then sky marshals are the best way to handle that. An agent or two on every flight is going to be far more effective than a jerk next to a scanner on the ground.
From where I sit, there's no reason for the TSA to exist, and this is possibly something DOGE can look into.
