There’s a growing elite consensus that the TSA has been fixed and is no longer a problem. You see it expressed on Twitter by folks like Nate Silver. Former Wall Street Journal airline writer Scott McCartney articulated this view at the Southern Methodist University Texas Economic Forum where he and I spoke this fall.

I think that the narrative is misleading. TSA pays screeners more, so it doesn’t have a problem hiring screeners. That’s made a difference in security lines at some airports. But that’s the only dimension along which they’ve seemed to improve. It’s also the one most visible to travelers, so they’re getting too much credit.

It's… true? I've had 10+ quick and painless experiences in a row, at some point I might have to admit they're not the problem anymore. https://t.co/gJBSwuVxUV

— Zvi Mowshowitz (@TheZvi) December 1, 2024

What do we mean by good?

• The median checkpoint doesn’t have the terrible waits they did two years ago.
  
• In July 2023, TSA employees got big raises, aligning with the federal GS scale. An average 30% increase across the full TSA workforce, at an initial annual cost of $400 million, makes it far easier to recruit and retain workers.
  
• There are still plenty of airports where security waits can be miserable, and just as importantly those waits can be hugely variable which means showing up at the airport early all the time even when it wouldn’t have been necessary. Denver and Austin are two places where security lines are frequently terrible. The misery at LAX and New York JFK varies by terminal and remember that American Airlines doesn’t allow CLEAR to set up shop in any terminal they control.

None of this, of course, has anything to do with the TSA’s primary mission of security. It has to do with the social cost of pursuing that mission. But if you’re going to consider social cost, then surely the intrusiveness of the screening process matters?

• We still have to obtain advance approval to fly, with the names and dates of birth of travelers submitted to the federal government and checked against both banned passenger lists and watch lists.
  
• We still have to show papers at government checkpoints – and are now subject to facial recognition
  
• Most passengers have to remove shoes. Passengers are limited in the liquids they can bring through checkpoints.
  
• And most passengers have to submit to full body imaging.
  
• All to exercise a constitutionally-protected right to travel

There’s little indication that TSA is ‘better at security’ than they used to be. The claim really does seem limited to ‘doesn’t inconvenience travelers as much’ even as lines remain hugely variable; passengers still have to present and partially disrobe; and they still face liquid limits 18 years after word dropped about a sci-fi plot in Britain.

• TSA isn’t actually very good at catching dangerous items. The TSA’s own tests have shown 95% failure rates finding items going through the checkpoint on multiple occasions though they’ve done as well as finding one out of five. When their Inspector General has come out with scathing reports about their effectiveness, they’ve classified the findings to keep them from view. Since the results were embarrassing, TSA just no longer tells us the results.

• U.S. airport security uses flawed targeting lists that amount to pre-crime profiling, restrict the basic right to travel, and are ridden with errors and used for extortion. They check ID against lists of banned passengers and those they want to give extra screening to, but people wind up on the list in error and as retribution for refusing to become an informant. They get on the list not just without a conviction, but without due process for getting off when it’s a mistake (in fact the government usually won’t even acknowledge that someone is on such a list). And this has kept people from traveling, including traveling back to their home country which they’re entitled to do.

• TSA has poor disciplinary procedures, deploying problem employees in sensitive roles. Tens of thousands of TSA employees have been accused of misconduct multiple times.

• TSA is its own regulator, which is dangerous. TSA doesn’t set the rules for airport security, they also perform the screenings themselves. They watch over themselves, which means there’s no accountability.

  Meanwhile, in much of the world screening is performed by either contractors or a separate agency, so that the screening rulemaker and regulator is different than the one carrying out the security task – the group in charge of security isn’t just regulating themselves.

  The TSA’s “Screening Partnership Program” was at least a good idea, but once TSA employees were allowed by the Obama administration to unionize they’ve pushed back against its expansion.

In Australia there’s no ID or liquids check for domestic flights. In Hong Kong they don’t do the liquids dance either. And that’s worked out just fine.

There hasn’t been another 9/11, but that’s because there are fewer threats to aviation than we’d often admit (though TSA itself admitted it in court filings that were unredacted in error). In any case, even if TSA were effective, screenings at airports just makes other things relatively more attractive targets. Incidents in Istanbul and Brussels show that even risks at the airport get shifted to outside the checkpoint.

TSA Agents in Charlotte Watch News of the TSA’s Failure to Detect Weapons and Bombs, Instead of Searching for Weapons and Bombs (HT: Tocqueville)

TSA’s new analogic scanners are much slower than the machines they’ve replaced and the agency says it’ll be 2040 before they’re fully rolled out – while the agency feels they make it possible to lift the liquids ban, they are reluctant to do so until every airport has the machines (for ‘consistency’).

Having to show up at the airport 3 hours before a flight is costing the economy a minimum of $79 billion annually. In fairness, of course, airport screening isn’t nearly as bad as the TSA’s air marshal program which commits more crimes than they stop, and has never caught a terrorist. So maybe compared to air marshals we can say TSA is great?